Crafting Curriculum in Preservice Teacher Education: An Examination of Action Research Curriculum for Understanding the Needs of English Language Learners

• In Event: Preparing Social Justice Teachers: Rethinking Action Research Curriculum for Transformation

Abstract

As the number of English Language Learners continues to rise in U.S. schools, so does the need for Pre-K-12 teachers to be trained to effectively work with them. (Suarez-Orozco, Suarez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008). This presentation reports on a qualitative self-study of a pre-service teacher, Master’s degree seminar in which students prepared their action research projects focusing specifically on working with ELLs. The study explored the impact of the action research seminar curriculum on preservice teachers’ transformative understanding of their work with ELL students as a form of social justice. The main research questions were:
➢ How does the action research curriculum fulfill (or not) the goals of becoming culturally responsive teachers for ELL students?
➢ What experiences, assignments, and/or situations, allow preservice teachers to explore the complex issues facing ELL students in schools?
This study was grounded in the work of Villegas and Lucas (2003) using their six-part framework of preparing culturally responsive teachers. In their framework, they propose that in order for teachers to become culturally responsive, they must possess six “salient characteristics” including: being socioculturally conscious; having affirming views of students from diverse backgrounds; seeing himself or herself as both responsible for and capable of bringing about educational change that will make schools more responsive to all students; understanding how learners construct knowledge and being capable of promoting learner’s knowledge construction; knowing about the lives of his or her students; and using his or her knowledge about students’ lives to design instruction that builds on what they already know while stretching them beyond the familiar. (pp. 20-21).
The study was also grounded in the notion that in order to become culturally responsive teachers, the curriculum of preservice teachers’ coursework needs to be recognized as both political (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Pinar, et. al. 2002) and transformative (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985; Price, 2001). As Cochran-Smith (2004) explains: “schools [and how “knowledge”, “curriculum”, “assessment” and “access” are constructed and understood in schools] are not neutral grounds but contested sites where power struggles are played out” (p. 18).

Participants included four preservice teachers: three female and one male. Each student in the course was used as a case. Data collected included interviews, observations, tape recordings, reflective journaling, reading-field briefs and school ethos projects (Samaras, 2002), film reflections, questionnaires, and the students’ final action research projects. Data were analyzed systematically based upon Price’s (2001) three-part analysis of change: personal change; change in what they knew and were able to do, with an emphasis on instructing ELLs; and the kinds of agents of change they were becoming, thought they were becoming and/or hoped to be.

Results indicated three salient themes: students’ feeling more confident in working effectively with ELLs; students’ understanding that teaching is political; and that they had become more socioculturally conscious as a result of particular types of coursework. One major implication is the need to scaffold attention to English Language Learners in the Action Research curriculum in order to usher preservice teachers into productive areas of inquiry for social change.

Author

• Courtney M. Clayton, University of Mary Washington