“A Good Relationship”/“Behind Closed Doors”: Tracing Preservice Teachers’ Individualistic and Collectivistic Framings of Teaching

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Learning Toward Remedy, Repair, and Equity in Literacy Instruction (Table 2)

Abstract

Preservice teachers face challenges in enacting justice-oriented pedagogies in against-the-grain contexts. However, this framing of struggling PSTs often elides individualistic teaching and teacher professionalization norms, such as independence, privacy, and noninterference, that persist across teacher learning spaces. Thus, I ask how PSTs take up and challenge dominant individualistic norms in their talk about making curricular and pedagogical changes during student teaching. Using a single case design, I trace the individualistic framing of teaching through one teacher preparation program’s documents into five preservice teachers’ talk about their student teaching and professional futures. Findings illustrate that individualistic framing constrains and enables PSTs to enact curricular and pedagogical changes, although PSTs offered collectivist counternarratives that (re)imagined their (and teaching’s) presents and futures.

Author

• Christopher Kingsland, Towson University