Potential Affordances Blogging Has on Developing Teacher Preparation: An International Experience Comes to Life

• In Event: How Teacher Preparation Is Being Transformed by Digital Technologies at an Urban Comprehensive College

Abstract

Objectives
As each new generation of future teachers enter into the profession, they enroll in teacher preparation programs with more awareness of technology and more unique experiences with it than their predecessors (Funkhouser & Mouza, 2012). This study sought to explore this awareness and experience as they relate to blogs, an online journaling record (Williams & Jacobs, 2004). This study investigated the use of blogs by pre-service teachers as they travelled to Zambia and Chile as part of an international professional development school (PDS) experience. This presentation shares insight gained from exploring the ways blogs contributed to the pedagogical development of future classroom teachers.

Conceptual Framework
Narrative analysis was used to examine the pre-service teachers’ blogs and interpretation of their mediated actions during their experience (Reismann, 1993) in Zambia and Chile. This qualitative analysis technique helped to uncover the prominent features of narratives (Polanyi, 1989) and how pre-service teachers chose to represent their teaching and learning actions (Wertsch, 2000). It was from these narratives that students chose their memories of their days in the classroom and arranged those memories in a temporal sequence implying both causality and significance to who they are as developing pre-service teachers (Carter, 1993).

Methods
This qualitative study focused on the narratives that were blogged by pre-service teachers during travels to foreign countries. The following questions were explored: 1) What are the narratives pre-service teachers choose to write about in their blogs?; 2) Why did pre-service teachers select particular critical episodes about which to blog?; and 3) How can blogging inform the pedagogical development of pre-service teachers who experience international travels as part of their teacher preparation?

Data Source
Three students (1 undergraduate and 2 graduate) travelled to Zambia and two undergraduate students visited Chile to examine teaching and learning in other educational contexts. These pre-service teachers were encouraged to document their experiences by writing blogs. Blogs were collected during a six-week period that pre-dated the travel and continued beyond returning to the United States. Individual interviews and focus groups were also conducted.

Results
Analysis of data revealed that pre-service teachers blogged about their personal experiences adjusting to the travelling or the non-schooling experiences. When the blogs were about the schooling experiences, the focus was on the struggles the classroom teachers faced, the conditions in which students learned, or the techniques of teaching. It was rare that participants articulated a reflection of their own instructional practices or considered how the experiences could improve what they did in classrooms. The participants shared during interviews that the experiences were extremely valuable and contributed the development of their professional identities as classroom teachers in the United States.

Scholarly Significance
When educators use blogs in an educational setting, they enable their students to tell stories that help shape pre-service teachers professional identities. This study will contribute to scholarship that examines the productivity of blogs as part of teacher preparation and the developing pedagogical practices that are part of their experience.

Author

• Sherri Weber, SUNY Buffalo State