Resident Teacher Interns and the Play-Procedure Continuum: Invisible Boundaries in the STEM Curriculum

• In Event: Negotiating the Boundaries of Student Teaching: A Reconsideration of Shared Clinical Practice

Abstract

Objectives
The manner in which student teachers learn academic content at the university level and how they practice that content is often contradictory. Education students are often introduced to progressive pedagogies (e.g., constructivism) but frequently refrain from applying them in the classroom. The objectives of this paper are to identify approaches used by student teachers (i.e., residents) in a full-year clinically-rich program, which includes a full-time resident faculty member’s (RF) on-site participation and where residents’ initial teaching approaches are considered with respect to a Play-Procedure continuum. Play, on one end of the continuum, occurs when the curriculum allows for students to engage in informal, everyday STEM experiences. Procedure, on the other end, occurs when conventionally systematic, formulaic methods are strictly followed as a means of involving students in learning. Boundaries and tensions develop as residents determine how to approach the STEM curriculum on the play-procedure continuum.

Theoretical Framework
This study draws on Foucault’s concept of boundary (1970). Foucault argues that the institutionalization of classification schemes results in the development of boundaries among different categories. In addition to physical boundaries, those that exist as symbolic representations and possess strong social significance have an important function when considering the interplay among constituents in the student-teacher, school-university context. Thus, the work of Star and her colleagues has been instrumental in this regard (Bowker & Starr, 1999; Star & Griesemer, 1989). They coin the term “boundary objects,” which refer to interfaces that serve as maintaining the status quo in social worlds.

Methods and Data Sources
Data collected were based on biweekly RF field notes and weekly resident critical self-reflections. Naturalistic observation was employed (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Data from field notes and observations as well as critical self-reflections were based on the field experiences of six full-year student teachers, one placed in an urban elementary school and the remaining residents in a suburban elementary school in a very large metropolitan area.

Discussion of Findings
Residents were conflicted about their roles as future teachers in how to approach STEM subjects in schools and what they learned in STEM methods classes. Also identified during the investigation was a powerful and invisible boundary: the school STEM curriculum. While overlap exists between school curriculum and methods curriculum, the former is institutionalized in such a way whereby an invisible boundary is formed in dyads—curriculum and teacher, curriculum and student, curriculum and school administrator, and even curriculum and university faculty member. Moreover, the development of boundaries in the university-school context is indicative of social norms—such as teacher reputation and school administrator requests—that influence the school-resident relationship.

Scholarly Significance
This research enables both researchers and practitioners in student-teaching settings to renegotiate both physical and invisible boundaries that may inhibit progress of student teachers and their students. In this regard, the play-procedure dichotomy has the potential to be mediated so that school children receive the best of both worlds as they engage in STEM subjects. Also, university programs and schools can learn reciprocally in order to ensure best practices.

Author

• Daniel Ness, St. John's University