Distributed Scaffolding in a Service-Learning in Literacy Education Class

• In Event: 75.019 - Scaffolding Students' Learning in Formal and Informal Contexts

Abstract

This poster presentation assumes that the “instructional scaffolding” metaphor may be reconceived as distributed scaffolding when multiple means of influence are provided in a service-learning setting. In the service-learning course described here, the professor’s role is largely as designer of activity settings for preservice teacher candidates, through which the students construct their own conceptions of teaching culturally diverse populations. The course involves a set of interrelated settings: a tutoring experience at the city’s alternative high school; the reading of books from a menu of texts that cover a range of diversity topics; the discussion of these books in book club meetings independent of the professor’s direct influence; and the whole-class discussion of these texts, led by each student book club.

The intersection of teacher candidates’ prior beliefs, their tutoring and mentoring experiences at the alternative school, their engagement with books from the book club menu, and their discussions and class presentations often produce a perplexing dissonance. This dissonance, indeed, is among the course design’s goals, serving to trouble the teacher candidates’ vision of themselves as English teachers, lecturing on Milton and Faulkner to rapt student audiences. The professor’s role in the course primarily comes through the design of the class and supervision of the discussions and tutoring. In other words, the course serves as a scaffold for student learning through the provision of activities through which teacher candidates take their own direction.

The teacher candidates’ support for understanding the education of diverse populations thus comes from a variety of sources:
• The foundation of their prior experiences in school and in society, which are subject to critique;
• The experiences available in the alternative school, which might include the school’s computer-driven curriculum, alternative school students with whom they develop relationships, and the school’s teachers and administrators with whom they coordinate their tutoring;
• The individual reading they do based on selections from the course book club menu;
• The book club discussions, which are a function of the particular group membership in relation to the reading;
• The whole-class discussions led by the book club groups, which provide exposure to a broad range of texts, authors, and perspectives and opportunities to engage with them.

In contrast with conventional notions of instructional scaffolding in which one teacher guides learners toward a particular sort of knowledge, the service-learning course is designed to provide this distributed scaffolding. The purpose is not to impose the professor’s ideological orthodoxy on the students to make them culturally sensitive, a goal that has little chance of succeeding in our Southern university and its generally conservative student population. Rather, the goal is to place the students in a series of related settings in which they read and discuss challenges of educating diverse populations while also establishing a relationship with a small set of students from backgrounds that are not conducive to high rates of affiliation with school, and thus evaluating the scholarly ideas in light of the reality of their tutoring experiences.

Authors

• Peter Smagorinsky, University of Georgia

• Lindy L. Johnson, The College of William and Mary