Jenifer Jasinski Schneider

Writing Instruction or Destruction Lessons to be Learned from Fourth-Grade Teachers’ Perspectives on Teaching Writing

The purpose of this study was to examine fourth-grade teachers’ self-assessments of their perceptions about writing development and writing instruction. The authors surveyed fourth-grade teachers within one large school district in the Southeastern United States. Utilizing quantitative and qualitative methodologies, they analyzed the teachers’ self-assessments of their instructional practices with regard to writing. They found that the teachers revealed a wide range of statements about writing instruction with fluctuating perspectives about how writing develops. In addition, there was evidence that the state curriculum and the writing test dictated the teachers’instructional practice. As a result, many teachers revealed discrepancies between their perspectives about writing development and their instructional practices. The authors suggest there are lessons to be learned for all teacher educators from this scenario.

Accelerating reflexivity? An ethno-theater interpretation of a pre-service teacher literacy methods field experience

During a teaching methods field experience, we initiated several processes to facilitate pre-service teachers’ reflection, empowerment, and performance as they learned to teach students. Through an ethno-theater presentation and subsequent revisions to an ethno-theater script, we turned the reflective lens on ourselves as we discovered instances of our teaching within this field experience that required us to look at our data and ourselves as contributing actors in a series of scenes. Our analysis of the data (as captured through the performance text) led us to new understandings of ‘reflection,’ ‘empowerment,’ and ‘performance’ through the constructed roles and relationships within this field experience work. We discuss the process of creating an ethno-theater script and the methodological impact it had on us as teacher educators and researchers. We conclude with a proposal for dramatic solutions to accelerating reflexivity within teacher education contexts.

iText, but iDon’t Teach With It: An Essay on i-Literacy in Teacher Education

In this article, the author explores her observations of preservice teachers’ technological literacy as it is often enacted across iterations of a writing methods course. Using personal examples and classroom anecdotes, the author argues that the construct of digital native is flawed and, instead, the author positions preservice teachers as instructional-technology learners rather than instructional-technology experts (i.e., natives). Within the context of teacher education, the author calls for explicit instruction in multimedia literacy and technology-mediated teaching with the goal that preservice teachers develop insider knowledge of multimedia literacy and the ways in which digital texts and devices work. To this end, the author positions technological-literacy learning as parallel to early language learning as well as second-language acquisition, suggesting that preservice teachers understand technology and digital products from behind the screen before they are expected to engage in instructional-technology strategies in front of the screen.

Accessing Teacher Candidates' Pedagogical Intentions and Imagined Teaching Futures through Drama and Arts-Based Structures.

ABSTRACT Through a lens focused on imagining the future, and with a pedagogical goal to help novice teachers embody effective teaching practices in a writing methods course, the authors (two teacher educators) conducted a design-based experiment to determine if we could access teacher candidates’ pedagogical decisions and their future intentions through tableau and other imaginative acts. The authors examined the candidates’ enactments of literacy teaching through an analysis of photographs and implemented the use of tableau and drawings to explore connections between observable teaching acts and the candidates’ imagined teaching futures. Drama and arts-based interventions provided the authors with clear insight into the teacher candidates’ emerging constructions of literacy pedagogy as well as their teaching decisions related to print and multimedia composition. The interventions also enabled the authors to identify patterns that specifically related to the teachers’ emerging perceptions of classrooms as communities. By positioning photographs, tableaux, and drawings as communal vessels through which the candidates could closely and publicly examine their own teaching, the authors observed the candidates’ embodied teaching portrayals, gained access to their thinking, and viewed their anticipated actions as developing teachers. Significantly, the role taking, tableaux, and drawings were not methods for reflecting on the past; rather these modes allowed the authors to glimpse the candidates’ futures through embodied acts.