We teach as we are taught: exploring the potential for emotional climate to enhance elementary science preservice teacher education

Bellocchi, Ritchie, Tobin, Sandhu and Sandhu’s (2013) study highlights the crucial role that emotions play in learning at the university level in a preservice secondary science teacher education class. They examine the classroom structures that tended to lead to both a positive valence and a high level of intensity of the emotional climate (EC). This article explores the implications of their study for better understanding how to foster a positive classroom emotional climate for elementary level preservice teachers, given the specifics of elementary school environments. Drawing on theories of interactional solidarity. I explore the implications of EC for increasing pre-service teachers’ capacity to avoid order-giving rituals and to create science-centered communities in their classrooms. I also suggest possible areas for future research, such as the role of expectations in EC, the different EC outcomes of lectures, EC and the development of confidence in science, and the ways in which teacher candidates are positioned within interaction rituals in elementary science methods classes.     

Connecting science to everyday experiences in preschool settings

In this paper I discuss the challenges of teaching science concepts and discourse in preschool in light of the study conducted by Kristina Andersson and Annica Gullberg. I then suggest a complementary approach to teaching science at this level from the perspective of social construction of knowledge based on Vygotsky’s theory (1934/1987). In addition, I highlight the importance of the relational aspect of knowing using feminist standpoint theory (Harding 2004). I also draw from feminist research on preservice elementary teachers’ learning of science to further underscore the connection between learning content and everyday experiences. Combining these research strands I propose that science needs to be grounded in everyday experiences. In this regard, the idea is similar to the choices made by the teachers in the study conducted by Andersson and Gullberg but I also suggest that the everyday experiences chosen for teaching purposes be framed appropriately. In and of itself, the complexity of everyday experiences can be impediment for learning as these researchers have demonstrated. Such complexities point to the need for framing of everyday experiences (Goffman 1974) so that children can do science and construct meaning from their actions. In the conclusion of my discussion of science and its discourse in preschool settings, I provide examples of everyday experiences and their framings that have the potential for engaging children and their teachers in science.     

Affective Imagination in Science Education: Determining the Emotional Nature of Scientific and Technological Learning of Young Children

Vygotsky (1986) draws attention to the interrelationship between thought and language and other aspects of mind. Although not widely acknowledged, Vygotsky (1999) also drew attention to the search for the relations between cognition and emotions. This paper discusses the findings of a study which examined imaginary scientific situations within the early years. The central research questions examined: What is the emotional nature of scientific learning? and How does affective imagination support early childhood science learning? Video observations were made of the teaching of science from one site in a south-eastern community in Australia (232 h of video observations). The teachers used fairy tales and Slowmation as cultural devices to support the concept formation of 3- and 4-year-old children (n?=?53; range of 3.3 to 4.4; mean of 3.8 years). The findings of this under-researched area (e.g. Roth, Mind, Culture, and Activity 15:2–7, 2008) make a contribution to understanding how affective imagination can work in science education in the early years.     

POSSIBILITIES AND POTENTIAL BARRIERS: LEARNING TO PLAN FOR DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION IN ELEMENTARY SCIENCE

Research indicates that differentiated practices enhance the likelihood of meeting the needs of students who find literacy learning challenging (Tobin & McInnes, 2008; Tomlinson, 2003). The aim of the professional development project described here was to leverage these findings and to build the foundation for future research exploring if similar outcomes occurred in science. We wanted to examine teachers’ perceptions regarding planning and implementing Differentiated Instruction (DI) in science. Our workshops emphasized multimodal possibilities, so the project draws on research indicating that elementary students are able to demonstrate their understanding of science concepts in a variety of ways (Tippett, 2003) as well as research on DI in the context of language and literacy instruction. The study yielded insights about in-service teachers’ perceptions of the possibilities and potential barriers presented by DI in science.     

