The Benefits of Including Preservice Teachers in Collaborative Curriculum Innovation Built Around Community Funds of Knowledge and Aspiration

• In Event: Researching Power-Marginalized Young People’s Aspirations and Strategies Toward Social-Educational Futures in Difficult Times

Abstract

Objectives
The ARC2 project’s pursuit of curriculum that capacitates aspirations requires school-university partnerships; and in one of the schools, pre-service teachers are included in this collaboration. The objective of this paper is to analyze implications for student- teachers’ learning when they are included in a school site-based program for partnership curriculum innovation. The paper addresses the questions: How are student-teachers able to contribute to developing inquiry-based community study with year 9 humanities classes? How does focus working with students on inquiry into community funds of knowledge contribute to student-teachers’ understandings of curriculum and students’ aspirations?

Theoretical perspectives
The paper brings together critical scholarship of curriculum—particularly approaches to place-based pedagogy (Gruenewald 2003), Funds of Knowledge (Gonzales et al 2005), and students as researchers (Steinberg & Kincheloe 1998)—with scholarship of teacher education, particularly about preparing student-teachers to teach power-marginalized students. A key issue noted in meta-analyses of teacher education (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner 2005; Nuttall et al 2006) is that student-teachers rarely have opportunity to be involved in socially just curriculum innovations, relegating them to immersion in practices that reproduce inequality across generations.

Methods and data sources
The paper consists in a purposeful case study, analyzing the data of:
- fieldnotes from school meetings among teachers, student-teachers, and university lecturers as they plan and reflect upon development of an inquiry unit for year 9 students;
- Individual and group interviews with student-teachers, analyzing classroom and excursion materials and student work;
- audiotaped group reflection on students as researchers; the curricular value of community funds of knowledge; and resourcing students’ hopes for personal and community futures.

Student-teachers and university lecturers will analyze the data, contributing reflections to the school’s year 9 teaching team. This in turn will provide feedback to the university teacher education program, considering implications for university courses and partnership work with schools.

Results
Data gathering will be completed by September 2013. Early findings suggest that engaging with a community-oriented approach to curriculum development significantly widens student-teachers’ senses of the roles of teachers. Student-teachers realize the value of curriculum negotiation with students for building deep knowledge about students’ life-worlds and aspirations, in planning educational activities such as a city camp excursion and student research investigations of local community issues. Building dialogue with students about potential futures for the school’s diversifying communities, and about students’ senses of place in local social spaces, awakens student-teachers’ appreciations of their own, as well as students’, agency to contribute to curriculum and to community life.

Significance
Including student-teachers in curriculum-innovation partnership with a school teaching team and university lecturers expands opportunities to induct student-teachers into pedagogies that further social-justice values. It widens student-teacher’s understandings of how students’ aspirations are deeply grounded in family and community resources. This awareness translates into curriculum development that empowers both young people and teachers. The process also furthers professional development for in-service teachers and academics about constraints and opportunities for curriculum innovation in contexts of institutional schooling, and how to work with and around constraints.

Authors

• Peter Burridge, Victoria University

• Marie T. Brennan, Victoria University, Melbourne

• Julie Arnold, Victoria University