Appropriating Principles of Practice: Novice Teachers as Students of the After-School Setting

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

Abstract

This paper considers the ways teacher education can meaningfully engage with out- of-school or after-school learning environments. The author examines a long-standing university-community partnership, the UC links project, to share insights gained from assisting pre-service teachers to become students and organizers of learning in the after- school setting. More specifically, this paper focuses on the ways pedagogical and theoretical tools gleaned from such experiences can be translated or utilized within more formal classroom environments. Building on previous work (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010; Vossoughi, 2011) the author illustrates how the university classroom itself provides a rich opportunity for exploring and experiencing this process of creative appropriation (Rogoff, 2003).
In 1995, a consortium of professors across seven of the University of California (UC) campuses orchestrated a collective project for public school students from nondominant communities to mediate the effects of a state proposition, Proposition 209, designed to roll back civil rights and affirmative action gains through colorblind policies (Cole, 1996; Gutiérrez, 2006; Vasquez, 2003). Organized around cultural historical approaches to learning, leading activities designed to incite engagement and sustained interaction around learning (Griffin & Cole, 1984; Vygotksy, 1978) and the construct of re- mediation (Cole & Griffin, 1983; Gutiérrez, Morales, et al., 2009), new partnerships were forged with UC faculty, undergraduate students, and community and school personnel to create new learning ecologies for public school children and undergraduate and graduate students interested in teaching and learning.
As both researcher and lead instructor for one such partnership, the author draws on pedagogical reflections and qualitative coding of students’ ethnographic field notes to analyze 1) the ways pre-service teachers began to identify and name the theoretical or design principles at work in the after-school setting 2) emergent attempts at translating these principles into more formal classroom settings and 3) the mediating role played by the university course in supporting this developmental process.
Preliminary findings indicate that undergraduate students were invited to “see” and draw upon cultural historical concepts both in the after-school site and in the university course. This was mediated through guided moments of meta-reflection on the pedagogical interactions in the course itself – instructors’ attempts to make transparent the ways cultural historical approaches to human development influence the ways we organized learning in a more formal classroom environment. This process was further supported by the “live” apprenticeship and shifting roles across undergraduate, graduate, and lead members of the instructional team as well as the changing social relations and expanding sense of community that emerged in the course. In other words, the undergraduate course itself was treated as a site for understanding cultural historical concepts and approaches to learning. Thus, instructional team members often used the language of ethnographic field notes to name, elaborate, or critically reflect on their own pedagogical moves. In this way, students’ own experience as learners became a powerful resource for understanding the potential relationships between informal and formal learning, as well as learning and human development more broadly.

Author

• Shirin Vossoughi, Stanford University