Learning to Teach English in Urban Settings

• In Event: Cultural-Historical Approaches to Teacher Education: Examining Collaboration, Expertise, and Mentoring in Teacher Learning

Abstract

This paper analyzes select findings from a year-long, multicase study of novice English teachers enrolled in two different pathways to teaching: an urban teacher residency, and a university-based teacher education program. Using cultural-historical activity theory, this paper explores the various ways that novice English teachers took up and appropriated the available tools of their teaching settings, and the ways in which these tools and artifacts—including mentor teachers’ conceptions of teaching English and the curricular tools available in the teaching setting—mediated novice teacher learning around teaching English in high-needs [i.e. underserved, under-resourced, highly bureaucratic, segregated, and disinvested] urban settings.

Theoretical framework
Cultural-historical activity theory provides many analytic affordances to this study in that it sees learning and development as inherently social processes; understands that learning is a function of participation in social practices within particular settings; and sees conflict, tension, and contradiction as the engines of learning. Within this framework, learning is understood as the appropriation of conceptual and practical tools. In this study of novice urban English teacher learning, this framework has proven extraordinarily useful in making sense of the ways in which the tools and artifacts available in each setting facilitate particular kinds of learning for participants.

Methods and data sources
The data sources used for analysis include in-depth interviews with nine novice English teachers (four from the university program and five from the urban teacher residency), their cooperating teachers, instructional coaches, supervisors, and English methods instructors. Data sources also include observations of novice teachers teaching, as well as analysis of program documents and relevant assignments.

Findings and Significance
My analysis focuses on how the different mediating tools and artifacts of participants’ settings—Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion, ACTs Springboard curriculum, and the mentor teacher’s conceptions of English and classroom management—worked to frame participants’ understandings of teaching English as a discipline.

For example, the urban teacher residents were expected to adhere to a particular set of “teacher moves” adapted from Lemov's Teach Like a Champion, a text that prescribes a narrow definition of what student learning “looks like” both affectively and academically. Additionally, the residents were expected to align their instruction with a narrow set of English College Readiness Standards, which were indexed to the ACT. Taken together, these curricular tools tended to mediate a more limited notion of what it meant to teach English in a high-needs urban school, namely that content was primarily a vehicle through which to teach skills.

These findings are significant given that many of the novice urban English teachers in the study came in with robust notions of educational equity; however, analysis shows that their interaction with the tools of their settings, including their mentor teachers’ conceptions of the role of skill acquisition in urban English classes, often resulted in pared down notions of what English, as a discipline, might look like in urban schools.

Author

• Lauren Gatti, University of Nebraska - Lincoln