Learning to Respond: The Journey of One Teacher Preparation Program's Efforts to Support Preservice Teachers Through Social, Cultural, Environmental, and Political Events

• In Event: Investigating the Promise of Network Improvement Communities to Improve Teacher Preparation Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
This study explores a university teacher preparation program that, like others in the state, fulfilled state requirements but was lacking in adequately preparing pre-service teachers to enact responsive practices. Program improvement efforts in the focal program emphasized curriculum and instruction and responding to program evaluations. This case study makes visible how teacher education programs adapted to teacher candidate needs and evolved programmatically. We use the case of one program to illuminate how responding to various events that PSTs experienced strengthened community within the program, which provided a model for supporting candidates to learn to build community among students in their classrooms.

Theoretical Framework
Our inquiry is informed by organizational theory that positions organizations as in a constant state of becoming (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Improvement science recognizes cross site collaboration as a site for organizational improvement (Bryke et al., 2015). One benefit of participation in a network is that it makes practice visible and reifies assumptions that drive organizational decision-making. This research draws attention to how information moves through members of organizations and provokes new forms of practice to respond to organizational needs (Star, 1989). This case study describes the iterative process of a program’s development through local and cross-site collaboration.

Methods & Data Sources
We take an autoethnographic approach (Ellis et al., 2010) to trace how various experiences prompted the first author, and the program as a whole, to adapt instructional practices to respond to social, cultural, environmental, and political events that PSTs experienced. Data includes personal reflections, course lesson plans, and teacher candidate reflections from the first authors’ course, as well as survey data and meetings notes from NIC meetings focused on the preparation of candidates to support multilingual learners. Analysis traces the historical trajectory of teacher educator and program development from a community lens (Zeichner, 2016), with a particular focus on how participation in the NIC supported teacher educators enacting responsive practices.

Results
This case study reports on the journey of one program’s development. The program identified a need to create a more humanizing program that attended to candidates’ experiences in and beyond the classroom. The program theorized that this approach would in turn prepare candidates for developing more humanizing classrooms. At the same time, participation in the NIC provoked further programmatic reflection by providing images of “a range of possibilities” that resulted in program restructuring to center restorative justice, responsive teaching, and building an inclusive classroom community. Our analysis will report on emergent teacher preparation practices that resulted through responsive instruction, as well as practices enacted across the network to share information to inform collective improvement efforts.

Scholarly significance
This study contributes to research on how teacher educators adapt practice to connect to community, embed socio-emotional learning, and refine practices for preparing candidates to support students in and beyond the classroom. It also has implications for networked improvement communities as contexts for supporting program improvement.

Authors

• Susan K. Toma-Berge, University of California - Irvine

• Carlos Sandoval, WestEd

• Elizabeth A. van Es, University of California - Irvine