Co-construction of knowledge in tertiary online settings: an ecology of resources perspective

Tertiary education has seen a shift toward pedagogies that make use of social interaction. As part of the shift, teachers have considered re-framing their role in the teaching process, and giving more attention to ways in which knowledge construction amongst students can be supported. While many online technologies are well positioned to support interactivity between students, the use of these tools does not necessarily ensure that the social interaction is of a type that guarantees learning will take place. This paper employs an “ecology of resources” perspective (Luckin 10.1016/j.compedu.2007.09.018, 2008) to explore the experiences of teachers and selected students from three tertiary-level contexts as they engaged with interactive learning tasks mediated by asynchronous online technologies. The data presented in the study were generated primarily from accounts and semi-structured interviews, and presented teachers’ beliefs about how the learners could operate as knowledge resources for each other, while they themselves were somewhat ‘epistemically distant’. In contrast, the data suggest that the experiences of students and tutors were vastly different. The students represented themselves and others as inadequate resources, perceiving that the expertise to construct knowledge was not present in the student group. These observations highlight the importance of building resource-rich learning environments, enabling access to expert performances through blended settings, and nurturing a perception of capability between students.     

School district triggers for reconstructing professional knowledge

In a recent publication, Senge (All systems go: the change imperative for whole system reform. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, 2010, x) stated ??at no time in history has there been a more powerful need for a new vision of the purpose of education.?? Increasingly citizens, academics and practitioners are calling for radical changes to educational practices to meet the needs of a knowledge-based society in the twenty-first century (Dede in 21st Century skills: rethinking how students learn. Solution Tree Press, Bloomington, 2010; Hargreaves and Shirley in The fourth way: the inspiring future for educational change. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, 2009). Accomplishing such substantive educational change requires that individual educators collectively reshape their personal professional knowledge (Connelly and Clandinin in Teachers as curriculum planners: narratives of experiences. OISE Press, Toronto, 1988; Elbaz in Curriculum Inq 11(1):43?C71, 1981) and adapt their personal mental models (Duffy in J Staff Dev 24(1):30?C36, 2003). In 2000, we began a longitudinal study on the role of a school district in facilitating significant educational reform which required adaptations to individual and collective mental models of professional practice. Annually we conducted intensive interviews with a large sample of teachers, school and system administrators in this large Ontario, Canada school district. Recently, we conducted a retrospective analysis of these data collected in order to identify the conditions necessary for a large organization to support knowledge-creation and dissemination. In this paper, we identify three school district actions that triggered individual educators to challenge and reconstruct their professional personal practical mental models of the teaching and learning. First, improved student learning became the central focus of the school district. Second, the school district stressed and created opportunities for educators to collectively engage in professional dialogue about their practice. Third, the school district emphasized the importance of educators individually and collectively using evidence to assess whether their actions improved student learning.     

Project Clarion: Three Years of Science Instruction in Title I Schools among K-Third Grade Students

The purpose of the study was to measure the effects of higher level, inquiry-based science curricula on students at primary level in Title I schools. Approximately 3,300 K-3 students from six schools were assigned to experimental or control classes (N?=?115 total) on a random basis according to class. Experimental students were exposed to concept-based science curriculum that emphasized ??deep learning?? though concept mastery and investigation, whereas control classes learned science from traditional school-based curricula. Two ability measures, the Bracken Basic Concept Scale-Revised (BBCS-R, Bracken 1998) and the Naglieri Nonverbal Intelligence Test (NNAT, Naglieri 1991), were used for baseline information. Additionally, a standardized measure of student achievement in science (the MAT-8 science subtest), a standardized measure of critical thinking, and a measure for observing teachers?? classroom behaviors were used to assess learning outcomes. Results indicated that all ability groups of students benefited from the science inquiry-based approach to learning that emphasized science concepts, and that there was a positive achievement effect for low socio-economic young children who were exposed to such a curriculum.     

