What Kind of Teachers Do Our Students Wish They Had? Centering Students in Teacher Preparation

• In Event: The Pursuit for Responsible Educators Creating Equitable Learning Opportunities: A Cross-Institutional Conversation

Abstract

This presentation takes up the AERA call of accepting greater responsibility by scrutinizing the education preparation process while pushing for centering the learner in all that we do. Taking responsibility here suggests that educators and stakeholders interrogate what is prioritized in teacher preparation programs and during professional development such that there is rarely any room for students to inform how teachers are being trained. A lot of talk during a typical professional development is talk about students and one seldom sees, during PD sessions or in teacher preparation programs, talk with (and learning from) students about good teaching. Premised on the idea that a good teacher is a good learner (Feiman-Nemser, 2012), and informed by the spirit of ‘students teaching teachers learning’ (Branscombe, Goswami, Schwartz, & Martin, 1992), the presentation argues that teacher education programs and teacher professional development initiatives could benefit by learning from students about what kind of teachers students wish they had. Perhaps one reason that students end up being adults who knowingly or unknowingly participate in and sustain inequalities is that they never had the teachers that they wish they had and, by extension, they never had the teaching and learning that they wish they had. How, then, might educators find out the kinds of teachers that our students wish they had? Focusing primarily on service-learning as a site for bridging classrooms and communities, this study illustrates how educators can facilitate conditions for students, who undertake peer-to-peer cross-age mentoring, to enact teacherly roles which signal emergent conceptualizations for good teaching. Facilitating these conditions is a key prerequisite to this process. This study shows that, where these conditions are not intentionally created, students tend to default towards extant undemocratic teacher-as-supervisor roles which are prevalent in traditional schooling. Further, eliciting students’ opinions about their preferred teaching styles through verbal means such as group and paired interviews or through having them journal reflections and thoughts, offers insights into pedagogical design. Framed within socioculturalism and dialogism, this qualitative empirical study examines the interactional infrastructure of a year-long, literacy-based, service-learning project between 20 middle schoolers and 60 elementary schoolers. Through data-coding and analysis of multimodal data (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001; Jewitt, 2009) produced during students’ participation in service-learning, I highlight how students' emergent conceptualizations of the teacher role (presented through text in journal entries, visual and audio means in video clips, and transcriptions of interviews) offer insights for understanding our students’ teacher preferences. Overall, this study has implications on the course design for professional development and teacher training programs. Furthermore, engaging with our students, whereby we learn from and with them about good teaching, disrupts the underutilization of students as teaching/learning resources.

Author

• David Bwire, The College of New Jersey