A multi-year study of pre-service teachers’ literacy practices in the content areas: time epistemologies and indicators of stasis and growth

This three-year study focuses on 42 pre-service teachers’ perspectives on integrating literacy into their content area teaching. Pre-service teachers described time as an influential factor shaping their teaching practices, and, we found, that perceptions of time influenced pre-service teachers’ reported ability and willingness to plan for and enact the implementation of literacy strategies as part of content area lessons. While we noted a number of factors related to time, we were particularly drawn to three time-related factors that signified for pre-service teacher participants’ active roles and agency in how they were enacted in the classroom. Identifying temporal concerns about curriculum, learner response to literacy practices, and use of classroom time to scaffold learning allowed us to specify aspects of participants’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) development as well as facets of limited PCK growth. Using time as a theoretical lens to view pre-service teachers’ accounts of literacy practices, we suggest, provides insights into their PCK, specifically indicators of stasis and growth, and understanding about pre-service teacher resistance or acceptance to the infusion of literacy into content area teaching.     

TOLERANCE AND MENTAL HEALTH

Beginning with a brief discussion of the different meanings and contexts of tolerance, certain paradoxes of tolerance in regard to mental health in a clinical setting, in a socio‐legal setting, and at policy level are presented. Other paradoxes in the domain of mental health treatment are evoked: finding a balance between patemalism and neglect and between oppression and protection, and above all, the economics of tolerance. The author suggests that to help move understandings of tolerance away from association with passivity and neglect, such understandings should be linked to change, needs, and passion.