Collaborative Teacher Education: Forging Tangible Connections Between the Field and the Classroom

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

Abstract

The challenges of designing teacher education courses that enable pre-service teachers to embody and practice the theoretical and pedagogical perspectives which undergird their courses has been long documented (Darling-Hammond, 2006). One tension that may contribute to this disconnect is separation between teacher educators who are responsible for shared groups of novice teachers (Ball et al., 2009), especially between those who instruct in field experiences and those who instruct in university classrooms (Darling-Hammond, 2006). As national interest in teacher preparation increases, researcher must highlight innovative efforts to align and study learning experiences that support teachers across field and classroom sites to recognize and design for deep learning.
This study analyzes the contributions of one such collaboration between the authors—a TA for a practicum-based course and the site coordinator of that practicum field experience. Meeting regularly to plan for a small group of shared students, we leveraged cross-site knowledge to focus our instructional design on the undergraduates’ development of robust theories of learning. Through honest, transparent sharing and collaborative decision-making, we sought to make decisions that would instantiate the inextricable link between theory and practice. Our research question was: How does an intentional collaboration and strategic mediation of undergraduate learning across two isomorphically designed activity systems support undergraduates' developing understandings of learning theory?
Our study is situated in the context of El Pueblo Mágico and its paired university course, a social design experiment organized around notions of expansive learning that disrupt reductive ideologies about non-dominant populations (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) and modeled after the UCLinks after-school programs. Framing our study are sociocultural perspectives on learning as situated within social contexts and mediated by available tools. (Vygtosky, 1978). Further, we also leverage Cultural-Historical Activity Theory because, as Cole & Engestrom (1993), explain, “precisely how cognition is distributed must be worked out for different kinds of activity, with their different forms of mediation, division of labor, social rules and so on” (p. 42). Examining the classroom and field site as activity systems illuminates the congruities and contradictions that arise between the mediational tools available across spaces, individual subjects, and the stated object (Engestrom, 1999). Thus, a rich portrait of the variance and similarities of undergraduates’ experiences across settings emerges.
A grounded analysis (Charmaz, 1983) was derived from triangulation of data sources including undergraduate and site coordinator fieldnotes, undergraduate interviews, pre- and post-surveys, audiotapes of collaborator meetings and analytic memos documenting and reflecting on our decision-making processes. Emerging findings illuminate conceptual shifts in undergraduates' understandings of learning and highlight the ways our collaborative relationship mediated these shifts during the semester.
Working to understand what takes hold in this innovative space marked by cross-site teacher educator collaboration, we hope to contribute to the body of literature (e.g. Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) that sheds light on tangible, yet non-prescriptive ways to design teacher education that disrupt deficit views and the practice of unexamined heritage notions of schooling (Cope & Kalantzis, 2007).

Authors

• Andrea Caroline Bien, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Makenzie Selland, Utah Valley University