“I want them to feel heard. I want their voices to be agents of change”: Exploring a Community-Engaged Partnership Focused on Critical Service-Learning

This study explored the successes and informative challenges of a partnership forged between an elementary school, a university, and a nonprofit educational agency. The purpose of the partnership was to research the implementation of a yearlong critical service-learning framework in third and fifth grades. Teachers were engaged in a series of professional development sessions and workshops to learn how to enact My VOICE, a pedagogical approach that leverages student voices to develop a community-based service project that addresses a student-identified social issue. Using qualitative approaches, we systematically gathered teachers’ perspectives and recorded the apparent strengths and weaknesses of the partnership. We posit suggestions for strengthening the partnership and highlight the benefits of critical pedagogies that can be impactful for all children

Dialogic education for and from authorial agency

In this paper, we extend Bakhtin's ethical philosophical ideas to education and introduce a dialogic authorial agency espoused approach. We then consider this approach in opposition to the mainstream technological espoused approach, while focusing our contrasting analysis on student’s authorial agency and critical dialogue. We argue that the technological approach assumes that the "skills" or "knowledge" are garnered in pursuit of preset curricular endpoints (i.e., curricular standards). Since the goals of the technological approach are divorced from the students’ personal goals, values, and interests, they are incompatible and irreconcilable with what we idealize as the true goal of education, education for agency. The authorial agency approach to education (Dialogic Education For and From Authorial Agency) emphasizes the unpredictable, improvisational, eventful, dialogic, personal, relational, transcending, and ontological nature of education. The authorial agency of the student and of the teacher are valued and recognized by all participants as the primary goal of education – supported by the school system and broader society.  The approach defines education as a learner’s leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, the life, and the world in critical dialogue. The purpose of authorial agency pedagogy is to facilitate this process by promoting students’ agency and unique critical voices in socially desired practices – critical voices, recognized by the students themselves and others relevant to the particular practice(s). Ultimately, in the authorial education for and from authorial agency, students are led into investigating and testing their ideas and desires, assuming new responsibilities and developing new questions and concerns.            Finally, we describe and analyze the first author’s partially successful and partially failing attempt to enact a dialogic authorial approach. It will allow the reader to both visualize and problematize a dialogic authorial approach. We will consider a case with a rich “e-paper trail” written by 11 undergraduate, pre-service teacher education students (mostly sophomores), and the instructor (Peter, the first author, pseudonym) in a course on cultural diversity.  The case focuses on the university students (future teachers) and their professor discussing several occasions that involved interactions between Peter and one minority child in an afterschool center. Our research questions in this empirical study were aimed at determining the successes, challenges, and failures of the dialogic authorial pedagogical approach and conditions for the

Exploring intersubjectivity between student teachers and field instructors in student teaching conferences

Student teachers are learners of teaching and emerging collaborative practitioners preparing to join school-based professional learning communities. Using situative learning theory, this 16-week multiple-case study explored whether necessary conditions were satisfied within field instructor-led conferences towards the goal of helping student teachers learn how to develop roles as participatory contributors. Systematically shared meanings of conference discourse and similar perceptions of control regarding topic selection were explored as indicators of successful conferencing. Findings show that even though field instructors aimed to engage student teachers in mutually understood conversations and share control of topic selection; these objectives were not fully achieved. Conference participants’ perceptions of discourse and control must be aligned if field instructors are to help student teachers improve instructional decision-making and develop contributor roles as members within communities of practice

Problems in Student Teaching

Currently, education schools across the nation are reforming teacher education programs in light of the newly developed common core standards, shifting accreditation principles, new measures of teacher performance, and the pressing concern that in-service teachers are woefully under-prepared for the realities of classrooms. During this time of wide spread programmatic reform, we present a list of considerations that are particularly germane to the clinical preparation of student teachers. Our list includes common practices that limit learning opportunities for student teachers and detract from the meaningfulness of assessing student teachers. We posit three approaches for education schools to consider as they engage in program revisions

Supporting Teacher Candidates' Sense-Making of Field Instructors Feedback Through Co-constructed Goal-Setting

The purpose of this study was to discern if teacher candidates and their university-based field instructors engagement in co-constructed goal-setting activities would better support teacher candidates’ understanding of feedback delivered during post-lesson observation conferences. Data from preliminary and retrospective surveys were compared within and across treatment and control groups. Findings showed that teacher candidates (n = 9) who participated in co-constructed goal-setting activities grew more comfortable discussing their teaching and took on a greater responsibility in guiding the post-observation conferencing discourse and higher rates than control-group participants (n = 9). However, the co-constructed goal-setting protocol did not support a greater understanding of feedback

750126 – Supplemental material for The Promises and Realities of Implementing a Coteaching Model of Student Teaching

<p>Supplemental material, 750126 for The Promises and Realities of Implementing a Coteaching Model of Student Teaching by Elizabeth Soslau, Jennifer Gallo-Fox, and Kathryn Scantlebury in Journal of Teacher Education</p