Crossing the Border from Science Student to Science Teacher: Preservice Teachers’ Views and Experiences Learning to Teach Inquiry

Preservice science teachers face numerous challenges in understanding and teaching science as inquiry. Over the course of their teacher education program, they are expected to move from veteran science students with little experience learning their discipline through inquiry instruction to beginning science teachers adept at implementing inquiry in their own classrooms. In this study, we used Aikenhead’s (Sci Educ 81: 217–238, 1997, Science Educ 85:180–188, 2001) notion of border crossing to describe this transition preservice teachers must make from science student to science teacher. We examined what one cohort of eight preservice secondary science teachers said, did, and wrote as they both conducted a two-part inquiry investigation and designed an inquiry lesson plan. We conducted two types of qualitative analyses. One, we drew from Costa (Sci Educ 79: 313–333, 1995) to group our preservice teacher participants into one of four types of potential science teachers. Two, we identified successes and struggles in preservice teachers’ attempts to negotiate the cultural border between veteran student and beginning teacher. In our implications, we argue that preservice teachers could benefit from explicit opportunities to navigate the border between learning and teaching science; such opportunities could deepen their conceptions of inquiry beyond those exclusively fashioned as either student or teacher.     

The color of innovative and sustainable leadership: Learning from teacher leaders

In this article, I address how teachers in urban and suburban U.S. schools with multicultural and multilingual student populations demonstrate leadership both within their classrooms and schools as well as outside of them. Based on research with U.S. public school teachers in two projects (Nieto What keeps teachers going? New York: Teachers College Press 2003, Why we teach. New York: Teachers College Press 2005), various roles that teachers have in initiating, putting into practice, and sustaining change in schools are described. Implications for policymakers and administrators are then briefly explored.     

Student-Generated Scientific Inquiry for Elementary Education Undergraduates: Course Development, Outcomes and Implications

While some researchers have argued for science classrooms that embrace open-inquiry by engaging students in doing science as scientists do (cf. National Research Council [NRC] 1996; Driver et al. in Sci Educ 84:287–312, 2000; Windschitl et al. in Sci Educ 87(1):112–143, 2008), others have argued that open-inquiry is impractical, ineffective, and perhaps even counter-productive towards promoting normative scientific ideas (cf. Kirschner et al. in Educ Psychol 41(2):75–86, 2006; Settlage in J Sci Teach Educ 18:461–467, 2007). One of the challenges in informing the debate on this issue is the scarcity of well-documented courses that engage students in open-inquiry characteristic of scientific research. This paper describes the design, implementation, and outcomes of such a course for undergraduates planning on becoming elementary teachers. The goal of the class was to immerse future teachers in authentic, open-inquiry (without specific learning goals related to scientific concepts) in hopes that students would come away with a deeper understanding of the nature of science (NOS) and improved attitudes towards science. Data collected from a variety of sources indicate that an authentic, open-inquiry experience is feasible to implement in an undergraduate setting, gives students a more sophisticated NOS understanding, improves students’ attitudes towards science and open-inquiry, and changes the way they intend to teach science in their future classrooms.     

Creative in finding creativity in the curriculum: the CLIL second language classroom

Modern education is often characterized by a tension between learning and creativity (Connery et al. in Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts, 2010). ??The Arts????if attended to at all??is often positioned as a distinct element of the broader curriculum, and separate from teaching and learning within other curricular domains. Yet, despite being largely neglected within contemporary social constructivist literature, Vygotsky??s sociocultural theory of mind (Vygotsky in Mind in society, 1978; Vygotsky in The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1: Problems of general psychology, 1987)) has as its core a fundamental concern for creativity, affect, and emotion as the basis for human development. This paper argues that Vygotsky??s understanding of catharsis??in particular, the transformative potential of emotion??gives cause to rethink the qualitative nature of pedagogy, and especially the importance of ??mundane creativity?? (Holzman in Vygotsky and creativity: A cultural-historical approach to play, meaning making, and the arts, 2010, p. 27) at the core of teaching and learning. This, in turn, opens up new possibilities for conceiving of how creativity might be understood and realized within and across different dimensions of the curriculum more broadly. For an empirical example to explore these constructs, the paper considers data from a ??content and language integrated learning?? (CLIL) context. Emerging in the mid-1990s as a European response to the success of the Canadian French immersion method for teaching languages (Johnson and Swain in Immersion education: International perspectives, 1997), CLIL sets out several guiding principles for integrating second language (L2) with content to develop both simultaneously. With a focus on how Japanese mediates a unit of work on Geography, the study highlights how the integrated language/content focus affords a space for creative pedagogical engagement in terms of learners making their own creative choices on what language to use, and how it could be used, to facilitate the learning of both language and content (Bachman and Palmer in Language assessment in practice: Developing language assessments and justifying their use in the real world, 2010; Mahn and John-Steiner in The gift of confidence: A Vygotskian view of emotions, 2002).     

