Laurie Katz

Science Professors Serve as Mentors for Early Childhood Preservice Teachers in the Design and Implementation of Standards- Based Science Units

This study examined the use of science professors acting as mentors to enhance the science competency of early childhood educators. Findings indicate that mentor-mentee dyad interactions varied; however, mentors were able to assist with curriculum, science content, and resources. Although standards-based units were developed, there was little “real” science inquiry present. Findings did not support a higher-quality product that involved a mentoring relationship versus a nonmentoring relationship. The mentors’ lack of impact may have resulted from how the teacher candidate/science professor dyads “positioned” themselves relative to the others in developing a standards-based science unit.

Challenging Points of Contact among Supervisor, Mentor Teacher and Teacher Candidates: Conflicting Institutional Expectations.

Grounded in an ethnographic logic of inquiry utilizing the concept of languaculture, this study explores how cultural differences between a field-based team and the university supervisor led to unanticipated challenges and points of conflict in an early childhood teacher education program in Midwestern United States. By examining points of contact as points of cross-cultural interaction, researchers examine ways in which (a) cultural expectations proposed through the discourse-in-use of teacher candidates, mentor teacher, and university supervisory personnel made visible what counted as expected practices and (b) cultural differences in the inscriptions of the field-based actors and university program. Findings indicate that the field-based team (re)formulated and provided a rationale for what counted as appropriate ways of lesson planning and lead teaching. However, after providing extensive support for building the team, the university expectations returned to a static model, thus failing to accommodate to the needs of the team and mentor teacher. This study highlights how the roles and relationships among the triad need to become a focus particularly when new or innovation program designs are being undertaken. The results suggest that the dynamic roles and relationships among the triad need to become a focus particularly when new program designs are being undertaken. The study also calls for multiple angles of analysis of the demands and opportunities for different actors at points of contact across institutional boundaries.

Inaugural Editorial for Volume 46

As we officially begin our tenure as the incoming editors of Journal of Literacy Research (JLR), we want to provide some background and the key principles that will guide our editorship. JLR has historically been one of the very top journals in literacy research, and we intend to continue this tradition. To accomplish this, we have developed an ambitious set of goals that include reviewing and publishing research drawing on the highest standards in education, securing an interdisciplinary space for literacy research, balancing the need for conceptual, basic, applied, and policy-related work, promoting new and diverse voices, and constructively utilizing social media and other means to raise the impact of JLR. However, before we detail these goals, we begin with some history and background to our team.

Dancing with the pacifiers: infant's perizhivanya in a Brazilian early childhood education centre

ABSTRACT This study captures the possibilities of infants’ interactions in a Brazilian Early Childhood Education Centre. It contributes to an increasing number of educational research that is capturing the specificities of how young children use their understandings of context through gestures and verbal forms of language to create meanings as they develop social relationships with their peers and adults. The meanings of these interactions are explored based on the Vygotskyan notion of perezhivanie. The research design was guided by ethnography in education principles. Participant researchers used fieldnotes and video recording to capture infants’ interactions at the centre. For the purposes of this study, events were selected that related to the use of the cultural artefact pacifier. While teachers and families regarded the pacifier as an artefact that calms infants, helping them settle into a new environment, this study expands infants use of pacifiers as they also became artefacts to be explored and part of infants’ social relations with each other. The events analysed highlight the biology/culture and emotion/cognition unities in infants’ processes of development. This study argues for expanding teachers’ practices in a process of appreciating what infants’ intentions are and what they are communicating.

Researching the Intersection of Program Supervision and Field Placements: Interactional Ethnographic Telling Cases of Reflexive Decision-Making Process

In this chapter, we seek to contribute to this growing body of work by making transparent the interactional ethnographic logic of inquiry that is guiding, and has guided, an ongoing research program of an early childhood teacher education program (ECTE) with PreK-3rd grade licensure in the Midwest United States. This research program was designed to support a reflexive process, through which the program director (Katz, first author) sought to systematically explore the impact of particular changes being considered within the teacher education program, before scaling the change to the full program.

Advancing the Field of Literacy Studies

We stated in our inaugural editorial (March 2014, Vol. 46, Issue 1) that our goal is to publish articles representing both new and cutting-edge research and those pieces that “illuminate traditional findings in ways that open up new research areas, pursue novel questions, or promote the development of more sophisticated and promising methodologies.” The articles in this issue address previously well-researched topics (young children’s writing, critical literacy, and vocabulary learning), but they advance the field substantially by providing new depths of understanding with additional implications for alternative approaches in classrooms from preschool through the secondary years, both in the United States and internationally. For example, Deborah Rowe’s article “The Development of a Descriptive Measure of Early Childhood Writing: Results From the Write Start! Writing Assessment” adds considerable texture to a landscape of previous research in early writing by carefully analyzing preschoolers’ initial writing attempts to develop the first comprehensive, research-based descriptive measure of 2to 5-year-olds’ writing. Drawing from data collected in response to a standard task used in the Write Start! Writing Assessment, Rowe begins with a set of research-based descriptions of children’s early writing drawn from 15 well-known studies, and then carefully crafts a set of integrated categories across four important features of print—form, directionality, intentionality, and message content—resulting in a tool that provides a basis for comparing group and individual trajectories of change for each writing feature. With this tool, educators should better understand the capabilities of young children through developing a multi-dimensional profile that shows the child’s emergent understandings of different print features. Another example illuminating young children’s writing is Maria Ghiso’s “Arguing From Experience: Young Children’s Embodied Knowledge and Writing as Inquiry.” She finds that first graders can address a controversial issue such as gun control by taking a position, providing evidence, and considering opposing perspectives. If only a developmental perspective was theorized to explore young children’s capacity to grapple with difficult topics, one might suggest that children are too immature to address such issues at a young age. However, Ghiso finds otherwise as she utilizes feminist epistemologies to understand how first graders enact an alternative rationality by drawing on knowledge from their own personal experiences as central to the arguments they were constructing. Ghiso found that these students were not making a formalist argument about the constitutional right to bear arms, but were conceptualizing their arguments from their own personal experiences of being vulnerable to gun violence. Hence, Ghiso cautions that a