Beyond Pinterest: Teacher Candidates' Consideration of the Role of Classroom Literacy Environments

• In Event: 32.044 - Preservice Teachers' Visual and Literate Understandings of Classroom Environments

Abstract

In this presentation we describe a reflective digital story project and discuss how analyzing these projects created by our teacher candidates (TCs) made visible their evolving beliefs as they envisioned their future classrooms. The tensions present in the TCs’ stories allowed us, as researchers and teacher educators, to see the tensions in our own teaching. This encouraged us to modify our methods courses to support TCs’ negotiation of their professional identity. In this presentation we focus one key finding from our study - the TCs’ focus on the physical layout of their future classrooms - and discuss the changes that have taken place in our own teaching practices to provide our TCs with more intentional class engagements around literacy environments.

Authors

• Jackie Sydnor, Ball State Unviersity

• Tammi R. Davis, Missouri State University

• Sharon Daley, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Linda Coggin, King University