Integrating Technology in Physical Education Teacher Education: A Socialization Perspective

ABSTRACT

Physical education teacher education (PETE) programs are encouraged to develop teachers capable of delivering technology integrated learning experiences. Technological pedagogical content knowledge provides a framework for integrating technology into teacher education programs. Occupational socialization theory describes an educator’s recruitment, training, and socialization in the teaching profession. The purpose of this article is to propose a conceptual framework for helping preservice physical educators develop technological pedagogical content knowledge that is grounded in occupational socialization theory. We specifically recommend a four-phase approach to help preservice teachers (a) build their knowledge and learn to value technology in physical education, (b) observe and explore through instructor modeling and integration, (c) experiment and collaborate with mentoring and scaffolding, and (d) discover through innovation and utilization. These suggestions acknowledge the sociopolitical aspects of learning to teach with technology and implications are discussed along with the need to help preservice teachers transfer technology integration into their professional careers.     

A scientific approach in the assessment of the school-based part of the teacher education programme in Sweden

This article aims to highlight how a scientific and critical approach is used in assessment dialogues during the last period of a practical, school-based teacher education programme. The result is based on 13 assessment dialogues conducted in a course at a Swedish university, where one of the course objectives is to, ‘in a scientific way, analyse teaching situations based on learning theories’. The assessment dialogues were analysed drawing from Bernstein’s concepts of ‘classification’, ‘framing’, ‘horizontal knowledge’ and ‘vertical knowledge’. The result shows that only in a minority of the assessment dialogues are students expected to use theory as an analytical tool and to critically examine their teaching practice. The theory is used in a more instrumental way to legitimize what is considered the ‘right way’ to teach. One conclusion is that the critical tradition of academia is seldom observed despite being clearly stated in the learning goals. The link between general academic knowledge and more school-based contextual knowledge is often missing or not made visible by the students or the teacher educators, and normative content is still clearly prominent.     

Modelling by teacher educators

A desirable professional competency of teacher educators is the ability to explicitly model for their students, the thoughts and actions that underpin one's pedagogical approach. However desirable, the articulation of knowledge of practice is a difficult and complex task that demands considerable awareness of oneself, pedagogy and students. This article explores the nature and development of explicit modelling by two teacher educators in the context of a preservice education programme in an Australian University. The article illustrates how through their collaborative self-study, the teacher educator/authors have begun to conceptualise a pedagogy of teacher education that is based on learning from the experience of ‘being explicit’.     

Using modelling to make culturally responsive pedagogy explicit in preservice teacher education in Finland

Despite multiculturalism being discussed in teacher education, teachers still often feel insecure in the classroom around developing meaningful practices. This might be due to several issues about how preservice teachers are taught. In this article, modelling culturally responsive pedagogy is demonstrated as a promising strategy in shaping preservice teachers’ learning experiences and facilitating the finding of pedagogical responses in their future work. The article examines preservice teachers’ awareness of modelling as a teaching strategy in a multicultural education course in Finland, and the ways in which they connected the modelled strategy to their own learning and intentions for future teaching. A total of 246 reflective learning journals were analysed qualitatively, using a constant comparison approach. The results indicate that preservice teachers recognised and reflected on modelling culturally responsive pedagogy. They highlighted several aspects of the culturally responsive activities, environment and teacher educator behaviours modelled for them. For some preservice teachers, this recognition stayed at the level of personal awareness of own learning on the course, but for others these revelations were springboards to start forming ideas about future teaching practice. Preservice teachers articulated their intentions about the kind of teachers they would like to become, their principles in teaching, as well as specific teaching/learning activities. We present how the modelling of culturally responsive pedagogy strategies allowed preservice teachers to self-reflect, critique and connect their own learning experiences to future practice. Therefore, modelling culturally responsive pedagogy is argued to be a fruitful strategy in teacher education.     

Preservice teachers respond to And Tango Makes Three: deconstructing disciplinary power and the heteronormative in teacher education

This study employs Foucualdian concepts to analyse macro and micro contexts of publicly spoken and silent discourses describing ‘homosexuality,’ ‘education’ and ‘teacher’ in order to identify teacher subject positions available to preservice teachers. The macro context is analysed by tracing heteronormative discourses found in newspaper stories involving teachers and public schools that address conflicting views of homosexuality. The macro context analysis indicates two binary teacher subject positions: martyred (unemployed) teacher/silent (employed) teacher and sophisticated teacher/unsophisticated teacher. The micro context analysis is of preservice teachers' responses to And Tango Makes Three, a picture book by Richardson and Parnell. This analysis demonstrates how preservice teachers take up and negotiate teacher subject positions found in the macro analysis. Combined, the analyses allow the researchers to consider how preservice teachers' performances of teacher subjectivity open up possibilities for re-imagining new teacher subject positions and what this might mean for the practice of teacher educators.     

