Teaching elements of nature of science: A yearlong case study of a fourth‐grade teacher

This study examined and supported the efforts of Tina, an experienced elementary teacher, in helping her fourth graders internalize informed views of the inferential, tentative, and creative nature of science (NOS). Tina held informed views of, and was motivated to teach about, NOS. The study aimed to answer the following question: What specific supports were needed to enable Tina to make the target NOS elements explicit in her teaching? The lead researcher visited Tina's classroom every week and interacted with her on a continuous basis. Data sources included classroom observations and videotapes, teacher NOS questionnaires and associated interviews, teacher–researcher communications, and teacher and researcher logs. Although Tina's understandings and intentions were necessary to enable her to teach about NOS, they were not sufficient. Tina needed support to translate her NOS views and intentions into pedagogically appropriate instructional activities that would make the target NOS aspects accessible to her students. Socially mediated support was needed at the personal level in terms of helping Tina activate her tacit NOS understandings, and at the professional level in terms of modeling explicit NOS instruction in Tina's own classroom by the lead researcher. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 40: 1025–1049, 2003     

Falls the shadow and the light: liminality and natality in social work field education

This article is situated within an experience of conflict for Tina, a social work student, who is caught between her beliefs about the virtues of social work practice, and her disillusioning encounter with the school's administration. In this paper, we interpret Tina's experience of conflict by drawing on the central concepts of liminality and natality, and how she moves through disillusionment to illumination, thereby generating new self-understandings and meanings of social work practice. We conclude with the pedagogical implications for students, and educators, and that as messy and complex as the liminal is, it is also vital to the creation of new understandings and regeneration of meaning in professional education.     

Tipping the Balance from Expert to Facilitator: Examining Myths about Being a Teacher Educator

This self-study addresses two questions: (1) how did self-study aid the teacher educator in interrogating her beliefs about and mediate her projection of teacher-as-facilitator versus teacher-as-expert? and (2) in what ways did prospective elementary teachers in an undergraduate, interdisciplinary science course exert control over their learning as a result of the teacher educator's self-interrogation of practices? In her teaching role with prospective teachers, Nicole explored a major myth about teaching concerning the image of the professor as the primary expert in the classroom. Critical events analysis revealed instances where she exerted power as an expert or assumed the role of facilitator. Instead of clearly marked instances where she took actions to exert her various roles in the classroom, she found that classroom events could not be categorized neatly. There were cases where she acted as an expert and students felt free to make their own decisions about their learning. When she was uncertain or attempted to relinquish control, students often responded by not taking control of their learning.     

Teacher–writer–crafter–maker: an exploration of how making mattered for one writing teacher

This qualitative case study documents a secondary English teacher's making, writing and teaching. The focal teacher engaged in diverse making practices – including composing, crafting and digital fabrication. She also participated in a National Writing Project (NWP) Summer Institute that focused on both teacher writing and digital composing. Data include observations at this NWP Project Summer Institute and in the focal teacher's English classroom, as well as interviews and artefact collection related to her making practices. The findings describe how this teacher's making mattered for her understandings of writing and for her teaching (or not). The case offers insights into why it may be important to cultivate educator making, as well as potential tensions between experiencing making and incorporating it into writing pedagogy. Ultimately, it contributes to writing research interested in examining how various forms of production and making are enmeshed.     

ORDER AND CONTENT OF THE BIBLICAL COURSES IN A COLLEGE CURRICULUM∗

The man is a blue collar worker. He tells the story of his nine year old daughter. She said that the only thing she really wanted for Christmas was a pair of Vidal Sassoon Jeans. He explained to her that they really weren't wealthy enough to afford $40 jeans. Maybe Levis would do. “Forget it,” she said. “If I can't have what I want, I don't want anything.”

The man said that they saved up and got her the Sassoon jeans for Christmas. “But you know,” he mused, “she judges the others in her class on what kind of designer jeans they have. They form cliques based on their clothes. It's their way of being somebody, being acceptable, being ‘in’.”     

