Reenvisioning Learning in Order to Transform Teaching

• In Event: Reimagining Teacher Education Through University-Community Partnerships

Abstract

Despite decades of criticism (e.g., Lave, 1988), individual, cognitive models continue to dominate discussions of what it means to learn and consequently, what it means to teach. To challenge this paradigm, we have developed a teacher education course model based on sociocultural and practice theories of development that privileges the study of learning – what it is, when, where, and how it happens – so that novice teachers can understand learning as distributed across people, tools, and activities in sociohistorical contexts (Cole & Wertsch, 1996; Lave, 1996). Defining features include: placing undergraduates in community-based afterschool programs that serve children who belong to cultural and linguistic minority groups, positioning undergraduates as collaborators rather than experts, requiring them to write fieldnotes to document, and subsequently using learning theories to analyze their interactions with children at their sites. In this paper, we share findings related to how this model has facilitated (or not) novice teachers’ views of what it means to learn and to teach.
In this study, we draw on ethnographic and discourse analytic methods to examine how undergraduates engaged with the intentions of the course. Data, which were collected in the first author's Spring and Fall 2010 educational psychology courses, include: undergraduate fieldnotes, papers and in-class writing assignments, weekly blog posts, interviews with undergraduates, fieldnotes taken in the course, and audio-recordings of class discussions. All data were analyzed using a general inductive method that included open-coding, developing focused-coding categories, and searching for disconfirming evidence.
Analysis of data in the study pointed to the use student field sites as both a positive practice and a productive tension. Specifically, we found that the out-of-school placements played a large role in mediating the undergraduates’ understandings that learning involves relational, emotional, and sociocultural aspects in addition to academic dimensions. However, they also presented a tension. Because the programs we sent undergraduates to were differently organized, participation in them led these novice-teachers to develop varying perspectives on how to mediate children’s learning and their emerging sense of what it means to be a teacher. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of this tension as it plays out in the daily practices of the classroom and examine how the course instructor and students engaged their different beliefs to develop textured conceptions of learning and their implications for the design of learning environments.
Privileging learning and the understanding of how children learn promises to be an important pedagogical tool in the development of teachers who are responsive and adaptive to the needs of their students. However, it is not enough for teachers to discuss and think about learning. They must also have access to participation in authentic environments in which learning occurs. To ensure that this experience is productive, we must consider where we place teachers and how the mediation of these experiences is distributed between the sites and the course.

Authors

• A. Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Jacqueline S. Hotchkiss, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Christina Paguyo, University of Colorado - Boulder