Challenges in Enacting Core Practices in Language Teacher Education: A Self-Study

In this study, I explore my practices as a teacher educator in one course both before and after returning to the K–12 classroom to teach secondary language learners for one academic year. By examining the intersection of self-study and practice-based teacher education, I illustrate how I used self-study as a mechanism for innovation and change and focus on the challenges I encountered in implementing the use of practice-based education in my work as a teacher educator. Qualitative data analysis revealed that in redesigning my approach to my course, I stopped short of my goals to make the course more practice-centered. Although I provided students with many opportunities to practice planning, I did not provide enough focused opportunities to practice implementation and to participate in giving and receiving feedback. I learned that engaging teachers in practice-based teaching requires teacher educators to be both specific and deliberate in setting their own purposes for establishing the centrality of practice in their courses and to explain these clearly to teacher candidates. Further work in which teacher educators study their use of practice-based pedagogy would benefit from using a self-study lens. Other researchers are urged to add to the limited body of research about the use of practice-based pedagogy with teachers of language learners, particularly English language learners.     

Changing Conceptions of Effective Teacher Education: The journey of a novice teacher educator

This article examines my three-year journey developing a personal pedagogy of teacher education. As an autobiographical self-study, nodal moments are revealed that raise and reflect the tensions I experienced and the challenges I encountered. These included developing an awareness of my incomplete understandings of key components of teacher education, particularly the importance of fostering critical reflection. Acknowledgement of the benefits and complexities of first facilitating and later assessing reflective practice followed next. My transformation from a confident school-board resource teacher to an uncertain teacher educator, who reiteratively questions her practices as she comes to understand and teach to promote conceptual change, resonates with the uncertain terrain of teacher education. I explore the implications of this self-study by discussing the need for support, suggesting that teacher educators, particularly part-time instructors, be provided with opportunities to examine their teacher education beliefs. I recommend self-study groups as vehicles for this support.     

Negotiating cultural differences in urban science education: an overview of teacher’s first-hand experience reflection of cogen journey

Classrooms across the United States increasingly find immigrant science teachers paired with urban minority students, but few of these teachers are prepared for the challenges such cultural assimilation presents. This is particularly true in secondary science education. Identifying potential prospects for culturally adaptive pedagogy in science education is important for students and teachers alike because it provides means for increasing marginalized students’ access to science fields. In this autoethnography, I document my experience as an immigrant science teacher in an urban intermediate school in New York City. Although I possessed the content knowledge highly valued by the current neoliberal agenda, I lacked the cultural adaptivity necessary to foster a successful learning environment. I utilized cogenerative dialogue (cogen) as a tool to ameliorate instances of cultural misalignments and improve teaching and learning in my classroom. The results of the study show that the interstitial culture produced through the implementation of the different forms of cogen became a reference point to draw upon in improving the overall learning environment.     

Understanding Candidates’ Learning Relationships with their Cooperating Teachers: A call to Reframe my Pedagogy

Abstract

This self-study frames the influences of cooperating (or mentor) teachers on teacher candidates in my teacher education classroom as an action-at-a-distance on my pedagogy of teacher education; that is, a tacit set of influences and expectations that teacher candidates develop about my course before it even begins. Interviews with teacher candidates enabled me to develop two conceptual metaphors to think about the relationships candidates develop with cooperating teachers on practicum. The first, freedom with foundation, reflects the fact that teacher candidates hope to have considerable autonomy in their practicum placements while simultaneously having the support from their cooperating teacher to receive meaningful, regular, feedback. The second, power and performance, names the tensions teacher candidates feel in experiencing the practicum as a site of performance rather than as a site of learning. I offer some specific pedagogical ways in which I have responded to these issues before making a turn to self. I examined journal entries from my own experiences as a teacher candidate 20 years ago with a view to understanding the ways in which the two metaphors may have played a role in my own development as a teacher. This research compels me to attend explicitly to action-at-at-distance forces in my teacher education classroom, such as candidates’ relationship with cooperating teachers and my relationships with my former cooperating teachers.     

Taking a Return to School: Using Self-Study to Learn about Teacher Educator Practice

The work of teacher educators is complex and multifaceted and requires knowledge of pedagogy and practice in both schools and teacher education institutions. This complexity, combined with calls for teacher educators to work in close partnership with schools, sees some in teacher education working in hybrid roles and across the boundaries of schools and universities. Drawing on a self-study conducted over a one-year return to teaching, I explore my return home to teach in a secondary school and I examine the continuing impact of this experience on my practice as a teacher educator. Using the concept of tensions as a conceptual framework to analyse the data I explore three tensions in this article: (1) teacher as technician versus teacher as pedagogue; (2) challenging versus being responsive to other’s views of learning; and (3) teacher versus teacher educator identity. I explore how a return to teaching in school and the tensions I experienced enabled me to develop my practice and understandings as a teacher educator. I argue that rich professional learning can result from using self-study to examine teacher educator practice, particularly for teacher educators working in hybrid roles and partnership contexts.     

