Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

Summer 2004

Abstract

In this paper we, a research team comprising one professor of education and four graduate students document our reflections on questions we have about the challenges of documenting the impact of teacher education coursework and on our collective research. This paper is organized into three, separate sections. In the first section we present data that Patricia collected while observing Renee teach the same group of prospective English students over two semesters. These courses, C&I 301 (Introduction to Teaching in a Diverse Society) and C&I 302 (Teaching Diverse Middle Grades Students), are the first two courses in a four course sequence that integrate methods of teaching English with critical analysis of schooling and with reflection on one’s own transition from student to teacher. For the two subsequent courses (C&I 303, Teaching Diverse High School Students; C&I 304, Assessing Secondary School Students) the students were taught by different instructors and, during C&I 304, were student teaching. The term, “diversity” is included in the course titles because the teacher education program emphasizes that multicultural education is not a separate course, but that celebrating and working productively with a diverse student population is embedded in everything we do as teachers of adolescents (and adults). In this paper we respond to two recommendations Renee and Patricia have raised in previous works (Clift & Brady, 2003; Clift, 2004) in that we are exploring the ways in which longitudinal study can be incorporated into self-study; we are also using friendly critics (Patricia, Raul, Jason, and Soo Joung) as we analyze Renée’s teaching and the potential impact of her courses (as well as that of the larger teacher education program) on thirteen teacher education graduates’ developing practice. (These graduates have all been out of the teacher education program for two years now.) As our work proceeded we realized that as a team we were grappling with issues of power, authority, and voice in both the selfstudy and larger study. We have shaped this paper to allow others to glimpse our process and the questions it continues to raise for our work.

Comments

This paper is collected in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, available here: http://resources.educ.queensu.ca/ar/sstep/

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