Christy D. McGee

Calming Fears and Building Confidence: A mentoring process that works

This study suggests that the process of mentoring education students is not reserved for master mentor teachers but can also be done by more advanced students. The author shares her two-year experience of enlisting Master of Arts in Teaching intern teachers to mentor senior-level baccalaureate students during the practicum attached to a 12-hour integrated content block. The qualitative data collected through interviews and open-ended survey questions reveal that the mentoring experience was positive for both sets of students.

Reflecting on the Use of Metaphor: Two Professors' Processes of Discovery.

This article summarizes the literature concerning the use of visual and textual metaphors and describes outcomes of a project designed to help teacher education candidates begin integrating their personal beliefs about teaching with their growing professional knowledge and emergent practice. By using metaphors, teacher educators have the opportunity to help candidates solidify convictions and meanings and uncover “tacit or unarticulated” beliefs (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995, p. 6) that can lead to frame conflict (Reddy, 1993), that is, dueling metaphors. For example, there is a frame conflict in the conception of student value in the metaphors of teacher-as-police-officer and teacher-as-gardener. In one metaphor, students are perceived as deficit “others” who must be carefully watched by authorities; in the gardening metaphor, student potential is recognized as “more than” what can be seen on the surface. This article demonstrates how one university faculty explores textual and visual metaphor to encourage discourse among the candidates, other peers, and professors in a school of education. This extended dialogue gives candidates the opportunity to “compare their own characterizations to those of their peers, and depending on the responses of others, either maintain their own construals or bring theirs in line with those of the others” (Petrie & Oshlag, 1993, p. 602). This is the educative process of frame restructuring. As an added benefit of this project, the authors have found that using an artistic format combined with a written explanation of their work requires candidates to become more thoughtful, reflective practitioners.