[China] Practicum Partnerships in China: The Voice of Cooperating Teachers in a University-Government-School Initiative

• In Event: International Perspectives on Mentoring in Practicum Settings

Abstract

Objectives
Faced with urban schools that are reluctant to take student teachers because they "disturb their teaching order", Northeast Normal University (NENU) in Changchun, China, with the support of local governments developed a University-Government- School (UGS) initiative to strengthen partnerships in three Northeastern provinces. Given that this model is a top-down initiative, the purpose of this paper is to explore the initiative from the perspective of cooperating teachers. For example: To what extent are teachers willing to be engaged in the practicum in spite of already heavy workloads? And, what are the teachers' underlying commitments to working with student teachers?

Perspectives
In the UGS initiative, local government plays an important role in "commanding" the schools to embrace student teachers. However, we regard the cooperating teachers as central to the success of the initiative and not just as another "chesspiece on the board.” The danger of any top-down reform is the ‘lack of voice’ of those who are expected to enact the initiative (Cuban, 2011). Thus we were interested in the level of agency that cooperating teachers felt as this concept “opens up the opportunity for thinking quite differently about what we do, to develop a new set of practices that disrupt old authorities and certainties that rid us of stereotypical thinking, and opens up the possibility of creating something new” (Davies, 1994, p. 82).

Methods
This study drew upon the Mentoring Profile Inventory (MPI) to capture the teachers’ commitments across 14 dimensions that underpin their advisory practices (Clarke, Collins, Triggs, and Neilson, 2010). Focus group and individual semi-structured interviews provided further in-depth data.

Data sources
All 300 cooperating teachers used by NENU in the each of the three Northeastern provinces in 2010 were invited to complete the MPI. Approximately 200 teachers did so. From the respondent pool, three focus group interviews (one per district) and 30 individual interviews (10 per district) were conducted.

Results
The results were an individual profiling of teachers within and a comparative profiling across districts, both of which provided key insights to the initiative. This first attempt at profiling cooperating teachers in China provides important baseline data for ongoing partnerships efforts. For example, we found that motivators for taking a student teacher barely outweigh the associated challenges. Other trends to emerge include: teachers were motivated to work with a student teacher if they were able to take advantage of the opportunity to attend university classes (one of the UGS incentives); and teachers wanted the practicum to provide on-site opportunities for their own learning (this was relevant because a large number of teachers don't have a B.Ed.).

Significance
With hardly any research on cooperating teachers in China, this study provides one of the first attempts to analyze the work of those responsible for inducting new teachers to the profession. The resultant profiles provide a grassroots ‘point of view’ to better understand the ways in which Chinese teachers conceptualize practicum partnerships.

Authors

• Lijie Lu, Northeast Normal University

• Yunpeng Ma, Northeast Normal University

• Fang Wang, Northeast Normal University

• Bowei Zhang, Northeast Normal University