The Dynamics of Interaction During Post‐lesson Conferences and the Development of Professional Activity: Study of a pre‐service physical education teacher and her co‐operating teacher

The purpose of this study was to characterise the development of a preservice physical education teacher's professional activity over the course of training interactions with her co‐operating teacher. The student teacher's professional development was studied using a hermeneutic and inductive approach based on the analysis of data from observation and self‐confrontation interviews. The results showed that the preservice teacher's conceptions regarding her teaching developed despite communication difficulties with her co‐operating teacher and that she constructed new knowledge—at times without her co‐operating teacher's awareness—even when she disagreed with him. However, the student teacher's classroom activity did not always change as a result of this new knowledge. The self‐confrontation interviews revealed her construction of knowledge, as well as the reasons for disagreement and her resistance to changing her classroom action.     

Development of professional knowledge in learning to teach elementary science

The purpose of this research was to understand how preservice elementary teacher experiences within the context of reflective science teacher education influence the development of professional knowledge. We conducted a case analysis to investigate one preservice teacher's beliefs about science teaching and learning, identify the tensions with which she grappled in learning to teach elementary science, understand the frames from which she identified problems of practice, and discern how her experiences played a role in framing and reframing problems of practice. The teacher, Barbara, encountered tensions in thinking about science teaching and learning as a result of inconsistencies between her vision of science teaching and her practice. Confronting these tensions between ideals and realities prompted Barbara to rethink the connections between her classroom actions and students' learning and create new perspectives for viewing her practice. Through reframing, she was able to consider and begin implementing alternative practices more resonant with her beliefs. Barbara's case illustrates the value of understanding prospective teachers' beliefs, their experiences, and the relationship between beliefs and classroom actions. Furthermore, the findings underscore the significance of offering reflective experience as professionals early in the careers of prospective teachers. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 121–139, 1999     

Whose confession? Which tradition? (A preliminary critique of Penny Thompson, 2004)

What does Penny Thompson really want? Reading her article in BJRE 26 (1) proved a baffling experience: it clearly wanted to say something, and to say it passionately, yet signally failed to do so. It fails largely because it lacks an argument; there seems also to be conceptual muddle at its heart. A fuller critique will need to attend to Thompson’s reading of religious education’s history, particularly to her use of evidence—but that is a story for another night. Consequently, this brief critique has at its core four questions to elicit clarity where at present there is none: First, does Penny Thompson want so to revision religious education in community schools that she and other aspirants to ‘Christian confessional religious education’ may freely work to convert young people to ‘Christianity’ and to nurture them in a Christian tradition? Second, in what sense, or senses, does Thompson want readers to understand her phrase, ‘the truth of the Christian faith?’ Third, in whose confession and in which tradition does Thompson want this Christian confessional religious education to be rooted? Fourth, is Penny Thompson willing to allow Christian teachers to present alternative understandings of Christianity, critical of her (implied) view? These questions are preceded by reflection on the form of her article’s argument and on its use of ‘confess’ and its cognates.     

The interplay of a biology teacher's beliefs,teaching practices and gender-based student-teacher classroom interaction

Cross-relationships among a Taiwanese seventh-grade biology teacher's beliefs, practices and classroom interaction with either male or female students were qualitatively and quantitatively analysed. Results show that the teacher's classroom practices reflect her teaching philosophy, which she described in interviews held before and throughout the class observation period. Gender-based characteristics clearly play an important role in establishing and maintaining differences in interactions between male or female students and their teacher in this particular classroom. Data collected from classroom observations show that the subject teacher's beliefs concerning boy/girl differences in learning style and classroom participation are reinforced or sustained by her behaviour, which includes unequal distribution of direct questions, unbalanced feedback and encouragement, and a lack of restrictive controls on calling out answers.     

Formative Assessment in EFL Writing: An Exploratory Case Study

In second‐language writing, assessment has traditionally focused on the written products and how well (or badly) students perform in writing. Teachers dominate the assessment process as testers, while students remain passive testees. Assessment is something teachers ‘do to’ rather than ‘with’ students, mainly for administrative and reporting purposes (i.e. summative). Such assessment, being more retrospective than prospective, holds little value for teaching and learning. In recent years, with a major paradigm shift in assessment and evaluation in English language teaching, writing assessment informed primarily by a product and summative orientation, is considered increasingly inadequate. Such assessment, which focuses on measurement – i.e. marking, monitoring and checking, fails to capture the formative potential of assessment for promoting learning. A formative approach to assessment, on the other hand, focuses more on inquiry – i.e. discovering, diagnosing and understanding, as well as the opportunities assessment provides for improving teaching and learning. To harness the potential of formative assessment in the writing classroom, it is axiomatic that classroom assessment practices be geared towards maximizing student learning. This provides the impetus for my study, which investigates an EFL teacher's attempt to implement formative assessment in her writing classroom and its impact on her classroom practice and students' beliefs and attitudes to writing.     

