DISCUSS Philadelphia: Novice Social Studies Teachers' Role Identities as Discussion Facilitators

• In Event: Teacher Learning and Identity Change in Social Studies Professional Development: A Career-Spanning Perspective

Abstract

While learner-centered discussions are recognized as an effective instructional approach in social studies education, teachers rarely use them (Authors, 2015; Barton & Avery, 2016; Ho et al., 2017). This presentation offers a mid-point overview of our 6-year mixed-methods longitudinal study on the factors that influence novice teachers’ decision-making about whether and how to engage student discourse in social studies classrooms. We conceptualize teachers’ decision-making about discussion facilitation with the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI; Authors, 2017). The DSMRI defines actions such as discussion facilitation as emerging from the teacher’s role identity, which comprises the contextualized beliefs, perceptions, goals, values, emotions, and actions the teacher holds as central to their role in a particular situation. The study is investigating the role identity change of two cohorts of preservice secondary social studies candidates (PSTs) from two university-based teacher education programs in Philadelphia, from their last year of student teaching and into their first two years of classroom instruction. Our research questions ask: (1) To what extent do novice social studies teachers promote and sustain student reasoned discourse about social studies content, and how do these practices change? (2) What role-identities support decisions to promote and sustain student reasoned discourse and argumentation? (3) What personal and contexts factors promote and constrict the development of these role-identities?
To date we have 15 participants in cohort 1 (who have completed their first year of teaching) and 22 participants in cohort 2 (who have completed student teaching). Participants engage in life story interviews at the beginning of their student teaching year, and then participate in several sets of data collection each year, each set involving recording a 15-minute video of their discussion facilitation, writing a reflective memo about their decisions during the discussion, and participating in a stimulated recall interview about their instruction. We have also collected observational data and participants’ reflective memos on their experiences during two summer institutes. Our participants act as co-researchers on their own learning and development by annotating and analyzing their own data.
Now in year-three of data collection, our analyses point to two main findings. First, through the use of a content-agnostic tool that helps characterize student discourse during classroom discussions (Fishman et al, 2017; Osborne et al, 2019), we found that PSTs are capable of facilitating complex student-centered discourse. Second, PSTs negotiate multiple role identities and multiple goals during discussion facilitation, which foment identity tensions. When PSTs could not resolve tensions, their discussion practices often shifted towards either teacher-centered discourse or towards student-centered discourse that did not aim at coherent goals. We identified such identity tensions, for example, among white PSTs teaching African American history to Black students, as well as among those teaching other social studies subjects to heterogeneous students. Our analyses continue to characterize different types of teacher role identities and their framing of discussion facilitation, patterns in role identity change, and the role of personal and contextual factors in these role identities and their change.

Authors

• Timothy Patterson, Temple University
  Presenting Author

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Avi Kaplan, Temple University
  Presenting Author

• Wendy Chan, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Jenni Conrad, Oregon State University - Cascades
  Presenting Author

• Lightning Jay, Binghamton University - SUNY
  Presenting Author

• Andy Delcalvo, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Joseph Eisman, Purdue University
  Presenting Author

• Andrew J. Schiera, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author