Emotional engagement,social interactions,and the development of an afterschool game design curriculum

This formative design study examines how a program curriculum and implementation was emergently (re)designed in dynamic relation to the expressed emotions of teachers and students. The context was a yearlong afterschool game design program for STEM learning at an urban and public all-girls middle school. Using Randall Collins’ (Interaction ritual chains, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004) sociology of emotions framework, our analysis of field notes and video data reveal how the original intended curriculum hindered the generation of positive emotions, mutual foci of attention, and feelings of group solidarity—factors important in the generation of successful group interactions. In response to teacher and student expressed emotions, we took these factors as a guide for redesigning the program curriculum and implementation in order to foster a more positive emotional climate and redirect students’ positive emotions toward engagement in learning goals. This study’s implications point to the possibilities for designing curricula and program implementations to engender more emotionally responsive environments for STEM learning.     

Associations between teachers’ interpersonal behavior,physiological arousal,and lesson-focused emotions

Interpersonal aspects of teaching have repeatedly been linked to teacher emotions and well-being on a general level. However, it is unclear how teachers’ moment-to-moment interpersonal behavior is associated with their physiological arousal during teaching and how this contributes to their lesson-focused emotional outcomes. Eighty secondary education teachers with a mean age of 43.7 years (SD = 11.5) and 13.4 years of teaching experience (SD = 9.7) participated during one real-life lesson. We coded teacher behavior from an interpersonal perspective on the dimensions of agency (i.e., social influence) and communion (i.e., friendliness). Teachers’ physiology (in terms of heart rate) was measured as a proxy for their affective arousal. Teachers differed widely in their behaviors and in how behavior and physiology were associated from moment to moment. Being generally agentic was associated with higher levels of self-reported positive emotions after the lesson, also when being agentic went together with a high heart rate. In contrast, the stronger and the more positively a teacher’s physiological arousal was associated with displaying communal behavior, the more likely a teacher was to report negative emotions. We conclude that combining moment-to-moment data of teachers’ interpersonal behavior and physiological arousal has the potential to explain differences in teachers’ emotional outcomes. Such an approach might ultimately provide teachers and teacher educators with the fine-grained and personalized information needed to foster teacher well-being.     

Undermining critical consciousness unconsciously: Restoring hope in the multicultural education idea

The main goal of multicultural education is to transform the structural factors in the educational system in order to redress inequalities and inequities for historically underprivileged populations (Banks 1997). This article addresses theories and practices that frame multicultural education in teaching and learning contexts. How do teachers interpret the purpose of multicultural education? I suggest that educators are more likely to interpret multicultural education using the functionalist meta-theoretical framework (Burell and Morgan 1979) and the positivistic epistemology (Turner 2006). Ironically this kind of interpretation subverts the original goals of multicultural education as a transformative movement. The process of transforming curriculum and instruction in learning contexts encounters what I would call a “double jeopardy.” On one hand, curriculum processes run into political impediments that are often pervasive, complex, and invisible, whereas on the other hand they encounter a positivistic epistemology that reduces complex phenomena to simplistic, neutral, objective, and universal standards. I make a case for a radical humanist paradigm that privileges the investigation of social and political relations of power and places critical consciousness at the center of educational structures and pedagogy. I attempt to make critical consciousness visible and to show how it can be employed to change schooling opportunities and the lives of those who fall in the “Other” category of social theory.     

