Researching Continuities and Discontinuities Within Teacher Education Programs

• In Event: Ethnography as Epistemology: An International Dialogue on Challenges Facing Ethnographers Studying Knowledge Construction Across Disciplines, Time Scales, Actors, Institutions, and Countries

Abstract

US PreK-12th grade teacher education programs are being challenged to raise the quality of pedagogical skills and academic content of teacher candidates as well as being encouraged to become more of a practice-based profession (Wilson, Ball, Bryk, Figlio, & Grossman, 2009). These calls assume features for improving teacher quality will not be isolated learning experiences occurring only in field-based classrooms but will be integrated within the framework of teacher preparation programs. Underlying the integration of the university program content and practices is a tacit assumption that participants will have common understandings and knowledge about qualities that teacher candidates will develop, and that planned integration will permit a more seamless educational opportunity for candidates. In such programs, participants who are typically in field experiences include the teacher candidates, university supervisors and mentor teachers in schools.
This study adapted Agar’s (1995; 2007) concept of languaculture to examine the norms and expectations of two languacultures (university program and 3rd grade classroom) and how points of intersections between these different languacultures complement or contrast with each other. According to Agar, language is permeated with culture and culture is constructed through language-in-use by the social group. Ethnography involves an encounter between two languacultures, LC1 for the native languaculture of the ethnographer, and LC2 for the languaculture of the studied group. The ethnographer examines the languaculture being studied by identifying rich points or frame clashes, when he/she, as outsider. is confronted by differences in understanding of observed phenomena.
This study traces teacher candidates from the university classroom to the field-based 3rd grade classroom, LC was interpreted as the supervision component of the teacher education component and LC2, as the field-based classroom; i.e. the classroom involving the teacher candidate(s) and mentor teacher (Authors, 2011). Norms and expectations of each languaculture and how LC1’s frame of reference complemented or contrasted with the norms and expectation of LC2 were studied. Rich points provided anchors for tracing the roots and routes of cultural knowledge development to build warrants for knowledge necessary to understand the phenomena from an insider point of view. A frame clash was identified, when the supervisor found that two teacher candidates, who were placed in one classroom, did not provide the same quality of lesson plans she received from other teacher candidates. Identification of rich points provided a way of exploring insider perspectives. The analysis of the rich point found that the intersecting langucultures in the program had conflicting frames of reference for the teacher candidates. Thus, the lesson plan assignment from the teacher candidates was viewed by the university supervisor as out of alignment with LC1, while analysis of their roles in planning and instructing positioned them as part of LC2. While this frame clash made visible that the supervisor held a set of assumptions about the type of teacher competencies she was planning to assess, her ability to step back from these presuppositions enabled her to explore local, situated, and contextualized processes and practices of the classroom team, and to resolve the frame clash.

Author

• Laurie Joy Katz, The Ohio State University