Chinwe H. Ikpeze

Web-Based Inquiry Learning: Facilitating Thoughtful Literacy with WebQuests.

Diane looked up, put her pen in her mouth and thoughtabout the question for some seconds, and then lookedat me. “Well...mmm...I will encourage the citizens inmy city to reduce, reuse, and recycle waste. I can prob-ably carry out a campaign to educate citizens about thedangers of polluting the environment. I think...I willmake companies and individuals receive a penalty forenvironmental pollution and I will encourage the useof computers. I will study the successful programs thatother cities are using and see how I can do it in mycity....” (Interview transcript, June 8, 2004)

What about Writing? A National Exploratory Study of Writing Instruction in Teacher Preparation Programs.

ABSTRACT This small scale, exploratory study reveals how writing instruction is taught to preservice teachers across the United States in university-based preservice teacher education programs based on online survey results from 63 teacher educators in literacy from 50 institutions. Despite the growing writing demands and high stakes writing sample testing in K–12 classrooms, our survey of literacy teacher educators indicated that teacher preparation programs rarely offer stand-alone writing instruction methods courses. Evidence suggests that writing methods are frequently embedded in reading methods courses. Equally concerning, data indicate a lack of confidence among many teacher educators regarding teaching writing methods. This study highlights the need for greater attention to writing in teacher preparation programs and adds to the conversation of why these issues continue to plague higher education.

Teaching in the Third Space

When my family and I came to the U.S., I had to learn and adopt American cultural values. After years of living in America, I went to visit my home country, and to my greatest surprise, my family and friends thought I was no longer the same. During a friendly conversation and argument over social services and an occasional power outage, a friend said to me, “This one is Americanized; not only does she speak with a different intonation, she reasons differently.”

Teaching as a Cultural Artifact

When I started my career as a teacher educator, my graduate teacher education students looked astonishingly similar to me. They were young, almost all were women, mostly blonde and many just completed their undergraduate degrees and had proceeded to graduate studies almost immediately. Occasionally, I would be assigned a group comprising one or two students from other racial groups, and that is when I actually felt that I had a diverse class.

Building Relationships in Physical and Virtual Spaces

The previous chapter centered on how I negotiated responsive teaching with prospective teachers. Relationship building was the cornerstone of this responsive teaching; after all, teaching is not just about delivering content but also about building relationships (Bingham & Sidorkin, 2004; Noddings, 1992; Russel & Loughran, 2007).

Teaching Across Cultures

Teaching Across Cultures: Building pedagogical relationships in diverse contexts examines the tensions and opportunities in teaching in a cross-cultural context as well as the centrality of culture and relationship in teaching and learning. The previous chapters highlighted how my engagement with self-study became a transformational experience that resulted in a reflective inquiry into my teaching and my students’ learning and consequently, reframing my practice in a variety of ways.

Social and Professional Networks

Social and professional networks are critically important to the professional advancement of teacher educators. Professional associations help to socialize new entrants into the profession as they meet and interact with others with similar interests. I still clearly remember the first time I attended a professional conference and how much I learned from it.

Data Collection and Analysis

Self-study has its roots within the tradition of teacher inquiry, reflective practice and action research, but self-study stands out especially when compared to action research because it may incorporate other methods such as personal history, narrative inquiry, reflective portfolios, memory work, or arts-based methods (Laboskey, 2004).

Tensions in Teaching Across Cultures

It was another midterm, and one of the rituals that I maintained in all of my classes was the administration of the midterm survey. The midterm survey was one of several formative assessment tools that included weekly reflections, exit tickets, and quick writes, among others. The weekly reflections and assignments helped me to ascertain how much prospective teachers understood each topic, while the exit tickets helped me to collect information about how much they comprehended in particular lessons.

Toward Responsive Pedagogy

I came into teaching as a college professor with confidence; after all, I was a successful high school English teacher, and I also had college teaching experience. However, as an immigrant whose formative life experiences were grounded in a different culture, I was apprehensive about what to expect in my new setting. During my first semester of teaching, I observed the classroom of one of my colleagues, and I was able to see how she navigated classroom interactions.