The Civic Lessons and Immigrant Youth (CLAIY): Implications for Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we draw from the Civic Lessons and Immigrant Youth study to present key issues and implications related to teachers' work with immigrant youth. This synthesis draws on data and analyses from over six years of work examining the experiences, skills, and roles of teachers of immigrant youth as they navigated the complex terrain of teaching topics of citizenship in settings when not all youth had formal citizenship rights. Major themes include: the significance of building trusting relationships with immigrant students; the importance of approaches to teachers' knowledge building and legitimization of their immigrant students; and, finally, the prevalence of teachers' concern with the safety of their undocumented students. Subsequently, we pose questions for the field of teacher education in an era when immigration, education, and citizenship are intersecting in complex ways. Amid over-generalized conceptions of teaching for diversity, this article contributes to understanding how experienced teachers who supported immigrant rights practiced their craft, creating affirming environments in schools.     

Powerful students,powerful words: writing and learning in a poetry workshop

A poetry workshop can present opportunities to integrate students' knowledge and perspectives in classroom contexts, encouraging the use of language for expression, communication, learning and even empowerment. This paper describes how adolescent students respond to a poetry workshop in an English classroom centred on teaching writing that is based on their knowledge from their various life experiences and understanding of events beyond the classroom. Informed by New Literacy Studies and third space theories, ethnographic methods of participant observation were used to document an eighth‐grade urban public school classroom where a community member implemented a weekly programme using music lyrics and poetry for an entire school year. Findings illustrate how the poetry workshop encouraged students to contribute to the classroom learning context and engage critically with ideas that were relevant to their lives. Collaborating with a community member and tapping in to the powerful ways of using language to communicate led to important learning opportunities for students in this classroom. Poetic devices such as rhyme, rhythm, metaphor and wordplay enhanced and supported students' own language practices; students used these sophisticated writing strategies as they worked to convey their ideas, experiences and opinions.     

Science Students' Perceptions of Engaging Pedagogy

During their years of schooling, students develop perceptions about learning and teaching, including the ways in which teachers impact on their learning experiences. This paper presents student perceptions of teacher pedagogy as interpreted from a study focusing on students' experience of Year 7 science. A single science class of 11 to 12 year old students and their teacher were monitored for the whole school year, employing participant observation, and interviews with focus groups of students, their teacher and other key members of the school. Analysis focused on how students perceived the role of the teacher's pedagogy in constructing a learning environment that they considered conducive to engagement with science learning. Two areas of the teacher's pedagogy are explored from the student perspective of how these affect their learning: instructional pedagogy and relational pedagogy. Instructional pedagogy captures the way the instructional dialogue developed by the teacher drew the students into the learning process and enabled them to “understand” science. How the teacher developed a relationship with the students is captured as relational pedagogy, where students said that they learned better when teachers were passionate in their approach to teaching, provided a supportive learning environment and made them feel comfortable. The ways in which the findings support the direction for the middle years and science education are considered.     

Learning logs in introductory literature courses

This article explores the beneficial and sometimes unpredictable implications of a daily reflective writing exercise for introductory literature courses: the learning log. Pseudonymous samples of student writing, coupled with instructor commentary, gesture toward ways in which the learning log's continual implementation and modification foster a learning and teaching environment in which students and teachers can experience a greater degree of equality and engagement. The article draws upon in-class experiences, and student data collected between 2001 and 2006, in order to illustrate the learning log's potential to instill introductory literature courses with a sense of participatory innovation and creative democriticization.     

African-American women's decisions to become teachers: Sociocultural perspectives

In this study the authors describe sociocultural and school-related factors that influenced African-American women's perceptions of teaching and decisions to teach. Surveys were conducted of the participants' demographic and background characteristics, and life histories were developed that focused on early experiences with the family, in the community, and at school and how these experiences influenced their perceptions of teaching. These data revealed that the mother, women in the community, and female teachers were significant influences on the participants' decisions to teach. Moreover, their experiences and interpretations of these experiences have shaped their images of good teaching as shared, culturally responsive mothering. The participants' life histories further revealed that as their conceptions of good mothering and good teaching crystallized, their reasons for teaching transcended altruism and a love for children, resulting in perspectives on caring, and a sense of responsibility for the school success of all students. The authors suggest that improved understanding about African-American prospective teachers' lived experiences that give rise to their perceptions of and purposes for teaching hold implications for teacher education and African-American teacher recruitment and retention efforts.     