Dialogue in the support of learning to teach: a case study of a mentor/mentee pair in a teacher education programme

In this paper, we examine the role of reflection in teacher preparation, specifically within a mentoring relationship between cooperating and preservice teacher. We report findings from a case analysis of this pair who engaged in problem-posing dialogue within pre- and post-conferences around practice over one year of their work together in an elementary-level classroom. The context is an innovative programme in which cooperating teachers pursue their Master’s degree while undergraduates (preservice teachers) complete their elementary education degrees. Our analysis of talk about teaching during six coaching cycles as well as supporting documents illustrates how Jane’s mentoring supported reflective practices and disrupted a notion of a field experience as simply a place to ‘practice’ pedagogical knowledge with corrective feedback. Additionally, we explore the tensions in this approach to mentoring. This case study has implications for teacher educators who seek to bolster teacher preparation through the support of mentoring relationships.     

Exploring the theory-practice gap in initial teacher education: moving beyond questions of relevance to issues of power and authority

The ‘theory-practice divide’ in teacher education can be viewed not simply as an acceptance of a body of knowledge but instead an acceptance of the teacher educator’s authority to determine what is relevant educational theory. This research aimed to explore student teachers’ views of ‘educational theory’ and how it was discursively positioned relative to their practice in an attempt to examine whether their acceptance or rejection of it was also related to accepting the authority of the teacher educator. Using one-to-one interviews with 23 student teachers and employing a discourse analysis, four categories of students emerged. The paper describes these four categories and discusses the implications of these findings for initial teacher education and our understanding of the ‘theory-practice’ gap.     

Classroom-based assessment: Changing knowledge and practice through preservice teacher education

In this paper, the author investigates how the working assessment theories and practices of preservice teachers change in the enactment of those theories and practices in a mentored learning environment. Following 38 secondary English teacher candidates across time, the author tracks preservice teacher growth in knowledge about classroom-based assessment and assessment-driven planning. Teacher candidates reported they were strongly influenced by professional dialogue about planning and assessment in both campus classes and mentored field experiences. Although most teacher candidates grew to accept alternative assessments as valuable evidence sources indicating student learning, they recorded concerns that fell into five overlapping categories: designing goals; rubrics, grading and fairness; grading and motivation; validity of assessments; and time required to plan this way.     

On transitional space,unresolved conflicts,and an uncertain teacher education

This research project began as an effort to redesign a learning theory course as transitional space and evolved into an analysis of how unresolved conflict from younger learning selves influence graduate preservice teachers’ acquisition of teacher identity. The study draws upon work by Elizabeth Ellsworth on transitional space and Deborah P. Britzman’s work that deconstructs teacher education development. The data for the study were collected throughout a three‐semester graduate teacher education program and include narrative and formal writing using theoretical discourses. Foucauldian concepts of discourse analysis were used to interpret the initial data set; discourse analysis maps were then employed to further develop data interpretation. Two case study illustrations of preservice teachers resulted from this work. These illustrations demonstrate how transitional space is troubled space and the unevenness of teacher development. The study raises the question, ‘What will teacher education do with uncertainty?’     

Supporting collaborative reflection in teacher education: a case study

The aim of this paper is to understand how certain educational supports promote preservice teachers’ learning to reflect in collaborative settings. To address this issue, we present a case study on collaborative reflection among 14 preservice teachers and one teacher educator over the course of five weekly consecutive sessions. The results suggest that collaborative reflection can be supported by organizing the process according to a twofold dynamic: from analysis to synthesis, and from open facilitation to directive facilitation. Six different types of assistance related to this dynamic, and provided by the teacher educator, are identified and qualitatively described: framing, oppositional voice, counterpoising alternatives, asking for the dilemma, problematizing, and modelling.     

Authentically assessing graduate teaching: outside and beyond neo-liberal constructs

In this paper, we challenge the current focus on ‘best practice’, graduate teacher tests, and student test scores as the panacea for ensuring teaching quality and argue for ways of thinking about evidence of quality beginning teaching outside and beyond the current neoliberal accountability discourses circulating in Australia and other countries. We suggest that teacher educators need to reinsert themselves as key players in the debates around quality beginning teaching, rather than being viewed as a source of the problem. To enable teacher educators to assume accountability for quality beginning teachers, we propose the framework of a capstone teacher performance assessment—a structured portfolio called the Authentic Teacher Assessment (ATA)—and examine examples of these assessments through the lens of critical discourse analysis. As a measure of ‘readiness to teach’, the ATA is compared with supervising teachers’ assessments of preservice teachers. We argue that structured portfolios that include artefacts derived from preservice teachers’ practice in classrooms along with graduate teacher self assessments provide a stronger accountability measure of effective beginning teaching and demonstrably address the current anxiety regarding ‘evidence’. We suggest that such an approach should be reliable enough to be ‘read’ by external assessors (and moderated across other teacher education institutions). Rigorous research on a national basis is called for in order to develop and implement a structured portfolio as rich evidence of graduates’ quality and readiness to teach.     

(Re)thinking preservice teachers’ field experiences through a spatial lens

ABSTRACT

Space is not separable from the learning and teaching that take place in and through teacher education programs. In this paper, we attempt to illustrate how the use of a spatial lens in preservice teachers field placement can provide them with opportunities to raise questions and understand more about the relationships between self, the discursive construction of others, and taken-for-granted notions of learning and teaching. In helping preservice teachers’ critical reflections upon their spatial experience at their field sites, we specifically focus on “mapping” space as our approach to developing a critical embodied pedagogy. In particular, we highlight one White female preservice teacher’s spatial experience in a homeless shelter. We discuss the implications of developing pedagogical tools from the spatial perspective for early childhood teacher education programs.     

