Contextualizing Practice: What It Means and Why It Matters

• In Event: Putting PACT (Performance Assessment for California Teachers) in Context and Context in PACT: Teacher Educators Address the Content and Assessment of Quality Teaching in Preservice Preparation

Abstract

Ten years ago, Sonia Nieto (1992) echoed a concern long shared by scholars, policymakers, parents and the public at large: “our public schools are unsuccessful with too many students, primarily, although certainly not limited to, those from culturally and linguistically diverse and poor families…” (p. 3). In the midst of heated debate about the relationship between public education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, her words ring as true today as they did in 1992.

At present, various federal and state accountability policies aim to address the very achievement gaps that Nieto references. These policies currently shape and hold further potential to shape the content and quality of public education and teacher education. Often, however, such policies take a top-down and universalist approach to reform, without explicitly addressing how contextual factors shape policy design and implementation, nor acknowledging the central role that complex understandings of context play in quality teaching. PACT reflects both these tendencies in its statewide—and potentially nationwide—mandate and in its relatively peripheral attention to issues of context as they relate to teaching and learning. Indeed, PACT’s context component remains unscored and only minimally connected to PACT’s subsequent scored components (e.g., the instructional commentary) and minimally addressed by PACT’s scoring rubrics.

Yet various scholars assert that excellent teaching necessarily requires teachers to draw upon knowledge of their students in order to reframe the ‘given’ curriculum, thereby minimizing dissonance—typically related to cultural discontinuity in the form of conflicting values, beliefs, and practices—and maximizing resonance in students’ learning experiences (Hollins, 2008). Keeping this assertion and PACT’s features in mind, we reviewed literature related to culturally responsive and ambitious pedagogy (e.g., Au, 2001; Ball, 2000; Ball & Forzani, 2009; Gay, 2002; Hollins, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2005; Lampert & Graziani, 2009; Nieto, 1992) and decided to further explicate a foundational element of responsive teaching, which we call “contextualizing practice,” that can serve as an explicit bridge connecting educational theory and practice to the contextual realities of students’ lives.

In this paper, we share our collaboratively developed definition for contextualizing practice: “making learning meaningful and accessible through unearthing, recognizing and leveraging learners’ prior knowledge, values, and salient experiences, employing familiar cultural and linguistic tools, and engaging strategies such as explicit teaching, coaching, and scaffolding to support learning.” We then present a matrix-style diagnostic tool that we developed both to operationalize our understanding of contextualized practice and to assist ourselves in determining where examples of PST practice embedded in completed PACTs fell along a spectrum of contextualization. With this tool, we aim to assess PSTs’ demonstrated capacities to recognize, make sense of, make connections to, respond authentically to and/or intentionally leverage students’ prior knowledge and lived experiences when planning, enacting, and reflecting on teaching practice. As research would suggest, developing such capacities represents a core and challenging task in teacher education and one that we, as teacher educators, believe our performance assessments should encourage, capture and accurately gauge.

Authors

• Cristina Alfaro, San Diego State University

• Pia I. Wong, California State University - Sacramento

• Margarita I. Berta-Avila, California State University - Sacramento

• Lauren M. Anderson, University of Southern California