Meeting in the Third Space: Integrating Social Studies Methods and Community Fieldwork in Place-Conscious Teacher Education

• In Event: 61.061 - Communities as Central Places of Preservice Teacher Learning

Abstract

How does place-conscious teacher education pedagogy impact teacher candidates’ perceptions of themselves in relation to communities and inform classroom practice? As a school-based field supervisor and a university-based social studies methods instructor, we collaborate on creatively leveraging the intersecting contexts of school, university, and neighborhoods in order to prepare skilled and caring community teachers. A fundamental requirement in our social justice-oriented elementary certification program is for teacher candidates to engage in community events, connect with families and agencies outside of the school setting, and show evidence of being reflective practitioners who recognize and evaluate the effects of their assumptions, choices, and actions on themselves and others across multiple settings.
This documentary account tracks the work we do with cohorts of elementary teacher candidates who conduct fieldwork in a small interconnected set of high-poverty elementary and middle schools, which serve the city’s most racially, economically, and linguistically diverse population. Working against traditional models where university methods courses and classroom fieldwork happen in separate locations and rarely intersect geographically or conceptually, we draw from the teacher education literature on critical and democratic pedagogy (Noel, 2016; Payne, 2018; Zeichner, 2010; Zeichner, Payne & Brayko, 2015) that encourage programs to actively connect and ground methods and fieldwork within the hybrid space of school-community contexts.
In the social studies methods course, we engage teacher candidates in a social issue-based inquiry of essential questions as they play out in the community. Class meetings and weekly discussion seminars are held in a newly created partnership site to allow for learning experiences that better enables school practitioners and neighborhood stakeholders to play a more active role in preparing teachers for their communities. Because our dual elementary + ESL certification cohort conducts their fieldwork in a community with a large number of emerging bilingual students, methods course and seminar discussions emphasize immigration as a central theme of social studies and the American experience. A community mapping activity is one example of how we engage with the local space in a both a physical and intellectual fashion, and a funds of knowledge approach (Moll, et al., 1992) assists teacher candidates in identifying and incorporating student and family assets into their classroom instruction.
This presentation contributes to discussions about how highlighting place as an organizing construct for teacher education programming can enable teacher candidates to learn more about and within the communities in which our pupils live, eg. funds of knowledge, social networks, ways of interacting and of engaging the world, in support of student learning and to nurture new teachers who embrace learning about and within the communities where their pupils come from and who are able to translate this knowledge back into classrooms as culturally responsive teaching practices.

Authors

• Thomas Owenby, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Mary Klehr, Madison Metropolitan School District