Teacher Education as Community-Based Inquiry

• In Event: Immigrant Families and Literacies: Collaborative Research and Advocacy in a Diverse Faith Community

Abstract

1. Objectives:
This poster explores how taking a collaborative and reciprocal approach to teacher education shifted the expectations and experiences of a school-based learning component in a graduate-level literacy assessment course. By partnering with an ESOL teacher (Mrs. Cruz) and her students and cultivating an inquiry-stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009), we developed practices that positioned the English Language Learning children and their families as knowledge producers and the university students as co-inquirers. We look at how these course experiences shifted the literacy teacher preparation students’ impressions of both English Language Learners and the role and challenges of utilizing literacy assessments in their own future practice.

2. Theoretical framework:
Our research took a resource-orientation to literacy assessments (Authors, 2015) as situated within community based teacher education (Zeichner, 2015). Too often the high-stakes assessment paradigm reinscribes a deficit model that does not value the cultural and linguistic knowledge of historically minoritized populations (Gutiérrez & Oreallana, 2006; Willis, 2008). This research draws on frameworks that recognize the ways the identities and experiences of immigrant communities constitute an “epistemic privilege” (Moya, 2002) for meaning-making, especially with regards to issues of power.

3. Methods/Data sources:
This poster highlights a semester-long partnership between the university literacy and assessment course and English language learners and families. Data sources included field notes from all course sessions; written artifacts from both the graduate and ESOL students; correspondence with the ESOL teacher; class artifacts; and individual interviews. We analyzed the data using grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2014) and constant comparative analysis (Kolb, 2012) in order to uncover themes that cut across the various data sources and multiple communities of practice.

4. Findings:
Cultivating a reciprocal partnership with the ESOL classroom and a resource-orientation toward the students and families, which situated literacy assessments within the larger ecology of children’s lives, helped shift teachers education practices. One of the main findings was a widening appreciation for all stakeholders’ capacity to be producers and disseminators of knowledge. University students began to take the teacher’s and ESOL students’ expertise and experience into account in their assessment and instruction, while also seeing themselves as active participants in developing knowledge of practice with the children. In addition, this approach allowed the class as a whole to delve into moments of tension, particularly around the complicated issues regarding standardized testing and student-centered approaches to assessment. Rather than dismissing these issues as merely irreconcilable, the class collaborative inquired into the complexities and the ways that they might productively engage these tensions in their own practice as literacy educators.

5. Significance:
This poster offers insights into new and more equitable ways to design school-based learning as part of teacher education (Zeichner, 2010). Rather than framing these experiences as a site to put pre-structured ‘best practices’ into place, we instead demonstrate the potential for developing new perspectives on practice and community-collaboration that emphasis both the importance of the local community and the rich knowledge and experiences of diverse student populations.

Authors

• Katharine Emily Bartow Jacobs, University of Pittsburgh

• Lan Ngo, University of Pennsylvania