Prospective Teachers as Cultural Mediators: Negotiating Experiences and Hurdles

• In Event: Roundtable Session 25
  In Roundtable Session: Contexts in Teaching

Abstract

This study investigated prospective teachers’ developmental growth of their knowledge of cultural mediation from four interrelated contexts, science methods course, early field experiences, late field experiences and student teaching, that collectively contributed to their vocational socialization into science teaching. The longitudinal qualitative study explored the recurring understandings and hurdles prospective teachers’ constructed and encountered within these four contexts and how these understandings and hurdles contributed to their knowledge growth as cultural mediators. Using the constructs of commonplaces and cultural mediation as guiding frameworks, enabled the author to interpret prospective teachers’ educational experience as consisting of: a cultural mediator (the science teacher), instructing elementary science (the subject matter) to students (the learners) in four contexts (the milieu).

Authors

• Patricia L. Bullock, Kennesaw State University

• Karthigeyan Subramaniam, University of North Texas

• Incho Lee, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire

• Lisa Cabulong Buenaventura, University of Massachusetts - Boston