Uncovering Teacher Educator Knowledge for Teaching Emergent Bilinguals

• In Event: Considering the Embodied Knowledge of Teacher Educators

Abstract

Teacher educator knowledge is an emerging field of research. Berry (2007) conducted the first study which uncovered the typical tensions teacher educators had to resolve in their practice. More recently, Lay inquired into an online course (2021) where she revealed how seven themes of teacher educator knowledge informed decisions about planning, teaching and assessing. Through that project, we came to see assignments were repositories of teacher educators’ knowledge of teaching, teacher education, and their tacit knowledge. This understanding led us to wonder about what an assignment we co-constructed would reveal about our own knowledge of teaching and teacher education and what we might also uncover concerning our tacit teacher educator knowledge. We engage in self-study of practice. We began by identifying an assignment we designed and taught pre-service teachers as part of a course that taught them to teach multilingual students within their regular classrooms. We selected a curriculum development project based on the model developed by CREDE (Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence). For our analysis, we worked together identifying what the assignment revealed. We met three times. We kept careful notes for each session. At the end of each session, we identified what the assignment revealed about our teacher knowledge, our teacher educator knowledge and our tacit knowledge as a teacher educator. We integrated our assertions from the three sessions producing our findings. We found that our knowledge of teaching impacted our pacing, plans for group work, and reporting student work. Our teacher educator knowledge revealed our beliefs that the work needed to feel authentic, link together things learned in other classes, and demonstrate their knowledge of the underlying principles for instruction. Our tacit knowledge revealed our clear grounding of our pedagogy in sociocultural theory and commitment to equitable teaching.
Berry, A. (2007). Tensions in teaching about teaching: Understanding practice as a teacher educator (Vol. 5). Springer Science & Business Media.
Lay, C.D. (2021). A Self-Study of the Shifts in Teacher Educator Knowledge Resulting From the Move From In-Person to Online Instruction. Brigham Young University.

Authors

• Celina Marie Lay, Brigham Young University

• Stefinee E. Pinnegar, Brigham Young University