Professional Knowledge of Teacher Educators as Rooted in Historical Domains of the Practice

• In Event: Becoming a Teacher Educator: International Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives: Knowledge development in teacher education draws on multiple theoretical and practical domains, situated in dynamic contexts and processes (Grossman & McDonald, 2008). Situated in the context of teacher education in Israel, we discuss the knowledge that teacher educators-as-mentors draw on while mediating student teachers' learning. Based on recent study of mentoring student teachers in Arts Education (Author, 2011), we show how mentors' pedagogical content knowledge (Author, 2001,) is constituted through the intersections between their personal theories, pedagogical actions, and the historical developments of the domain. To this end, we examine how wider historical and political contexts of a particular practice, in our case mentoring activity in arts education, are represented in the language used to mediate professional knowledge.

Perspectives: We draw on two interrelated perspectives: Teacher education as a discursive practice which speaks to a socio-cultural approach to professional learning in activity (Author, 2010). A discursive perspective attends to the texts that are responded to in interactions (discourses), to the roles that are assumed and valued, and to the cultural and organizational codes and rituals of practice that are represented and appreciated in practice (Discourses). We also draw on dialogic theories of language (Bakhtin, 1981), that explore talk as carrying ideological meanings that are socially situated.

Method: Our theoretical positioning directs the integration of Social Activity Theory (SAT) which examines the mediating tools for a particular socio-cultural environment (Engeström, 1994) with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which examines connections between individuals' professional language and the social and historical contexts within which their practice operates (Gee, 1999).
The data included semi-structured interviews with five mentors from Arts education; ten non-participant observations of mentoring workshops and conversations; and stimulated recall interviews with each mentor.
The analytical framework was adjusted from the traditional stages of CDA and SAT. It entailed a holistic thematic analysis; identifying semiotic cues that connect between style, function and message of the sentence; singling out connections between and within Discourses; reviewing relevant literature on historical developments of the practice to explain connections between Discourses.

Conclusions and Significance: Our study illuminates on how particular dimensions of the discourse of mentors' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) grow out of the connections that they make between the Discourses of the profession and the Discourses of the discipline. This view extends traditional definitions of PCK as an independent 'entity' located only in the mind of the individual (Carlsen, 1999). As such, it challenges the ideological neutrality that is often associated with research on professional knowledge (Labaree, 1992).
Our findings suggest that mentors' PCK is entrenched in intricate connections between their views about the discipline and their reasoning about teaching subject matter. Their talk about teaching subject matter and the environments that they construct for student teacher learning grow out of the connections that they make between the Discourses of Teaching and the Arts. These are grounded in historical curricular developments of the domain. Such connections suggest examining PCK as a discursive construct, grounded in the social and historical conditions of the practice.

Authors

• Lily Orland-Barak, University of Haifa

• Ayelet Becher, University of Haifa