Brandon Sherman

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https://hdl.handle.net/1805/30179

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Agency, identity, power: An agentive triad model for teacher action
(Taylor & Francis, 2021) Sherman, Brandon; Teemant, Annela; School of Education
Teacher action and change is a complex and nuanced phenomenon that has been theorized across diverse literature in terms of identity, agency, and power. Drawing on this literature, this article offers specific articulations of teacher identity as interpretive framework, power as legitimate action, and agency as moral coherence. We posit a model of teacher agency understood in the interplay of individual beliefs, values, and ideals with institutional roles, authority, and institutional action, producing (or not producing) authentic action. This model draws a distinction between agency and power, and highlights dynamics of equilibrium and discord that may emerge between who teachers are and what they do. The agentive triad model serves as a theoretical tool for guiding or supporting teacher growth and agentive action, and for understanding the dynamics between institutionally legitimized roles and teacher identities.
The Anthropocene as we know it: Posthumanism, science education and scientific literacy as a path to sustainability
(2021) Jeong, Sophia; Sherman, Brandon; Tippins, Deborah
As products of the Anthropocene, the epoch of human ecological impact, models of environmental and social sustainability have been rooted in humanism, centering human agency and taking humanity as the prime reference point in understanding the world. Discourses around sustainability pose questions of how we are trying to sustain our world and our central place in it. With these questions in mind, we examine the role of science education for sustainability and as a tool for enacting societal change and interacting with the world responsibly. Science education is particularly concerned with helping learners cultivate tools and develop scientific literacy for understanding and interacting with the world. This is key to the ability of current and future generations to meet the challenge of building and maintaining a sustainable world. Yet, these tools are rooted in anthropocentric and Western ways of understanding our relationships with and in the world, which maintains myths such as the neutrality of digital technology or linear forms of progress. We turn to posthuman perspectives to consider an alternative onto-epistemological stance that decenters human agency and foregrounds the co-constitutive and intra-active nature of the world. We argue that scientific literacy and science education for sustainability can act as channels for our species to move beyond ecological sustainability to an understanding of humanity's entanglement with the world. Life in all its forms, from micro to macro is about relationships with cultural and natural ecologies. Any changes in these relationships can lead to the sustaining, altering, or threatening of these ecologies. In light of this recognition, we explore the implications of posthumanist thought for science education and literacy as learners seek a more sustainable world and a more harmonious place for humanity within it.
The digital ecologies of Korean college students: An exploration of digital self-directed learning
(2018) Briggs, Neil; Sherman, Brandon
The wealth of readily available online digital English language learning resources presents vast opportunities for students to engage in self-directed language learning. The extent to which such resources are known to students, however, let alone how they are being utilized, typically remains largely unknown to teachers. In order to design a curriculum that maximizes student learning opportunities by guiding them towards online digital resources that afford self-directed learning, it is essential for teachers to first develop an intimate understanding of the students’ relationships with such resources. This may include awareness, patterns of use, and the variables that constrain them from using the resources more extensively. To accomplish this objective, the Self-Directed Digital Study Instrument (SDDSI) was developed and implemented to survey 197 Korean college students. While the results of this study are indicative of a reality in which digital resources are being underused, they also point towards an area of great potential for pedagogical change in Korean post-secondary English learning education. In contrast to the traditional pedagogical model, the results suggest that self-directed learning or even self-determined learning models, facilitated via various digital resources, can present students with opportunities for more deeply engaging, individualized, and self-directed approaches to language learning.
ESL Teachers’ Acting Agentively Through Job Crafting
(Taylor & Francis, 2018) Haneda, Mari; Sherman, Brandon; School of Education
Worldwide, countries strive for effective ways to educate migrant children, and the United States is no exception. In this context, this qualitative study examines how a group of ESL teachers in U.S. elementary schools acted agentively and redesigned their work through job crafting (Wrzesniewskum & Dutton, 2001) so as to provide optimal support for English learners. Key findings indicate that, despite institutional constraints, teachers found ways to organize their work to align their practices with their educational goals. In some cases, they were able to negotiate with key school personnel to reconfigure their instructional practices, and in others they created multiple advocacy roles beyond the classroom. Based on our findings, we suggest that, in preparing ESL teachers, attention needs to be paid not only to pedagogy but also to the wider scope of their roles as advocates who navigate the micro-politics of school organization.
Language Learners as Digital Bricoleurs: Exploring Independent Learning in Individual Digital Ecologies
(2020) Sherman, Brandon; Briggs, Neil