Learning to become a learning professional: reflections on one year of teaching

This research aims to study the ways in which a teacher learns through and about professional practice. Data presented here is drawn from one year of teaching and focuses on pedagogical practices, critical reflection upon those practices and the impact of the implementation of a new physical education syllabus in Maltese secondary schools. The study employs autoethnography to reveal thoughts, feelings and learning experienced by a new teacher implementing a new curriculum; in other words, I (Attard) am studying myself.

I start with my personal life. I pay attention to my physical feelings, thought, and emotions. I use what I call systematic sociological introspection and emotional recall to try and understand an experience I've lived through. (Ellis & Bochner, 2000 Ellis C Bochner AP Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity 2000 in: Denzin N, & Lincoln Y, (Eds) Handbook of qualitative research London Sage 733 768  [Google Scholar], p.?737)     

Voicing Early Years Teachers’ Subjective Experiences Through Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There

In this article, I present a narrative conversation that combines six teachers’ responses to Maurice Sendak’s picture book, Outside Over There (1981) with my own responses to their discussions and to the book. The purpose of this research is three-fold: first, to examine how children’s literature can be used to evoke reflections in early years teachers on how they make sense of their work with children; second, to conduct a close and shared reading of Sendak’s elusive story; and third, to experiment with a dialogic, narrative form of representation. Using a qualitative form of reader response and text analysis, I assembled content from a focus group discussion held with six early years teachers, in which they discussed Sendak’s book, Outside Over There, and combined data from their responses with my own readings. Sendak’s goblins, the lead protagonist of Outside Over There, Ida, Ida’s family, and the phrasing of “outside over there” provided symbols around which the teachers discussed their professional vulnerabilities, including their subjective experiences of being undervalued in society. The picture book’s defamiliarizing effect helped the teachers question their own difficult emotions in realizing themselves within the broader field of education, and offered tools with which they could articulate the value of their “demanding internal adventures” (Cech, Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak, 1995, p. 237).     

Using Tasks to Explore Teacher Knowledge in Situation-Specific Contexts

Research often reports an overt discrepancy between theoretically/out-of context expressed teacher beliefs about mathematics and pedagogy and actual practice. In order to explore teacher knowledge in situation-specific contexts we have engaged mathematics teachers with classroom scenarios (Tasks) which: are hypothetical but grounded on learning and teaching issues that previous research and experience have highlighted as seminal; are likely to occur in actual practice; have purpose and utility; and, can be used both in (pre- and in-service) teacher education and research through generating access to teachers’ views and intended practices. The Tasks have the following structure: reflecting upon the learning objectives within a mathematical problem (and solving it); examining a flawed (fictional) student solution; and, describing, in writing, feedback to the student. Here we draw on the written responses to one Task (which involved reflecting on solutions of $ {\left| x \right|} + {\left| {x - 1} \right|} = 0 $ ) of 53 Greek in-service mathematics teachers in order to demonstrate the range of teacher knowledge (mathematical, didactical and pedagogical) that engagement with these tasks allows us to explore.     

Emotions and the liminal space in entrepreneurship education

ABSTRACT

Emotions are present in all learning processes, including those in entrepreneurship education. In this paper, we investigate which kinds of emotions exist in entrepreneurship education at university and in which contexts they occur, and show how the concept of liminal spaces – spaces of transformation in which students encounter high degrees of uncertainty, while their potential for learning is maximised – can be used in order to understand the role of negative emotions for entrepreneurship education. Providing examples from courses on entrepreneurship for Engineering and Business Administration students at a German university, we are able to confirm findings of existing literature on the type and sources of emotions. Moreover, our findings suggest that reflection of students on emotional processes that involve the endurance of uncertainty contribute significantly to the achievement of learning outcomes and that – within the limits of existing learning cultures and guidelines for assessment – teachers can facilitate such processes.