UCLA

Extensive research has documented how culturally responsive or sustaining pedagogies benefit minoritized youth. Yet, critical scholars assert that prevalent professional development models for in-service teachers overemphasize generic best practices or data-driven school improvement and subsequently proliferate problematic deficit paradigms, rather than asset-oriented pedagogies. While understudied, existing research on equity-driven and asset-oriented professional learning suggests critical reflection, collaborative inquiry, and relational trust are key components. Building on such literature, this qualitative case study explored how a public secondary school’s Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) piloted teacher-led and asset-oriented Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). As the study’s lead researcher and the school site’s instructional coach, I utilized Reciprocal Learning Partnerships (RLP) as an equity-focused framework for designing the study’s activities, developing its research questions, and analyzing the resultant data. Through observations, interviews, and document analysis, this study detailed the process for piloting a bottom-up model of context-specific and asset-oriented professional learning. It further uncovered that critical reflection, collaborative inquiry, and relational trust developed as a result of facilitators cultivating a sense of authentic, purposeful work and modeling dispositions of vulnerability and care. To more deeply understand the intricacies of relational trust, this case study also explored the extent to which its multiracial participants expressed vulnerable reflections on lived experiences and surfaced their personal identities and positionalities in professional learning spaces. The resultant findings suggest that the emergence of identities and positionalities often remained internal and that relational trust may not have been cultivated evenly amongst educators encompassing a broad array of racial, ethnic, gender and other identities. Taken together, the insights of this case study stress the importance of adult-facing equity work in diverse public schools—teachers must first experience their own learning spaces as asset-oriented and culturally sustaining to reproduce the same humanizing conditions in classrooms with their students.