Sex and gender in transition in US schools: ways forward

Abstract

This paper examines the current state of law and policy in relation to US transgender youth and their lived experiences. We approach this from different disciplinary backgrounds, identities, and ways of writing terms related to gender identity. We begin with an examination of the current legal climate in the USA and explore how students have pushed back against gender and sexuality norms even in a restrictive climate. Some transformations are already happening in public schools and some backlash, too, is being felt. Laws and policies in some locations are encouraging students, teachers, school leaders and community members to collaborate in making schools more educationally concerned about trans student success and teaching the school community about gender diversity. In shifting among scales and experiences of youth thinking and working on gender, we aim to emphasise youth agency and outline young people’s frustrations at the obstacles related to trans, gender dissidence and sexuality. In conclusion, we point to changes that can be made in schools to help professionals understand how policy and curricular innovation can bolster the openings that trans, gender creative and gender non-binary youth are already creating, whether or not those opportunities are officially recognised.     

Viewing student behavior through the lenses of culture and globalization: two narratives from a US college writing class

Globalization is bringing about profound changes in the university writing class in Western English-speaking universities, notably due to the influx of international students. This article narrates the experiences of a US writing teacher working with Chinese international students. It presents two incidents in which misunderstandings occurred, one involving textual re-use and the other, writing tests. The narratives demonstrate that, in order to understand student behavior, it is important for teachers to understand both the global context within which international students operate and their cultures of learning. The argument rests on the premise that, through personal engagement with students, teachers can engage in transformative internationalization, a type of internationalization that involves synergistic changes in both teachers and students.     

Encouraging interaction and striving for reciprocity: The challenges of community-engaged projects in teacher education

Opportunities for experiential learning in teacher education are increasingly important as the demographics of teachers and students diverge. I draw on place-conscious pedagogies, funds of knowledge, and teacher development theories to inquire into pre-service teachers' developing conceptions of community as they engaged in a project meant to introduce them to the local communities. Findings suggest that PSTs’ experiences with communities growing up limit their understanding of reciprocity between communities and schools as teachers. The findings have implications for the ways that teacher educators incorporate experiential learning into their programs.     

Student teachers as creative writers: does an understanding of creative pedagogies matter?

Teaching creative writing in primary schools requires an understanding of creative pedagogies that value autonomy and for educators to draw on their own experiences of the creative writing process to support the development of their pupils. This article draws on evidence from 58 undergraduate primary student teachers to further understand how their appreciation of creative pedagogies, combined with their experiences of creative writing, impacts on their approach to the teaching of writing in primary schools. Evidence from questionnaires and interviews reveals that factors such as freedom, choice and focusing on the personal aspects of writing are valued but often because they make writing fun for children, rather than because they develop children's creative behaviours and creative writing. Student teachers' own personal experiences of these factors affect whether they are likely to integrate them into their future practice in school. It is argued that if students experience creative writing that is underpinned by a creative pedagogy within their initial teacher education, they will be better equipped to teach creative writing and prepare children for being writers.     

Comments from the Editors

Second‐career individuals are entering the teaching profession in greater numbers. These older, mature individuals bring diffent experiences to teaching than do younger, traditional preservice and beginning teachers. Lyle, a second‐career teacher, began his first year of teaching in a junior high school, a setting that did not allow him to teach in ways that he believed he should. This paper presents a record of Lyle's struggles as he negotiates the role of teaching and his relationships with students. The conclusions examine some factors that mitigated against Lyles’ smooth transition into the teaching profession and suggest that second‐career teachers such as Lyle may be disadvantaged by traditional teacher education programs, the pressures under which they accept teaching positions, and their sometimes distant perspective of teachers, teacher's work, and students.     

