Practicing Disciplinary Literacy Instruction: Teacher Educator Pedagogy in Secondary English Language Arts Teacher Preparation

• In Event: 68.060 - Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: 68.060-16 - Enacting Literacy: Fostering Disciplinary Instructional Practices and Equity-Centered Dispositions in Preservice Teachers

Abstract

1. Rationale/Objectives
Disciplinary literacy scholars argue that teacher preparation should promote text-based instruction reflecting authentic disciplinary inquiry (e.g., Moje, 2008; 2015) and scholars of teacher education argue that learning to teach should centrally engage the practice of teaching (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). Bringing these scholarly communities into conversation, the study discussed in this proposal investigates how practice orientations in teacher education influence novice teachers' attempts at disciplinary literacy instruction.

2. Theoretical Perspectives
Disciplinary literacy theory points to the importance of supporting students’ engagement with texts so that they may come to learn the shared literacy practices used by participants of disciplinary communities (Lee & Spratley, 2010; Moje, 2007; 2015). Practice-based perspectives on professional learning point to the importance of engaging novice teachers with representations, decompositions, and approximations of teaching (Grossman et al., 2009). To date, practice-based teacher education efforts have not directly focused on developing novices’ abilities to support students’ disciplinary literacy learning with texts, although the shared sociocultural foundations of the two lines of scholarship suggest that such an effort would be promising. We posit that a practice-based approach to teacher education might support novices as they learn to make flexible judgments about how best to support students’ reasoning with literary texts in discussion in ways that reflect the social and cultural literacy practices that are shared within disciplinary communities.

3. Data/Methods
We investigated the following research questions within the context of a 6-week alternative preparation program that was redesigned in partnership with a team of teacher educators from a large research university to advance disciplinary literacy teaching through pedagogies of investigation and enactment:

• To what extent and in what ways did the teacher educator prepare novice teachers to (1) facilitate text-based discussions and (2) support students in learning to use shared literacy practices of literature?
• To what extent and in what ways did novice teachers support students in (1) having text-based discussions and (2) learning to use shared literacy practices of literature?
• How, if at all, did the teacher educator’s instruction influence novice teachers’ classroom instruction as it related to (1) text-based discussion and (2) students learning to use shared literacy practices of literature?

We conducted video analyses of teacher education coursework and video-analyses of novice teachers' subsequent classroom instruction in secondary English language arts. Our primary data are 24 videoed lessons that were taught by novices in weeks two and three of the program (classroom video) and 13 hours of video from the participants’ methods class, taught by Author A (teacher education video). All data were collected in June-July 2014.

4. Results
Analyses of ELA methods instruction and subsequent teacher candidate classroom teaching revealed that teacher candidates were significantly more likely to enact those elements of disciplinary literacy instruction for which they had experienced representations, decompositions, and approximations during their methods coursework. The study has implications for designing pedagogical approaches to preparing novice ELA teachers to enact disciplinary literacy instruction.

Authors

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Washington - Seattle

• Emily Rainey, University of Michigan