Capturing Preservice Teachers' Professional Development Through Multiple Lenses in a Community-Based Summer Literacy Camp

• In Event: Community-Based Collaborations to Diverse Field Experiences

Abstract

This inquiry applied an innovative sociocultural framework to examine transformations in preservice teachers’ professional development as they worked with children from diverse backgrounds in a summer literacy camp. The camp incorporated a community of practice model in which teams of master’s and doctoral students mentored small groups of preservice teachers. The study examined preservice teachers’ learning following Rogoff’s (1995, 1997) notions of the personal, interpersonal, and community planes of analysis. The research also employed a postmodernist crystallization imagery to capture multiple perspectives on the preservice teachers’ growth. The study assigns importance to the contextual dimensions in which learning takes place and emphasizes that learning is nourished by interactions with others.

Authors

• Janet C. Richards, University of South Florida

• Susan V. Bennett, University of South Florida - St. Petersburg