Have conceptual reforms (and one anti‐reform) in preservice teacher education improved the education of multicultural,multilingual children and youth?

This article examines three conceptual reforms in US teacher education (competency‐based teacher education (CBTE), reflective teacher education (RTE) and constructivist teacher education (CTE)) for their effects on the education of multicultural, multilingual youth, as well as considering alternative certification (AC), known here as an ‘anti‐reform’. The author suggests that although each reform made incremental improvements in the ways that preservice teachers are prepared to teach multilingual and multicultural learners, none significantly altered the education of under‐served children and youth. For instance, CTE points out the importance of prior knowledge, but fails in connecting its core concepts with culturally relevant instruction. CBTE, while also generally failing to alter teacher preparation for multicultural learners, did try to make explicit connections for preservice teachers. RTE made explicit the moral consequences of working in diverse communities but fell short when it altered the apprenticeship–mentor relationship. AC of teachers is presented as the work of neo‐liberals whose largely successful efforts to deregulate teacher preparation offer both an improvement and retrenchment for urban children and youth. Finally, the article links the field’s focus on the preparation of teachers for diverse students and the moral dimension of teacher education, concluding that such a connection may be the only way to maintain the professional school preparation of teachers.     

Creating and facilitating a teacher education curriculum using preservice teachers’ autobiographical stories

Preservice teachers’ autobiographical stories can serve as a personal, powerful, and poignant curriculum for teacher education. This research examines what and how preservice teachers learned through sharing their own and witnessing others’ autobiographical narratives in a literacy methods course. The teacher educator’s key role is examined in facilitating a public context of vulnerability in which preservice teachers shared painful stories revealing their sociocultural inequalities and personal struggles as literacy learners. Roles of the teacher educator are discussed in the transformation of autobiographies into deep understandings, universal connections and substantive strategies for preservice teachers to teach literacy effectively with diverse students.     

Teacher educators' professionalism in practice: Positioning theory and personal interpretative framework

This study connects to the international call for research on teacher educator professionalism. Combining positioning theory with the personal interpretative framework, we examined the relationship between teacher educators' positioning and their teacher education practices. The interpretative analysis of qualitative data from twelve experienced Flemish teacher educators revealed three teacher educator positionings: a teacher educator of ‘pedagogues’, a teacher educator of reflective teachers, and a teacher educator of subject teachers. Each positioning constitutes a coherent pattern of normative beliefs about good teaching and teacher education, the preferred relationships with student teachers, and valuable methods and strategies to enact these beliefs.     

What matters to supervisors and is this reflected in what they do? Analysing the work of university supervisors of the practicum

This study analyses the contemporary work and potential contribution of university supervisors supporting preservice teachers´ during their practicum experiences in initial English language teacher preparation. The study draws on a complex data derived from surveys, interviews, and observations of university supervisors working in a diverse array of English language teacher education programmes across Chile. A cultural historical activity theory perspective is employed to explore and analyse the motives, activities, and actions that underpinned the work of these supervisors. Findings suggest that supervisors have to respond to often contradictory demands and an overemphasis towards quality assurance actions that are potentially detrimental to preservice teachers´ development. The work of supervisors is analysed to understand how potentially to re-envision their role and functions, toward proposing how to productive expand supervisory practices as an integral part of teacher education.     

On not becoming ‘a mere empirical existence’: exploring ‘who’ and ‘what’ narratives in pre-service English teachers’ writing

Standards-based reforms of education favour narrow forms of teacher professional learning tied to generic standards and pre-determined, measurable outcomes. In high-stakes accountability-driven environments, in schools and initial teacher education programs, educators are rarely encouraged to inquire into their work and professional identities through narrative writing. This article describes and analyses an assessment task in a pre-service teacher education course wherein students explore dialogic forms of critical autobiographical writing as part of an ongoing process of examining and clarifying their views and values about English teaching. Drawing on Cavarero, we argue that the writing these preservice teachers do provides a space for them to negotiate ‘what’ and ‘who’ narratives as they journey to become English teachers. Their writing productively grapples with generic ‘what’ stories such as what standards documents attempt to tell about English teaching, and the ‘unrepeatable uniqueness’ of ‘who’ stories developed out of their individual cultural, educational and linguistic difference.     

“But I Don't Want to Tell Them the Answer”: Preservice Teachers' (mis)understandings about literacy instruction

The purpose of this study was to notice and name the beliefs 33 preservice teachers had about literacy teaching/learning. The beliefs were noted by using evidence from their ‘language-in-use’ during supported, literacy planning sessions with a teacher educator. Critical discourse analysis revealed that the preservice teachers believed (1) assessment is instruction, (2) literacy teaching/learning is inauthentic, and (3) children are not intellectually motivated. The findings are discussed through the lenses of figured worlds and the apprenticeship of observation. Implications for teacher educators are offered.