Beyond Schools: Critical Considerations of Community-Based Practicums

• In Event: 65.080 - Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: 65.080-9 - From Technical to Transformative: Teacher Identity Across Geographical and Theoretical Spaces

Abstract

In an effort to offer opportunities that broaden teacher candidates’ experiences, there has been a move to provide practicums that occur in community-based settings, such as museums rather than in schools. However, community-based practicums risk reaffirming notions that teaching is a technical endeavour rather than instilling practices of transformation or criticality. We will report on findings from a survey of community-based practicum courses illustrating their purposes and epistemological underpinnings; and then describe the experiences of students who participated in a pilot community-based practicum course. We conceptualize this research within the broader context of critical considerations of knowledge; understandings of teacher identity; and questions of what we mean by the project of education itself.

Authors

• Melanie D. Janzen, University of Manitoba

• Christie Sabrina Petersen, University of Manitoba