Developing Action-Oriented Knowledge Among Preservice Teachers

• In Event: “Knowing It All”: Conceptualizing the Curriculum for the Preparation and Practice of Elementary Teachers

Abstract

The data of this paper are 40 web-based inquiry portfolios completed by master’s students in an elementary preservice program whose mission is teacher education for urban schools. The curriculum of the program is built around inquiry. Students begin in the summer by conducting an ethnographic study of the community in which they will be teaching. They continue into the fall semester with a case study of an individual child, analysis of lessons that they conduct in each of the curricular areas—math, science, social studies, and reading with adaptations for children with special needs and speakers of English as a second language. They move into the spring developing and teaching a curriculum unit that draws in each of the major curricular areas. Throughout, they are pursuing a question of their choosing that guides the development of their inquiry portfolio wherein they draw on their experiences in the program—their summer, fall, and spring courses, studies, and field work, their fulltime student teaching in the Spring, readings, conference activities—to describe their personal journey into teaching and provide evidence of their own professional development and understanding of the complex surround that is education in urban schools serving children of poverty.
Using a grounded theory analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1990), we examine the preservice students’ descriptions of and reflections around practice as indicators of their growing action-oriented knowledge (AOK) (Urzúa & Vásquez, 2008), i.e., the representation and formulation of practice into concepts, pedagogical techniques, and strategies that arise among practitioners in problem-solving and decision-making situations. Specifically, we have examined the portfolios to determine which elements of the teacher education program—activities, readings, specific teaching strategies, program structures—figure in preservice students’ descriptions of their practice. The information derived from this first year of portfolio study has already helped program faculty to identify a common text—Bransford, Brown, & Cocking (1999)—that will be a referent across the program, to identify and support the use of several high-leverage pedagogies (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Grossman et al, 2009) that are appropriate in high needs settings, and to determine ways in which to better support preservice students’ growth of action-oriented knowledge.

Authors

• Frances O. Rust, University of Pennsylvania

• NancyLee Rodenberg Bergey, University of Pennsylvania