The Subject of Post-structuralism: A reply to Alison Jones

ABSTRACT Alison Jones finds in the writing of her students who take up post-structuralism, a confused humanism, an illegitimate appearance of a prediscursive self. She attributes this to some aspects of my writing and to the students' failure to understand the structuralist base of post-structuralism. Jones argues that I and her students are guilty of humanism when we use active verbs such as 'positioning' or 'forced choice', or when we try to imagine what agency might be in a post-structuralist framework. In this reply I produce a detailed reading of Jones'. In doing so, I attempt to find how she produced her reading of my writing, and at the same time to extend my understanding of what the 'post-structuralist subject' might be. I attend to this in the dual sense of human beings as subjects, and the subject of post-structuralism as we teach it to our students.     

Beginning Again: A Response to Rosen and Christie

Genre theory has been around for a long time now. The exchange between Michael Rosen and Frances Christie recently featured in Changing English is the latest in a series of exchanges between advocates of genre and their critics over the past three decades or so. Our aim in this response-essay is not to weigh up the merits of the cases made by Rosen and Christie. Rather, we want to think about how individual teachers might confront the hegemony of genre theory and the harmful effects we believe it is having on language education. Our starting point is Lisa’s own professional practice, as she enacts it from day to day at a state secondary school in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Australia. We draw on Lisa’s journal to construct a sense of the time and place, as well as samples of students’ writing that she gathered in the course of a year with her Year 7 class, in order to gain a better understanding of her work as an English teacher. How does this material compare with ‘all the genre work done over some 25–30?years’ by the genre theorists? What ‘knowledge’ will she be able to construct on the basis of the classroom observations that she made over that time? What should we make of the fact that her world is not the same as the world as genre theorists conceive it?     

‘Shoot for the moon!’ Students' identities as writers in the context of the classroom

A study of students' identities as writers was carried out in the classroom of a New Zealand primary teacher who had been formally identified by a national body of teachers as having excellent practice in supporting literacy acquisition. The researchers, Professor Janice Wearmouth, from the University of Bedfordshire, Mere Berryman, from the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and Lisa Whittle, from the Department of Conservation, Wellington, New Zealand, aimed to compare high and low literacy achievers' identities as writers within the context of this teacher's pedagogy and the learning environment of her classroom. The researchers concluded that all students, both high and low achievers, were developing very positive writing identities in a context where the teacher's method of supporting her students' writing was very well planned through a process‐writing approach. This teacher had a very high degree of subject and pedagogical content knowledge and an acute awareness of her students' literacy learning needs. Her approach had an immediacy of responsiveness in relation to every student's learning and, above all, had recognition of the overwhelming importance of positive relationships in the classroom, teacher to student and peer to peer.     

Achieving clarity: principle to practice. The difference reflection makes in implementing a policy for information technology in a primary school

Abstract

This article considers two pivotal issues in school development: first, the epistemological foundations by which a curriculum area is generally held to be constructed, and how this knowledge base can be accepted or reconstructed by individual interpretation. Secondly, the paradigm, and therefore the methodology, by which change agents represent their understanding of curriculum areas to those participants of curriculum change. The article has an unusual structure, as it is written in two separate sections. The first section relates in a simple narrative style the actions the author undertook in her role as a coordinator for information technology, seeking change in classroom practice within a large primary school (ages 5–11 years) in a London suburb. It is told retrospectively, for the author then undertook a period of study and reflection which led her to reconsider both her understanding and the method by which she introduced change. Hence, the second section, written at the end of this period of reflection, enters the realm of ‘paradigm shift’ in that it examines the author's past rationale, her actions and the consequent results within her new epistemological and ontological understanding. Essentially, she deconstructs her actions and reconstructs them as ‘what-should-have-happened!‘ The implicit tenet is that her actions did not lead to the change she sought because she did not have clarity in understanding or direction, hence the article's title: ‘Achieving Clarity … The Difference Reflection Makes …’. The axiom of her revised understanding is that enduring and profound change cannot occur without the change agent having this clarity of understanding, which can achieve consistency between principle and practice with both rigour and credibility. At least, that's the first step, for innovation is never that simple; it's a long process.     

