"Oh My God This Is the Worst!" Attending and Responding to Preservice Teachers' Affect

• In Event: Affect and Sense-Making in STEM Teacher Learning: Toward Ecologically Valid Theories of Teacher Learning

Abstract

Purpose
This study is part of a project aimed at cultivating preservice teachers’ (PSTs) responsive teaching practices in STEM. We examine one PST’s affectively charged participation in a discussion around an episode of student thinking and teacher educators’ (TEs) efforts to acknowledge and respond to her affect.

Theoretical Perspective
PSTs often begin teacher education programs with acquired “cultural scripts” (Kang & Windschitl, 2018) about teaching, which are informed by their own experiences as learners. Such scripts may clash with student-centered, responsive visions of instruction called for in teacher education programs (Author, 2021; Anderson et al., 2000; Stroupe, 2016). As such, PSTs may experience tensions as they encounter new ideas about teaching and learning that conflict with personal assumptions and experiences. Such tensions can surface intense emotions for PSTs, including anxiety, frustration, and moral indignation (Robertson & Atkins Elliott, 2020). Therefore, it is important to understand the nature of these tensions and ensuing emotions to better support PSTs’ learning.

Data & methods
This study is situated in an introductory education course centered on promoting STEM PSTs’ responsiveness to student thinking. We focus on one session where PSTs discussed a video of third-grader, Sean, positing that 6 is both even and odd (Ball, 1993). The video raised many vexations, particularly for one PST, Stacy. Using discourse analysis (Erickson, 2004; Hall & Stevens, 1996), we examine the class discussion and Stacy’s exit slip to analyze her affectively charged participation and the TEs’ responses.

Results
Stacy expressed vexation numerous times during the Sean’s Numbers discussion, e.g.,
“this is one of the worst videos I’ve ever watched”;
“my mom, who was a third grade teacher for 30 years, was like ‘no, no!’”;
“He’s just wrong”; “someone needs to reteach him”;
“This was a 10-minute conversation in a classroom. That blows my mind… I wanna get past this SO bad.”

TEs responded to Stacy’s heightened affect by expressing empathy (e.g. “I’m sorry you’re feeling frustrated”) and revoicing contributions (e.g. “six is an even number”). However, Stacy’s resistance lingered, as evidenced by her exit slip.

Upon further reflections as a team of TEs and analysts, we came to understand that Stacy’s affect was entangled with multiple dynamics: epistemological (her adamance that Sean was incorrect); moral (her conviction about teachers’ responsibility to ensure students do not hold wrong answers); cultural/identity (her alliance with her mother’s authority as a teacher).

Overall, our analysis highlights that responding to PSTs’ affect involves not only empathizing with their expressed emotions, but also necessarily entails nuanced and complex attention to conceptual, epistemological, social, and cultural dynamics.

Significance
By illustrating the layers and complexities of PSTs’ affect, especially around vexations, this study highlights the intersection of epistemologies, ideologies, and identities in the display, experience, and processing of emotions. The findings motivate the need to design for, create, and study places of learning where affect is elevated as a critical and inseparable dimension of PSTs’ learning and “where emotionality is expected, embraced, and processed in productive ways that are both felt and cognized” (Varelas, 2022).

Authors

• Lama Ziad Jaber, Florida State University
  Presenting Author

• Carla Finkelstein, Towson University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shannon G. Davidson, University of Alabama
  Non-Presenting Author

• Allison T. Metcalf, Florida State University
  Non-Presenting Author