Teacher Candidate Learning: Connecting to Students as Learners Through Their Lives and Experiences

• In Event: 28.052 - Studying Teacher Learning: International Perspectives — Invited Session

Abstract

The aim of this study was to understand teacher learning during a one-year, Masters-level equity-focused elementary preparation program in Auckland, New Zealand. The program was structured around six “facets of practice for equity,” which we identified based on an analysis of the international research literature (Grudnoff et al., 2017). These Facets provided a framework for understanding and investigating the teacher candidates’ learning. One of the facets is ‘connecting to students as learners, their lives and experiences’. Learning-focused connection with students has repeatedly been identified as central for teaching that promotes equity (Grudnoff et al., 2017) and is therefore a key area of learning for teacher candidates. Research questions were: What evidence of understanding and enacting connection with students as learners, their lives and experiences emerges when teacher candidates participate in an equity-centered programme? What are the conditions and causal mechanisms that support this emergence?

Theoretical Perspectives
Building on Opfer and Pedder’s (2011) analysis of teacher learning from a complexity theory lens we use a framework that integrates ideas from complexity theory applied to education (Davis & Sumara, 2006; Morrison, 2008) with work in sociology linking complexity theory with critical realism (Byrne & Callaghan, 2014). The framework accounts for the complexity of teaching, learning, and inequality, and affords examination of how the mechanisms of teacher learning occur under varying conditions. Seeing teacher learning as a complex phenomenon contributes new understandings about how teacher learning occurs as it positions teacher learning as an emergent phenomenon rather than an outcome that can be traced linearly to simple causes.

Method
Comprehensive case studies from programme entry until completion were constructed for five teacher candidates, selected for variation in their espousal of the facets of practice half way through the program. Ten major documentary data sources from critical programme points were collected for each candidate. These included surveys, assignments, interviews, and practicum assessments and reflections. Detailed narratives derived from the case studies (Byrne & Callaghan, 2014) documented the emergence of teacher candidates’ understanding and use of connection to students as learners. Cross-case comparison (Byrne & Callaghan, 2014) was then used to search for generative mechanisms that might provide a complex, contingent explanation of the teacher candidates’ learning.

Findings and Implications
The five cases showed that these teacher candidates quickly adopted the idea of connection at the beginning of the program and referred often to connecting to students lives and experiences. This was often at a superficial level, however, and missed the crucial element of connecting to students as learners. As the program progressed, the teacher candidates’ work and practicum feedback suggested that their understandings had deepened, and in some cases they were able to enact connection in their practice. Connection across cultures was a particular site of learning for the teacher candidates. Learning to connect with students as learners, their lives and experiences was the result of the complex interactions of teacher candidates’ identities and sense of agency with the school learning contexts in which they were placed, and the equity-focused design features of the teacher education program.

Authors

• Fiona Ruth Ell, University of Auckland

• Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Boston College

• Lexie Barbara Grudnoff, The University of Auckland

• Mavis Haigh, The University of Auckland

• Mary F. Hill, University of Auckland

• Larry H. Ludlow, Boston College