Linda Abrams

Critiquing Teacher Preparation Research

This is the second of a two-part article intended to offer teacher educators a cohesive overview of the sprawling and uneven field of research on teacher preparation by identifying, analyzing, and critiquing its major programs. The article discusses research on teacher preparation for the knowledge society and research on teacher preparation for diversity and equity, the second and third programs of research the authors identified through their massive review of research on initial teacher education, 2000-2012. Guided by their “Research on Teacher Preparation as Historically Situated Social Practice” theoretical/analytic framework, the authors describe the multiple clusters of studies comprising each of these programs of research and examine the social practices in which researchers engaged within one cluster selected from each. This article also suggests new directions for research on teacher education based on lacunae in the literature and on our analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing field.

Finding a third space in teacher education: creating an urban teacher residency

This paper describes an urban teacher residency program, the Newark Montclair Urban Teacher Residency, a collaborative endeavor between the Newark, New Jersey Public Schools and Montclair State University, built on a decades-long partnership. The authors see the conceptual work of developing this program as creating a “third space” in teacher education. We detail the ways in which we conceptualize epistemology and clinical practice in teacher education, and changes in the roles of the community, and P-12 teachers that occur in a third space. Providing an account of our messy and nonlinear process demonstrates the struggles of creating new spaces for teacher education. We believe the theory that informs our work, the challenges we face, and the strategies for meeting those challenges illustrate the tenuous and ever-evolving nature of doing work in the “third space.”

Tensions of Reimagining Our Roles as Teacher Educators in a Third Space: Revisiting a Co/Autoethnography through a Faculty Lens.

This co/autoethnography uses our lens as university faculty to examine how engaging in a year-long self-study with mentors nurtured a complicated third space where we could together begin to reimagine our roles as teacher educators. Two secondary faculty members and a doctoral assistant used co/autoethnography to revisit a collaborative self-study with mentors to better identify both the individual and programmatic complexities that arise when a third space is opened and we are invited to reinvent our perspectives and responsibilities as co-teacher educators. We ask two questions: What happens when faculty facilitate a third-space teacher education program with mentor teachers? How does this third space influence the teacher education practices in an urban teacher residency program? We present a series of tensions about our work together as teacher educators in the third space. They include professional into authentic relationships, authority into collaboration, collaborative agency into individual agency, and apprenticing to master teacher into apprenticing within a collective. Following findings about each tension, we discuss how we as faculty navigated each tension. Finally, we consider the implications of our work for all field-based teacher education programs.

Exploring Inquiry in the Third Space: Case Studies of a Year in an Urban Teacher-Residency Program

ABSTRACT Using case studies, we describe what happens from novice to apprentice when preservice teachers learn to teach in an urban teacher-residency (UTR) program with a focus on inquiry. Our UTR operates within a “third space” in teacher education, seeking to realign traditional power relationships and to create an alternate arena where the roles of the university, school, teacher candidate, and community can be reimagined. This third space encourages preservice teachers to be inquirers themselves in order for them to support their students as inquirers.

Articulating the Intimate Knowledge of Teaching

The dilemmas of creating a strong mentoring program in the third space are multiple. As described above, for all mentors, the prospect of trying to explain the intimate knowledge of teaching and practice can be daunting and isolating.

Thinking with Posthuman Perspectives in Self-Study Research

Abstract In this study, we set out to explore processes of individual and group becomings of a self-study collective over time and distance, and with/through technology. Born out of a self-study project in one of our early doctoral courses, our self-study community has evolved over several years to one that is hybrid in nature. As we have continued our collaboration through online media, a tension arose at the juncture of our fundamentally relational work together, our need for the physical, embodied aspect of learning and self-study and the hybrid, often disembodied, experience provided by substituting online meetings for those conducted in-person. In this article we explore these tensions through pivotal moments and lines of flight in our self-study work over the past year. To frame these moments, we draw on ideas from posthumanism, which offers ways to conceptualize our collective as a multiplicity, account for the relational and material aspects of our work, address the agency of non-human actors (such as technology) in our collaboration, and consider our self-study practice a dynamic, complex, contextualized, situated phenomenon.

The Future of Self-Study: Through and With Technology

In this chapter, we look across the contributions included in this book to highlight the affordances and challenges presented when using technology with/in the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP). Authors used technology as both tool and resource in their teacher education practice, and in so doing, transformed their understandings of themselves as well as their pedagogical beliefs and approaches. A second major focus was technology as part of self-study assemblages prompting us to argue that when technology is understood as coming into composition with teacher educators and other elements of teacher education context, we gain a more cogent and complex vision of the transformative potential of technology. In this chapter, we explore these themes against a backdrop of our own experiences as a self-study collective to trace, and problematize, the development of our relationship with and through technology. We also offer recommendations for reframing the relationship between self-study, technology, and teacher education practice for the future.

Exploring and Connecting Lines of Flight in a Self -Study Community

A small group of doctoral students and a professor faced each other around a narrow oval conference table during the final few moments of an intensive summer class where we had started to explore our individual capacities and identities as change agents. Although the class itself was at an end, we knew our work together was not done.