Critical Lessons From a Field Experience: Analysis and Reflection of Bias, Assumptions, and Evolving Teaching Philosophy

• In Event: 67.055 - Critical Reflection and Diversity: Prospective and In-Service Teacher Learning to Teach Diverse Students

Abstract

Objective
At the center of this study was an adolescent development course taught from a cultural approach (Arnett, 2013) for prospective teachers. Each prospective teacher partnered with a high school student who was an English learner at a local, small, suburban high school. The school district hosted 26 nationalities representing 31 languages. For ten weeks, prospective teachers met their partner in the school setting for half a day with a dual purpose: to observe, analyze and reflect on teaching and learning from their perspective as a future teacher as well as their partner’s.

Theoretical framework
As classrooms become increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse, prospective teachers need careful preparation to meet the needs of students with whom they may have had little experience and about whom they have little knowledge. Prospective teachers still come from the majority culture (Banks, 2001). Research has shown that prospective teachers enter teacher preparation programs with biases and assumptions about people with cultures different from their own (Kidd, Sanchez, & Thorpe, 2008) and those need to be examined. Zeichner’s (2010) considerations for quality field experiences are explored while Dewey’s (1933) ideas about judgment, analysis/synthesis, and balance are used to examine prospective students’ biases, assumptions and reflections in their experiences of teaching and learning.

Methods
The data in this study includes 976 journals and 122 case studies by 122 prospective teachers over nine semesters. Prospective teachers were primarily White and were sophomores or juniors in a traditional four-year educator preparation program. In analyzing the data, a conventional content analysis was employed. According to Hsieh and Shannon (2005) “conventional content analysis is generally used with a study design whose aim is to describe a phenomenon” (p. 1279). An inductive coding process was used (Zhang & Wildemuth, 2009) focused on specific meaning units (Bengtsson, 2016) centered on analysis and reflection.

Results
Through weekly field work with their partners, journaling, in-class analysis and reflection, and a final case study of adolescence, prospective teachers found themselves transformed by the work and experiences. Themes include: Assumptions uncovered and confirmed or refuted; Prospective teacher learning; Empathy and relationships; Cultural understanding; Experience as education; and Teaching philosophy.

Scholarly Significance
Giving students the opportunity to learn, experience, and grow is critical to their future teaching and their future students’ learning. Single courses in multicultural education have been shown to have little or no lasting effect on attitude (Pappamihiel, 2007) when students have no opportunity for authentic experience with English Learners. This work must be embedded across the educator preparation program curriculum. The lack of exposure to ‘others’, to ‘difference’ itself, has been seen by some as the most frustrating obstacle to attitudinal change (Bruna, 2006, p. 44). Pappamihiel (2007) reported positive attitudinal shifts after a project that involved pairing prospective teachers with ELLs for ten hours of tutoring. From the experience in this study, prospective teachers were both transformed as well as left asking new questions about how to meet all students’ needs.

Author

• Claudine Prairie Bedell, Saint Michael's College