Rhetorical Functions of Letter Writing: Dialogic Collaboration,Affirmation, and Catharsis in Dolores Huerta's Letters

This essay focuses on the letters that Dolores Huerta wrote to César Chávez in the 1960s and 1970s to better understand her role in the United Farm Workers (UFW) union and the functions of letter writing for individuals such as Huerta, who faced constraining ideologies of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Huerta used these letters to establish dialogic collaboration with Chávez. These letters also had a more personal function through affirmation and catharsis, enabling Huerta to affirm her role within the UFW by noting her accomplishments and sacrifices for the union and by expressing both her personal and professional problems. These rhetorical functions of her letter writing contributed to Huerta's identity consciousness, enabling her to build an identity that emphasized social justice issues related to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender.     

About Creativity,Giftedness, and Teaching the Creatively Gifted in the Classroom

In this case study the author explored a teacher's beliefs about creativity and gifted‐ness and investigated the classroom practices of this teacher of gifted students for 20 years. Seven semi‐structured and 2 open observations were carried out in her classroom, and 2 prefigured interviews were conducted with her. She believed that creative children are those who are “free thinkers” and have “imaginative intelligence.” The thin line between an academically gifted child and a creatively gifted child is built by “imagination,” “emotional intensity,” and “curiosity.” In creative writing, she tried to implement activities such as learning to write poetry, personal narratives, research reports and essays posing solutions to real world problems, and mystery stories decorated with similes, metaphors and imaginative expressions. In reading, students analyzed characters, problems, places and times in stories and novels, and then rewrote stories.     

From veteran parent to novice teacher: A case study of a student teacher

This paper presents a case of a secondary student teacher in a midwestern school in the United States. She was one of the growing number of women who are making the decision to become professionals later in life, after having experienced roles such as marriage, parenting, and other jobs. The study focuses on her adaptation to the role of a teacher and factors that influenced the adaptation process. The student teacher's development is traced, during the 10-week term of student teaching, through changes in her teaching and related changes in the language with which she described her experiences as a student teacher. These changes included increased time devoted to the impact of instruction on order in the class, and less time to classroom management alone. Her adaptation to the role of teacher was influenced significantly by the personal resources she had due to her age and life experience. They provided her with the strength to operate according to own values, even when they differed dramatically from those of her cooperating teacher.     

Collective Literacy Autobiographies: Exploring issues of authority,positioning and discourse

While a great deal of recent research and pedagogical interventions have focused on the development of critical reading practices of students, less attention has been given to developing critical writing practices. A move from a critical reading to a critical writing pedagogy would involve the application of the same general critical literacy principles, such as (1) repositioning students as researchers of language and (2) problematizing classroom texts [Comber (1994) Critical literacy: An introduction to Australian debates and perspectives, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 26, 655-668]. But while in critical reading classes these principles are applied to the language and texts of others, in a critical writing class they would have to be extended to the students' own language and texts. This paper describes the effects of interventions with students training to be teachers, which asked them to record their past literacy experiences in collective autobiographies, and to disrupt, i.e., critically analyse, them in order to instigate change in consciousness and in their future practice as literacy teachers. The author's focus is on a group around a particular student, Radha, and how the course helped them make sense of, and overcome their hesitancy to write from positions of authority. The author also describes how Radha learned to understand the difficulties she faced in her assignments when straddling conflicting subject positions.     

Promoting literacy in play

When I was four my mother, father, sister, and I moved to California. My mother wrote my grandmother often, partly because she missed her terribly and partly because my mother relishes writing letters. Whenever she wrote, I sat beside her at the kitchen table and composed as many pages as she did, page after page of squiggly lines.Kathy Roskos is Assistant Professor, Department of Education, John Carroll University. Carol Vukelich is Associate Professor and Director of Inservice Education, College of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, DE.