Preservice Teachers' Negotiating of Resistance to Socially Transformative Teaching

• In Event: 61.040 - Being and Becoming Citizen Teachers: Examining the Ecology and Complexity of Democratic Teacher Development

Abstract

This paper presents findings of how four pre-service social studies teachers’ experiences of student teaching contributed to the development of their purposes for teaching. Analysis of data revealed that participants often experienced difficulty enacting their purposes for teaching when their socially transformative purposes challenged their cooperating teachers’ accepted and routine teaching practices.
I recruited four participants who could provide detailed and rich data on experiences of social studies teaching and learning and the contribution of those experiences to the development of their purposes for teaching (Hatch, 2002; Merriam, 2002). Each of the four participants was placed in a secondary social studies classroom with a cooperating teacher for a 12 week student teaching experience. Data for this paper came from in-depth interviews, observations of participants’ student teaching, and participant journaling. I conducted two observations of each of the four participants during their student teaching and collected data from post-observation conferences.
Participant data was analyzed using a biographical approach to the narration, recognizing the social context of the narration (Merriam, 2002, p. 9). I created two categories for each text to separate the narration from the content. Doing so assisted in uncovering the multi-voiced nature of the text and the influence of the social context on the creation of the text. The social context, the secondary school that each of the participants were placed in for student teaching, had a significant influence upon the participants’ experiences and the meanings they constructed from their experiences. Recognizing the influence of the social context on the manner in which participants constructed meaning from their experiences of student teaching, and the way in which they shared their narration of their experiences, revealed the power of the school context to intercede in their attempts to enact their purposes.
Following analysis, evidence emerged that participants’ purposes for teaching social studies met with passive and active resistance from cooperating teachers. I distilled a pattern wherein this resistance led them to rethink how and if their purposes could function in classrooms. The participants’ purposes for teaching social studies largely centered on fostering active democratic citizenship, critical thinking, and taking a Progressive approach to social studies and history. In contrast, their experiences led them to believe that their cooperating teachers held traditional purposes for teaching social studies that centered on mastery of content knowledge, standardized test success, and classroom control and discipline.
Findings suggest implications for teacher education programs. 1) The process of pairing student teachers with mentor teachers may need to expand to include matching cooperating teachers with students that share some of the mentor teachers’ ideas about teaching social studies teaching. 2) The ability of student teachers to create space to enact purposes for democratic citizenship, the common good and critical thinking is a skill that merits deep discussion and study in social studies teacher education programs. Such conversations may enable and empower student teachers who hope to teach for these purposes and challenge traditional notions of the purpose of social studies teaching.

Author

• Evan Mooney, The University of Maine