"With Attention Spans One TikTok Long...": Linkages Between Conceptions of Students and Pedagogical Content Knowledge

• In Event: Catching Up With Teachers: Statewide Exploration of Teachers' Beliefs About Language and Literacy Teaching

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines underlying systems of reasoning that govern preK-12 literacy teachers’ decisions regarding what, how, and why to teach. Specifically, this paper explores teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), with particular attention to how teachers’ conceptions of their students inform their pedagogical practices and connect to “purposes” for teaching literacy (Locke, 2007). Thus, this paper attempts to deepen understandings of various factors that contribute to preK-12 literacy teachers’ curricular reasoning.

Theoretical framework
This paper is informed by critical childhood studies and critical youth studies (Ibrahim & Steinberg, 2014; Lesko & Talburt, 2014). These perspectives locate notions of “student” within broader discourses connected to “child/ren/hood” and “youth, teenager, adolescence/ts,” which these perspectives critique as cultural constructs that are formed, authorized, and given meaning through discourses, policies, and material practices. This tradition notes schooling practices as being particularly instrumental in producing notions of children and youth, highlighting schooling’s reliance upon developmental psychology as its theoretical lynchpin (Friedrich, 2014).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Data analysis involves two levels of inquiry. The first examines the ways teachers conceptualize their students, particularly regarding their literacies. For instance, the title of this paper --“with attention spans being one tic tok long”-- is an example of a teacher’s rendering of their students and doing so in relation to literacy. The second level of analysis links these conceptualizations to ways teachers articulate their pedagogy. For instance, one teacher explained she teaches Romeo and Juliet to 9th graders because “Freshman get falling in love in a day.”

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
As previously explained, this paper draws upon a larger study that includes both survey and interview data. Survey data will provide broad trends and interview data will deepen and nuance findings.

Findings
Across grade levels, teachers largely operated from deficit discourses related to their students and their literacies. At elementary levels, discourses of lack of “readiness” linked particularly with vocabulary were paramount, and students’ families were often blamed for this lack. At secondary levels, deficit discourses emphasized developmental lacks and/or connected to technological use (e.g., they don’t read because they’re watching videos). A smaller number of teachers revealed assets-based and intersectional understandings of students by moving beyond developmental discourses of deficit to identify students as classed, placed, raced people with various aspirations beyond schooling--all of which factored into what, how, and why these teachers’ taught.

Significance
Whereas current scholarship focuses on pre-service teachers (e.g., Sulzer & Thein, 2016), this research provides insights into how notions of students inform practicing educators’ PCK, which engenders inquiry into how these systems of reasoning are picked up differently by different teachers in different contexts (e.g., Do experienced teachers operate from different conceptualizations of students than novice teachers? Teachers from rural or suburban or urban contexts?) Thus, this research stimulates novel understandings of how conceptualizations of students inform teachers’ development of pedagogical content knowledge.

Authors

• Robert Petrone, University of Missouri - Columbia

• Heather Knight, University of Missouri - Columbia