Discourse of Professional Pedagogical Vision in Preservice Teacher Education

• In Event: Researching Discourse and Social Practices in Science and Engineering Education

Abstract

In this poster, we attempt to reflexively explain our methodological decisions as we engaged in the analysis of teacher candidates’ (TCs) development of professional pedagogical vision around ambitious science teaching practices.

Theoretical Perspectives
Goodwin (1994), as a linguistic anthropologist, conceptualized professional vision in terms of the cultural production of disciplinary practices through discourse, broadly construed. Using his approach lead us to consider cultural dimensions of learning how to teach and relevance of discourse analysis for understanding professional pedagogical vision in teacher education. In this study, teacher learning is considered as a socio-cultural and situated activity in which TCs negotiate understandings and practices as they interact in discourse communities over time (Lave and Wegner, 1991; Vygotsky, 2012).

Modes of Inquiry
By looking at their discussions of teaching events and discourse of the analysis of videos of teaching, we attempted to understand how TCs develop professional pedagogical visions. The research design of this study is a qualitative case study informed by ethnographic methods. We examined a case of professional pedagogical visions of science TCs who were enrolled in the second science teaching methods course in a teacher education program. The context of this study included secondary science teaching methods course and secondary education clinical application of instruction course, a seminar course the TCs are concurrently enrolled in in a large mid-Atlantic university’s teacher education program as well as the four secondary schools in two districts, where the TCs were in their field placements. The participants include six TCs (four female and two male) and their instructor. We used ethnographic methods and relied on multiple data sources including ethnographic field notes (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) and participant observation (Spradley, 1980) of the course, video recordings of the course, and collected documents and the artifacts from the assignments and the course materials. We took an overall grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2007) to analyze the data in this study starting with open coding, grouping the codes, and creating the coding categories. Our initial codes are originated from the discourse practices of ambitious science teaching practice, and from the core constructs of the professional vision framework. Codes did emerge during the analysis, but we drew from both sociocultural theory and linguistic anthropology to frame key constructs in the study. While grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2007) was used as an overall frame, interactional discourse analysis was used to determine the meaning-making and negotiation of professional pedagogical vision from the social interactions and as evidenced in the classroom discourse in the open coding process of grounded theory. We used video analysis and created event maps to understand the data at the macro level, and did discourse analysis for the transcribed events for the micro level analysis of the data.

Significance
We will explain the details of our analysis as well as the methodological challenges and decisions we made in the full paper. Our research provides contribution for investigating complex contexts where scholars attempt to understand inter-contextual and multilayered cultural construction through discourse.

Authors

• Arzu Tanis Ozcelik, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University

• Scott McDonald, The Pennsylvania State University