Changing Pedagogical Practice in Teacher Education: Negotiating the spaces between realism and relativism

This article reports a self-study from a larger research project that explored the impact on pre-service and in-service teacher education of a new national curriculum in New Zealand and the conceptualisations of epistemological shifts signalled by that document. A pedagogical initiative to introduce inquiry-based learning into a graduate diploma course for pre-service primary teachers was the result of and the catalyst for further reflection on my practice and the (mis)alignments between my theoretical understandings and beliefs and my pedagogical choices. In this article I focus on the tensions and contradictions I encountered while attempting to enact, in a tertiary environment, a pedagogy that aligned with the underpinning principles of the new curriculum. I describe the model that I developed to understand those tensions and contradictions, which are characterised as the spaces between realism and relativism. I suggest that negotiating these spaces is part of the process of becoming a teacher and a teacher educator in the twenty-first century.     

Critically Teaching Criticality?: Modeling Social and Pedagogical Inquiry with Literary Texts

Within US teacher preparation programs, critical pedagogy and a desire for social change can lead teacher educators to prioritize transformation of prospective teachers’ beliefs through self-reflection. In pursuit of effective critical pedagogies, teacher educators also need to examine their own practices and beliefs. This self-study, a manifestation of teaching as inquiry, reframes evaluations of teaching away from what students do toward what teachers do. Here I undertake a reflexive examination of my own recursive practice as a teacher educator in children’s literature. Drawing upon a complex notion of teaching and learning, I argue that student learning outcomes are unpredictable, and as a result, successful teacher education should model self-inquiry as a vital part of teaching. Findings show that teaching choices (and omissions) in response to students’ responses led to unintended outcomes that undermined my motivations. I conclude that teacher educators’ self-inquiry and reflection in broader social contexts offers access to critical ways of thinking that underlie their work toward developing similar capacities among their prospective teacher students.     

Bridging the Gap from Teacher to Teacher Educator: The Role of a Teaching Portfolio

This article explores the role of a teaching portfolio in supporting the transition from teacher to teacher educator. It uses aspects of self-study to catalogue the challenges and successes during this transition. Despite well-documented acknowledgement of the differing demands of teaching when compared to teaching how to teach, little is written about potential supports during transition to teacher education. This article cites benefits associated with developing a teaching portfolio during this period of transition. The process of reflecting on a teaching philosophy, interrogating pedagogy and developing a personal and professional development plan facilitate the formation of an adapted teacher identity. In addition, the scholarly, evidence-based process of portfolio writing acts as a bridge into the research and writing world of an academic. The portfolio writing process this researcher engaged in was based on iterative feedback from more experienced colleagues internal to the institution and from external panels. This led to a supportive and collaborative induction to the role of teacher educator from a number of perspectives. The researching of my self enabled deep reflection on my teaching philosophy, supported early academic writing and facilitated relationships with staff who acted as critical friends and mentors. This promoted the implementation of an effective teacher education pedagogy through structured, reflective, and evidence-led modifications to practice. This article creates awareness of the broader role of a teaching portfolio for teachers and teacher educators, in creating rich learning experiences for the pre-service teachers we teach.     

The Place of English Revisited

In this essay I explore the constraints and opportunities confronting me as a newly qualified teacher and how these affect my pedagogy. I have reflected on my own development from beginning to newly qualified teacher and considered how such forces have shaped my identity as a teacher, my values and my approach to the job. As part of my exploration of my practice and the values I hold, I have revisited ‘The Place of English’, an essay I wrote midway through my Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) year; I have reconsidered how the current climate of educational reform and my subsequent experience have altered or strengthened these initial perceptions. In what follows I have reflected critically on two episodes of teaching and learning with my Year 10 class, my most challenging group, in order to further understand the way in which I have responded to the responsibilities and pressures placed on a classroom teacher. These pressures, I suggest, are intensified by the preconceptions of age and gender within my school and implicit more widely in the traditional values of our culture. The fragments of my practice that I have explored reveal tensions that gesture at a gap between educational theory, first-hand professional experience and governmental policy. They present an argument to resist the temptations of oversimplified, linear conceptions of teaching and learning, and maintain the place of English as a subject of creativity, exploration and expression that, at its heart, values both individual and collective student voices and identities.     

Toward a Pedagogy of Transformation

An on-going challenge in teacher education programs is how best to support new teachers in connecting their university coursework with their professional identity development and pedagogical practice in the schools. The reading and writing of case studies is one promising strategy teacher educators have explored as a means of assisting teachers in developing and cultivating a self-reflective, theory and practice reflexive, style of learning in the teacher education classroom and beyond. In the present paper, I present a case study of my own journey as a developmental and educational psychologist responsible for co-teaching a secondary teacher education course called "Adolescent Development for Teachers", in which having student-teachers research and write-up a case study of a single adolescent became the focus of the course and our pedagogy. I describe events that brought about the use of the case study in the course, the influence the use of the case study had on myself as an instructor as well as the students, and what students say are the educational benefits and difficulties of completing the adolescent case study. Implications for infusing a developmental focus into teacher education programs are discussed.     