Elementary Teacher’s Conceptions of Inquiry Teaching: Messages for Teacher Development

This study explored practicing elementary school teacher’s conceptions of teaching in ways that foster inquiry-based learning in the science curriculum (inquiry teaching). The advocacy for inquiry-based learning in contemporary curricula assumes the principle that students learn in their own way by drawing on direct experience fostered by the teacher. That students should be able to discover answers themselves through active engagement with new experiences was central to the thinking of eminent educators such as Pestalozzi, Dewey and Montessori. However, even after many years of research and practice, inquiry learning as a referent for teaching still struggles to find expression in the average teachers’ pedagogy. This study drew on interview data from 20 elementary teachers. A phenomenographic analysis revealed three conceptions of teaching for inquiry learning in science in the elementary years of schooling: (a) The Experience-centered conception where teachers focused on providing interesting sensory experiences to students; (b) The Problem-centered conception where teachers focused on engaging students with challenging problems; and (c) The Question-centered conception where teachers focused on helping students to ask and answer their own questions. Understanding teachers’ conceptions has implications for both the enactment of inquiry teaching in the classroom as well as the uptake of new teaching behaviors during professional development, with enhanced outcomes for engaging students in Science.     

Challenging and Appropriating Discourses of Power: Listening to and Learning from Early Career Early Childhood Teachers of Color

ABSTRACT

The racial mismatch between teachers and students has become a salient issue in efforts to counter the historical failure of children of Color in American (pre)schools. To address this mismatch, scholars have argued for the critical need to recruit and retain teachers of Color. In this article, we propose that to successfully prepare teachers of Color so that they remain committed to the profession, we must learn from their experiences during their preservice preparation and their first years of teaching. Against the backdrop of normative institutional discourses shaping teachers and teaching, we sought to learn from the ways in which six early career early childhood teachers of Color reconciled their preservice teacher education experiences, identities, and beliefs about education with the construction of their identities as teachers. To do so, we asked: How do the discursive spaces of early childhood teaching and teacher education shape the practices, beliefs, and identities of early childhood teachers of Color during their teacher education programs and within their three first years of teaching? Through Critical Narrative Analysis of in-depth interviews, we sought to unveil the discourses that shape and are shaped by the experiences of early career early childhood teachers of Color. Findings indicate that instead of being colonized by institutional discourses and oppressed by others' perceptions, to remain in the profession, these early career early childhood teachers challenged and appropriated institutional discourses, reauthoring them agentively. Implications underscore the responsibility of teacher education programs in preparing teachers of Color to negotiate the ever-so-normative discursive space of early childhood teaching and teacher education, if they are to enter and remain in the profession.     

Emotionally and motivationally supportive classrooms: A state-trait analysis of lesson- and classroom-specific variation in teacher- and student-reported teacher enthusiasm and student engagement

Teacher enthusiasm and student engagement are often interrelated and have important implications for student learning and students' and teachers' well-being. However, results on the lesson-specific variation of teachers' and students' affective-motivational experiences and their interplay are scarce. This study investigated variation in teacher enthusiasm and student engagement, each rated by teachers (n = 70) and students (n = 1537), as indicators of a shared affective-motivational climate in ninth-grade math classrooms across five consecutive lessons. Multitrait-multistate analyses revealed substantial “trait-like” consistency in all four affective-motivational measures. However, there was also a substantial degree of “state-like” lesson-specific variance that was shared across the four measures. This indicates that teachers' and students’ affective-motivational experiences are shaped by situation-specific influences and person-by-context interactions, which are shared between teachers and students. Teacher gender, teaching experience, class-level achievement, and the availability of motivationally supportive instructional interventions failed to explain substantial variance in these associations.     

