Institutional Dynamics Between University and School Informing Preservice Teacher Mentors' Use of Educational Theory

• In Event: 35.063 - Mentoring Practices: What Works, for Whom, and Where

Abstract

Based on a larger study on professional education (Becher, 2018), this paper examines institutional dynamics between university and school that inform teacher mentors' perceptions and use of educational theory in practicum activities.
In teacher education (TE) curricula, formal knowledge is grounded in academic educational theory. This creates pedagogical problems for practicum mentors of overcoming tensions between theory and practice (Shulman, 1998). The theory-practice gap has been framed in three major ways (Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006): (1) As a knowledge transfer problem, in which practical knowledge "derives at least in part from research knowledge" (pp. 802) which necessitates translating research based knowledge into practice; (2) as two distinct kinds of knowledge based on different paradigmatic views for approaching problems; or (3) as a knowledge production problem, focusing on differences in the kinds of knowledge that scholars and practitioners contribute on a problem. While these underpinnings pertain to people's understandings of the source and kind of relevant knowledge, institutional conditions that inform such perceptions are usually disregarded. Therefore, we ask: How do institutional conditions of university and school inform mentors' perceptions and use of educational theory in learning to teach activities?
The study was conducted in the context of Israeli initial professional education at one major research university and included 29 participants from the TE program: 11 teacher educators, 10 Professional Development School mentors and 8 cooperating teachers.

Adopting a 'Case Study' methodology (Stake, 2000) to organize accumulated data, the study employed a triangulation of qualitative research methods. Primary data collection was based on semi-structured interviews (Kvale, 2008) with all participants and 56 relevant authentic, natural documents (Silverman, 2006) that described the program. Secondary data collection incorporated 19 non-participant observations (Fetterman, 1998) on participants' mentoring activity.
The data was analyzed following a 'participants focused' analytical methodology (Shkedi, 2011), using 'emic' categories that grow out of the data collected from participants' talk, actions and relevant contexts (Gordon-Finlayson, 2010). Diagram I depicts analysis stages.
Our findings expose mentors' perceptions and use of educational theory: Participants often view educational theory as irrelevant, ineffective and insignificant for the practice of teaching. Furthermore, teacher research is conceived as exclusively grounded in reflective processes on practical experience, detached from theory. Mentors rarely integrate theoretical knowledge in mentoring activities (See examples of evidences on Table I). When theory appears in mentoring activities, it often refers to pseudo-academic sources. Furthermore, analysis reveals that mentors' failure to integrate theory into their mentoring is grounded in evident misalignments between perceived teachers' professional tasks at school, on the one hand and the structure of the academic discipline at the university, on the other hand.

Based on these findings, we offer a new construct of "organizational coherence" in TE between the organization of practice at school (teachers' professional tasks) and the organization of research at the University (Education discipline structure). We suggest a new conceptualization of the theory-practice gap in pre-service mentoring and highlight important institutional conditions to be attended in the design of mentoring programs in education.

Author

• Ayelet Becher, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev