Mapping the Discourses of Practice

• In Event: Understanding and Supporting Teaching Practice: Multiple Perspectives

Abstract

The work reported in this paper is drawn from the NSF-sponsored Beyond Bridging project at The University of Arizona, a design project attempting to increase the probability of low incident science and mathematics teaching practices among beginning elementary school teachers, especially those who serve low-income, culturally and linguistically diverse, elementary students. The design is grounded in a third-space
framework (Moje, Collazo, Carrillo, & Marx, 2001) in which university teacher educators, school-based mentor teachers, and preservice teachers work closely and extensively together in the clinical phase of teacher preparation. Our premise was that in
traditional clinical teacher education the discourses (i.e., sense making frameworks) of university-based methods instruction are unraveled by the discourses students encounter in elementary school classrooms resulting in the generally low frequency of ambitious instruction among novice teachers. We are thus attempting to bring these discourses together in a co-educational space.
This analysis focused on the character of the discourses the participants brought to the coeducational space. Data for the analysis were derived from a series of co-educational sessions in the field-based math methods course in which university instructors, mentor teachers, and preservice teacher participated jointly in the analysis of the mathematical structures of several addition and subtraction word problems and in the interpretation of interviews by the preservice teachers of elementary students’ mathematical understandings. The data consisted of video and or audio records of large and small group discussions and observers’ field notes.
The analysis suggested that the discourses across these teacher education communities were often divergent. The university instructors, for example, sought to focus on the varieties of mathematical structures and representational formats that could be utilized in promoting pupils understanding of addition and subtraction. Mentor teachers, in contrast, tended to see the potential for creating pupil confusion in some problem structures and offered ways to overcome this confusion. Preservice teachers echoed this concern for anticipating and avoiding pupil confusion. It was clear that these separate interpretative frames had differential consequences for lesson design by the different participants.
The patterns were interpreted in terms of their ecological origins, i.e., the extent to which a discourse reflects the situated experiences of a particular community (Doyle, 2011). Classroom teachers faced with designing and sustaining events in complex settings are, for example, reasonably concerned about students who cannot participate because they are confused. Similarly, preservice teachers often dread confusing students, perhaps
because of their own struggles with confusion as students and because pupil confusion is seen as a sign of a failed lesson. Practice (i.e., the experience of enacting teaching), in
other words, gives rise to understandings (discourses) about how situations work and these understandings are, in turn, used to make sense of subsequent plans and experiences.
This work has important implications for understanding the sense making processes that underlie pedagogies of enactment (Grossman et al., 2009). Such an understanding would seem to be essential in designing pedagogies of enactment and taking into account the sense making resources that participants in teacher education bring to the process.

Authors

• Walter Doyle, The University of Arizona

• Kristin L. Gunckel, The University of Arizona

• Marcy B. Wood, The University of Arizona

• Erin Turner, The University of Arizona