Two Aspiring Teachers Construct and Reconstruct Arguments About Why Students Fail in School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Challenging Preservice Teachers’ Conceptions and Practices of Student Assessment and Evaluation

Abstract

Drawing on notions of “figured worlds” (Hollland, Lachicotte, Skinnner, & Cain, 1998) and life history methodology (Author, 2008a; 2008b), the author investigates what two aspiring teachers brought to an introductory education course concerning the intersecting dimensions of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and language background regarding school failure. Both young women, one who is White and from an upper middle class family in a rural Midwestern community and the other who is biracial and grew up in an urban family challenged by her low socioeconomic status and addiction experienced by family members, initially held similar deficit views on why students fail in school. The course supported their rethinking of who their students were and who they might become as teachers.

Author

• Mary Louise Gomez, University of Wisconsin - Madison