The Oppressor Within: A Counterstory of Race, Repression, and Teacher Reflection

In this paper, I offer my own counterstory of matriculating through a teacher education program as an African American student on a predominately White campus as a reference point for thinking through how racism operates through teacher education’s dominant discourse and practice of teacher reflection. It is an important story to tell primarily because it touches on a largely unexplored dimension of teacher reflection. While the large majority of the literature has focused on how to prepare White preservice teachers to teach in a culturally and racially complex world, little qualitative attention has been given to the preparation of nonwhite students. While there are a few select and important articles that touch on some of the challenges African American students face in predominately White teacher education programs, including covert and overt racism, none focus on how teacher reflection might reproduce these dynamics. Thus what the literature on teacher reflection often suggests is that it is a racially neutral practice. In this essay, however, I suggests otherwise, by providing an intimate and critical look at my process of learning to be a reflective practitioner. The question I seek to grapple with is quite simply, “What does teacher reflection work to repress?”     

Exploring Self-Study to Improve My Practice as a Mathematics Teacher Educator

While supervising a student teacher in school, an incident occurred that highlighted a contradiction between my practice and my beliefs and prompted me to question why I do not always live the values I profess. The aim of this article is to investigate how self-study can help me to understand the complex and context-based situations of my practice. I draw on the work of other teacher educators to examine the potential of self-study to improve my practice. Through this exploration I have begun to transform the way that I comprehend teaching and learning in teacher education. I identify several tensions and challenges in implementing the methodology within my professional context. I believe that self-study can help us in our roles as teacher educators to develop more reflexive self-awareness and to problematize taken-for-granted assumptions relevant to our contexts of practice.     

Reflections on being female in school science: Toward a praxis of teaching science

This essay interrogates the phenomenon and the implications of being female in school science through girls' and young women's stories interwoven with my own narrative as a woman teacher/researcher in science education. The intent is to raise awareness of issues related to being female in conventional science teaching, and to suggest some alternative perspectives and approaches for action and reflection. I discuss several directions within my teaching which announce my own interpretation of bell hook's “engaged pedagogy,” which emphasizes a commitment to self-actualization and well-being for both teacher and student. My choice to integrate disparate writing styles (conversational and scholarly) was a deliberate effort to resonate issues between practice and theory and interrupt this separation. J Res Sci Teach 35: 463–471, 1998.     

Developing a Vision of Teacher Education: How my classroom teacher understandings evolved in the university environment

Drawing on my experiences as a former classroom teacher making the transition to teacher education, this study examines how my vision of teacher education developed over the course of my first three years as a graduate teaching assistant in a social studies education program in the United States. A qualitative self-study methodology was used to identify and describe sources of tension and growth that contributed to the evolution of my classroom teacher understandings as I forged a distinct vision for teacher education. My vision of teacher education was informed by completing graduate coursework, engaging in the work of teacher education, interacting and collaborating with peers, and studying my practice as it developed and unfolded. Throughout the article, I discuss the potential of self-study methodology to encourage new teacher educators to examine both the features and motivations behind their practice, as well as the effects of this examination on the development of a vision of teacher education.     

Examining Features of Teacher Education in Norway

Drawing upon recent research in the United States, this paper proposes that there are three key features undergirding powerful teacher education programs. The research suggests that in order to be powerful and effective, teacher education programs need to have a vision, be coherent, and provide opportunities to learn that are grounded in teaching practice. The author uses these features as a lens to examine programs in Norway – a country in which teacher education has been relatively under-examined. The analysis reveals several challenges for the Norwegian teacher education programs examined, such as a lack of shared vision among faculty responsible for teaching subject content and those teaching pedagogy, as well as few opportunities for student teachers to learn in the context of practice. Implications for strengthening programs are discussed.     

Learning to teach: enhancing pre‐service teachers’ awareness of the complexity of teaching–learning processes

Abstract

Interest in story in teaching has been linked to teacher research (Carter, 1993; Elbaz, 1991), to teacher education (Connelly &; Clandinin, 1994), to curriculum (Britz‐man, 1989; Gudmundsdottir, 1991c), and to school change (Giltin, 1990). I wish to argue here for a link between story and one form of teacher reflection, for portfolio construction, unlike more conventional forms of teacher development, encourages teachers to tell the story of their classrooms and to frame that story in particular ways. I wish to argue here for a view that constructing a portfolio shifts the ownership of learning to the portfolio‐maker and that in this constructing, we can trace a teacher's developing understanding of pedagogy. Specifically, my aim is to illustrate the narrative dimensions of a self‐generated portfolio question — its interpretations, the reflections upon its meaning, and its transformations of pedagogical understanding — as this text becomes pedagogy and pedagogy becomes text. This interpretive process is illustrated through a case study of Ellen Nicol, a secondary English as a Second Language teacher, in her graduate teacher education year and her first 2 years of classroom teaching. Ellen's pedagogical text, her question, is reinterpreted with major changes each time she comes to understand more completely the richness and complexity of her classroom. Each new transformation and reinterpretation serve as guide for selection of materials, for selection of pedagogy, and for assessment of success. Each new collection of pedagogical information serves as impetus for possible reframing and transformation of the text.