Though there is a wealth of digital resources available for independent computerassisted language learning, language teachers may find mixed success in supporting learners in using it. Teachers need to understand their learners and how educational information-communication technology and the target language are integrated in their lives. We present the concepts of digital ecology and digital bricolage. Building on a prior survey study on English learner technology use at a Korean college, this qualitative case study explores ways that four Korean college students integrated technology and English into their lives. Drawing on a priori and emergent themes from interviews, we explore students’ digital ecologies and their processes of digital bricolage. We found that types of technology use varied across these cases, suggesting the value of digital ecologies for thinking about student technology use. Further, variations of technology use across the cases suggest that learners draw selectively from their available digital ecologies based on their perceptions of what it means to learn English and their personal priorities. We propose a framework for understanding language learner digital bricolage based on formality and instrumentality. This framework is of value to researchers and teachers who want to support students in digitally mediated self-directed language learning.
A Rhizomatic Case Analysis of Instructional Coaching as Becoming
(Routledge, 2020) Sherman, Brandon; Haneda, Mari; Teemant, Annela; School of Education
Drawing on rhizomatic theory, we examine the professional development approach of instructional coaching as a space of becoming. Analyzing episodes from a year-long coaching collaboration, we show how teacher/coach interaction can be understood as a complex and shifting network of material and discursive elements that can combine to produce surprising outcomes. Thinking through key rhizomatic figurations of assemblage, rhizomatic lines, and territorialization, we examine coaching across intra-actional events: how happenings in coaching conference extend and intertwine with larger assemblages of the classroom and school. We show how rhizomatic ruptures emerging in practice may open up new possibilities for teachers and students.
Unraveling the EFL expat: challenging privilege through borderlands and Asia as Method
(2022) Sherman, Brandon
Each year, multitudes respond to the demand for native English speakers to teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Asian countries, particularly China, Japan, and South Korea. These EFL transnationals are often young, new to living abroad, and inexperienced as educators. When they arrive, they often find a community, and an identity waiting for them: that of the expatriate. In this paper, I draw on research on EFL expatriates to produce a figuration, a way of engaging with and highlighting contradiction and disjuncture in the narrative identity of EFL expat taken up by some transnational EFL teachers. This figuration serves as a nexus to which I bring two bodies of theory with which to think. These are the Borderlands Thought of Gloria Anzaldúa and Chen Kwan-Hsing’s articulation of Asia as Method. Separately, I bring these into conversation with the figuration of the EFL expat, then consider what emerges when all three are brought together. In doing so, I highlight how the figuration of the EFL expat is outlined by privileged and constrictive colonial, racial, professional, and linguistic dichotomies. The theories of Anzaldúa and Chen help to unravel these binaries, suggesting ways in which transnational English teachers can move on from such constraints to become something more than in-but-not-of their local world. I also consider what it means for Western scholars to work respectfully in theoretical spaces that were not developed by and for them, proposing that such researchers can think of themselves as theoretical expatriates.
Unravelling effective professional development: a rhizomatic inquiry into coaching and the active ingredients of teacher learning
(Routledge, 2020-09) Sherman, Brandon; Teemant, Annela
Teacher professional development (PD) is about change. One of the most prominent lines of research on PD addresses what makes it an effective change process. This research produces critical features of effective PD, the seemingly active ingredients of teacher change that are meant to guide professionals in the design, implementation, and evaluation of PD programmes. Embedded within this research is a linear, hierarchical, causal mono-logic model that is the hallmark of Western rational thought. Rhizomatic thought, with its non-linear perspectives, offers a contrast, highlighting the unpredictable multiplicity of complex systems that embrace the emergent dynamics of becoming and hybridity. In this paper, we look at features of effective PD through a rhizomatic lens, with a focus on PD as mapping and tracing. Drawing on vignettes from five case studies from a year-long pedagogical coaching PD programme, we explore how effective features of PD can be unravelled in practice and rewoven into vibrant hybridity within real-world school contexts.
Unravelling effective professional development: a rhizomatic inquiry into coaching and the active ingredients of teacher learning
(Taylor and Francis, 2021-05-27) Sherman, Brandon; Teemant, Annela; School of Education
Teacher professional development (PD) is about change. One of the most prominent lines of research on PD addresses what makes it an effective change process. This research produces critical features of effective PD, the seemingly active ingredients of teacher change that are meant to guide professionals in the design, implementation, and evaluation of PD programmes. Embedded within this research is a linear, hierarchical, causal mono-logic model that is the hallmark of Western rational thought. Rhizomatic thought, with its non-linear perspectives, offers a contrast, highlighting the unpredictable multiplicity of complex systems that embrace the emergent dynamics of becoming and hybridity. In this paper, we look at features of effective PD through a rhizomatic lens, with a focus on PD as mapping and tracing. Drawing on vignettes from two case studies from a year-long pedagogical coaching PD programme, we explore how effective features of PD can be unravelled in practice and rewoven into vibrant hybridity within real-world school contexts.
Ways of Interacting: What Underlies Instructional Coaches’ Discursive Actions
(Elsevier, 2019-02) Haneda, Mari; Sherman, Brandon; Bose, Frances Nebus; Teemant, Annela; School of Education

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