Anton Puvirajah

A New Perspective on Preservice Teachers’ Video-Aided Reflection

Abstract This article adds to the literature on video-aided professional development for teachers by presenting a schema-based framework for analyzing teachers’ video-aided reflection on their own teaching. Qualitative analysis of two novice teachers’ video-enhanced reflection was used to demonstrate how the framework could be used. Results emphasized the importance of participants’ prior knowledge as a major influence on their ability to reflect. The authors contend that this is important because prior knowledge should determine the kind of guidance participants need in order to benefit most from video-aided reflection.

Embodied Experiences in Virtual Worlds Role-Play as a Conduit for Novice Teacher Identity Exploration: A Case Study

This article presents a descriptive case study of teacher embodiment during a role-play parent-teacher conference in a collaborative virtual world. Using a single novice teacher as the primary unit of analysis, the article describes the nature of teacher embodiment by deconstructing the teachers various Discourses using Gees Building Tasks as an analytical tool and reconstructing them using embodiment literature as a synthesis tool. The findings indicate that well-designed experiences in collaborative virtual worlds coupled with meaningful reflection of those experiences have the potential to allow novice teachers to feel and act like a teacher, a phenomenon that is called embodiment in this article. The study provides theoretical and empirical basis for continued examination of the use of collaborative virtual worlds for clinical practice.