Within and beyond a grow-your-own-teacher program: Documenting the contextualized preparation and professional development experiences of critically conscious Latina teachers

ABSTRACT

This study provides an account of seven Latina teachers’ select educational, professional, and personal experiences over the past 10 years as they completed a grow-your-own-teacher program, became licensed teachers, and established themselves in Latinx minority–majority public schools within their rural, mid-western community. More specifically, as a Latina researcher and participant observer, I sought to better understand the culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) Latina teachers’ process-oriented engagement and conscientization over time. Far from being ‘ready-made’ conscientized teachers, in this work I discuss the ways CLD Latina teachers’ multiple and developing identities as bilingual learners, mothers, racialized minorities in schools, and educated professionals serve as both burdens and gifts in their engagement and processes of conscientization for teaching CLD students. Through the use of critical literatures, and life and professional story methodologies informed by Chicana feminist epistemologies, I sought to privilege Latina teachers’ narratives as well as uncover the mechanisms and experiences that proved most impactful for their development and sustainment within white normative educational spaces. Findings illustrate an emergence of racialized, identitarian resources among Latinas and implicate a nuanced, culturally contextualized, pedagogical approach to pre-/in-service CLD teacher professional development that engages participants in reflective storying, critical inquiry, and restorative community building.     

Educating for the “Real World”: The Hidden Curriculum of Community Service-Learning

This study draws on interviews with community supervisors partnered with high school students and presents their perspectives on service-learning and youth. The results show that there was a hidden curriculum being played out at community sites that was in part facilitated by community agency supervisors who actively engaged in mediating, mentoring, and structuring the service-learning experiences of students. Agency supervisors' decisions about the curricular experiences of students had a significant impact on the social justice aims and intentions of the projects designed by the teachers. Consequently, it is crucial for schools and teachers to take into consideration the community supervisors' perspectives and interpretations of social justice and invite them into a collaborative partnership throughout the process of structuring service-learning experiences.     

A study of participatory action research as professional development for educators in areas of educational disadvantage

The main aim of this article is to explore the ways in which teacher educators can improve levels of reflection in postgraduate student teachers. The author argues that postgraduate student teachers are able to reflect on their practice in schools, and that the insights gained are useful in clarifying their own beliefs about teaching and learning. The outcome of such reflection at an early stage of their career may have implications for their ability to engage with the development opportunities made available to them as they move through their teaching careers. Using a qualitative approach, data from the learning journals and reflective writing assignments of student teachers, and a focus group interview, are examined in order to evaluate students' ability to engage in reflective writing at various stages over a 1 year course. The support given to students over the course of the year is examined with a view to evaluating its impact on students' abilities to reflect on their practice and their own learning. A number of recommendations are made for possible improvements to supporting student teachers in this important area of work.     

Service learning using English language teaching in pre-service teacher education in Singapore

In line with the Ministry of Education's vision of the delivery of twenty-first century competencies amongst all students in Singapore, the National Institute of Education in Singapore employs service learning as a pedagogical tool to develop community outreach and engagement. This paper begins with a review of related literature on service learning as a means of enhancing the quality of pre-service teacher education programmes internationally. It then looks at how the teaching of the English language may be used as a principal means by which students can make an impact on a local community of their choice in the Singaporean context. It draws attention to the nexus of theory and practice via highlighting three service-learning projects where the vital relationship between the pedagogical methods area of study known as Curriculum Studies on English Language Teaching and the opportunity to practise English language teaching outside the traditional clinic field experience offered through practicum posting are presented. The paper concludes with the proposition that service learning promotes active citizenry and moral education of youth and allows student teachers an opportunity to build deep partnerships with the community even before they step into the teaching profession as full-fledged teachers.     

It's all about Baxter: task orientation in the effective teaching of writing

This New Zealand‐based study of the classroom practice of nine exemplary teachers of writing to upper primary‐age students explored the significance of task orientation as a component of effective teacher instruction and the instructional strategies or actions that effective teachers utilise to promote such. Effectiveness pertains to teachers being able to generate a positive impact on learners' engagement and academic outcomes. Particular attention was given to the content and organisation of the tasks and activities that teachers required of their students. Analysis of observed teacher practice in relation to learner gains showed actions associated with task orientation to be strongly associated with student progress in writing. Two indicators linked particularly with learner gains in writing. They relate to teachers being able to select and promote learning tasks that are purposeful and challenging for students and to students being involved in the selection or construction of learning tasks. There were relatively high levels of proficiency with regard to teachers being able to select and promote purposeful and challenging tasks but significant operational variability with regard to teachers involving their students in task selection or construction. Classroom illustrations are provided on how effective teachers promote learner involvement in task selection or construction.