Purposeful Tensions: Lessons Learned from Metaphors in Teacher Candidates' Digital Stories
Summary (3 min read)
Constructing Teaching Identities
- Bullough & Baughman (1997) emphasize, "teacher identity, the beginning teacher's beliefs about teaching, learning and self-as-a-teacher, is a vital concern to teacher education as it is the basis for meaning making and decision making" (p.21).
- This key process of professional identity development is often overlooked in teacher education, however.
- Recent research (Ticknor, 2014; Authors, 2015) indicates the importance of intentionally providing teacher candidates opportunities to begin to negotiate complex discourses inherent in learning to teach while still in supportive teacher education environments.
Affordances of Digital Storytelling
- Research on the use of digital video composition (Authors, 2015; Pandya, 2014; Rish, 2013) shows that most teacher candidates' videos in which they are asked to reflect upon and represent their beliefs and/or visions of teaching multimodally are more complex and cognitively demanding than writing written reflections about one's teaching beliefs and understandings.
- According to Leander and Boldt (2012) , texts like the digital stories their teacher candidates create are "not about the world; rather they are participants in the world" (p. 25).
- As such, their teacher candidates do not simply produce these texts but rather use them to interact with and negotiate discourses present in learning to teach.
Methodology
- This study describes work developed by a research group who came together as teacher educators with a common digital story project, across three universities.
- Fueled by their combined experience of over 60 years in elementary classrooms, the authors share a passion for finding ways to allow the digital storytelling project to inform their own teaching practices.
Context
- This study focuses on the digital stories of two teacher candidates, Ellie and Charlotte (pseudonyms used).
- They were both enrolled in a literacy course during their elementary teacher education program.
- Charlotte's university was located in a mid-size Midwestern city and Ellie's was in an urban metropolitan university in the South.
Data Collection
- Ellie and Charlotte's digital stories were selected using critical case sampling because they were likely to "yield the most information and have the greatest impact on the development of knowledge" (Patton, 2002, p. 236) .
- The authors use of two cases, collective case study (Creswell, 2007, p. 74 ) across multiple sites, allowed us "to show different perspectives on the same issue.".
- Data was collected under an approved exempt protocol from IRB at each university.
- Their stories were not analyzed until after the course ended.
- These were segmented by sentences, unless in some cases, they were broken into two segments when needed to correspond with images.
Data Analysis
- Finding the metaphors in the digital stories allowed us, like Musoff (2012) , to "make experience coherent" (p. 302).
- The researchers individually coded data from the digital story transcripts and visuals related to teaching and learning to identify themes.
- Next, for increased validity, the researchers came together to identify prominent metaphors of teaching and learning.
Findings
- Through the use of metaphoric analysis, several key findings emerged.
- In the section that follows, the authors explain the metaphors that emerged and provide examples of their manifestation in each teacher candidates' digital story.
Charlotte's Metaphors
- I want all of the students in my classroom to love reading and develop a passion for it, that continues on into their adult lives.
- She had not actually planned or taught any lessons herself.
- Additionally, she was considering traffic patterns around the room as she mentions the floor plan will "allow for the students to comfortably move around the room during silent reading.".
- She trusted that her students would be monitoring their own learning as they had choices in activities as well as assessment and would record much of this on their own.
Discussion
- Refer to Table 3 for teacher candidates' metaphors across cases.
- In this section the authors will discuss the tensions and alignments of Ellie and Charlotte's metaphors.
- Then, the authors consider how these metaphors relate to the Inquiry and Industrial Models of education and how this informs their own practice.
Tensions and Alignments in Metaphors
- Further analysis of the how the metaphors relate to each other, allow us to examine how Ellie and Charlotte were developing their professional identities (Thomas & Beauchamp, 2011, p. 764 ).
- This mismatch created a tension between the roles of teacher and student.
- There is a clear alignment between Charlotte viewing herself as Facilitator of Learning and viewing her students as Responsible Participants in their learning.
Models of Education
- The metaphors of the envisioned roles in the digital stories also provide illustrations of the presence both of the Inquiry and Industrial Models of education (Leland & Kasten, 2002) .
- Both are present in the digital stories their teacher candidates created.
- In each of these stories, the students were then positioned as Lovers of Literacy, Responsible Participants, and Independent Readers.
- Her metaphor as Teacher As Organizer aligns with the Industrial Model because of the teacher -centered way she envisioned arranging her classroom and positioned her students in need of being organized.
- While being shielded from any contradictions to the Industrial Model in schools allowed Charlotte to envision a more inquiry-based classroom -one more in line with their own visions of ideal classrooms -the authors are concerned that when she does experience the effects of an industrial model, she will be unprepared to negotiate these tensions.
Conclusions
- When teacher candidates have only experienced an industrial model of education in both their own apprenticeships of observation (Lortie, 1975) and their field placements, it may become difficult for them to see the possibility of implementing any other approach.
- The authors begin to think about how this would inform their teaching of literacy courses and engaged in conversations about how these findings could help us find concrete ways to improve their own teaching practice.
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"Purposeful Tensions: Lessons Learne..." refers background in this paper
...…Model where language is “an object to be analyzed into objective parts… separate from the responses of readers and the intentions of the author” (Myers, 1996, p. 89), rather than literacy as “a way to explore topics of personal interest while building and negotiating meaning with others”…...
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"Purposeful Tensions: Lessons Learne..." refers background in this paper
...…of the majority of students enrolled in our various programs— White, middle-class females in their early twenties—which research tells us is the typical teacher candidate (Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, 2004; Gay & Howard, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Lowenstein, 2009; Zumwalt & Craig, 2008)....
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"Purposeful Tensions: Lessons Learne..." refers background in this paper
...…of the majority of students enrolled in our various programs— White, middle-class females in their early twenties—which research tells us is the typical teacher candidate (Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, 2004; Gay & Howard, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Lowenstein, 2009; Zumwalt & Craig, 2008)....
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"Purposeful Tensions: Lessons Learne..." refers background in this paper
...…affordances of digital composing/storytelling in supporting complex negotiations of discourses of teaching and the creation of a teaching vision (Albers, 2006, 2011; Beach, 2014; McVee et al., 2012; Pandya, 2014; Rish, 2013; Sydnor et al., 2015) the questions guiding our study were as follows:…...
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...Researchers have explored the creation of digital videos in teacher education to productively engage new technologies and as a multimodal response to written text (Albers, 2006, 2011; Beach, 2014; McVee, Bailey, & Shanahan, 2012; Pandya, 2014; Rish, 2013; Sydnor et al., 2015)....
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