Mary Louise Gomez

Teacher education reform and prospective teachers' perspectives on teaching “Other people's” children

Abstract This paper depicts the perspectives of preservice U.S. teachers towards diverse learners and shows how these create barriers to equitable and just schooling for many children. It reviews national reports calling for changes in teacher education with regard to their attention to the teaching of “Other peoples” children and reviews teacher education program efforts at reform for diversity; finally, it provides analyses of these efforts that point the way for further struggles for change.

Personal Experience as a Guide To Teaching.

Abstract In this paper, the authors analyze their experiences in using storytelling about teaching to prepare second-career teacher candidates. Cases of two program participants are developed to show how personal experiences, rather than multicultural program ideals, became instantiated as guides for teaching practice. The authors show how prospective teachers developed a speech community in which they clarified their individual paths to school success and attempted to transport these understandings to instructing students of color who were struggling in school. For analyses, the authors draw on ideas about how people work in differing social groups with particular discourses that support group cohesiveness and ideals. Implications for teacher education using narrative as a vehicle for critical reflection are presented.

Who Are Latino Prospective Teachers and What Do They Bring to US Schools

In this article, the authors draw on life‐history methods to investigate the family, school, university, and teacher education experiences of three Latino teacher candidates in a large, midwestern, research‐oriented university in the United States. They show how in university social experiences and in teacher education classes and field experiences, these young men often felt misinterpreted in interactions with white females in particular. Also evident is their strong desire to make personal connections with youth and families they teach. The authors offer suggestions for how teacher educators can be more responsive to prospective male elementary teachers and teacher candidates of color.

Telling Teaching Stories

1We thank Maureen Gillette, Carl Grant, Beth Graue, Wayne Otto, Dawn Perkins, and Tom Sehnick for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

The Structure and Goals of a Student Teaching Program and the Character and Quality of Supervisory Discourse.

Abstract This study compares the form and substance of supervisory discourse between university supervisors and elementary student teachers during postobservation conferences in two teacher education programs with similar organizational structures but with very different ideological orientations. One program represents a traditional-craft orientation to teacher education while the other represents an inquiry-oriented approach. The findings indicate a great deal of similarity with regard to both the form and substance of supervisory discourse in the two programs and suggest the need for changes in the organizational context of student teaching if innovations in the curriculum of student teaching are to be realized.

Telling Stories of Our Teaching, Reflecting on Our Practices.

Abstract This article explores how one teacher educator developed contexts in which White, middle-class prospective teachers told teaching stories to one another in a weekly, on-campus, student-teaching seminar. The goal of the seminar was for the student teachers to consider alternative ways to think about and to behave toward children different from themselves in race, social class, and language backgrounds. Through storytelling, the prospective teachers saw the strengths of children whom others wished to label as deficient. By sharing stories, the prospective teachers engaged in collaborative critique regarding classroom events, took greater control over their own development as teachers, and developed plans for future action that support all children.

“It’s not them, it’s me”: competing discourses in one aspiring teacher’s talk

In this paper, we deploy M.M. Bakhtin’s notions about how language works to understand aspiring teachers’ struggles about the intersecting roles race, class, gender, language background, and sexual orientation play in students’ school lives and learning. Through life-history interviews and document analysis, we investigated the authoritative and internally persuasive discourses one aspiring teacher brought with her and took from a 15-week long course on a predominantly White Midwestern public university campus. Ideas she encountered in the course and its required tutoring component challenged her thinking about how various facets of people’s lives (such as those we list above) and the contexts in which they live, work and are schooled, affect how they are perceived, what they know, and can do.

Cultivating an Informed Empathy: An Aspiring Teacher Examines his Talk and Actions

This text traces the development of an aspiring biracial teacher’s growing understandings of African American youth he tutors. It deploys a Bakhtinian conceptual framework for how we might develop new understandings of ourselves through relationships and dialogues with others. It offers examples from one aspiring teacher’s experiences to illustrate how when individuals look inward, that they can come to different interpretations of who people are and why they behave as they do. Further, it offers teacher educators examples of ways to engage aspiring teachers’ compassion and empathy for those they see as “others.”

‘The roar that lies on the other side of silence’: supporting aspiring teachers in developing dissonance, uncertainty, and compassion for diverse learners

ABSTRACT In this text, we examine ways teacher educators might inspire: compassion in aspiring teachers for students with whom they interact, and dissonance and uncertainty concerning ways they talk and think about them. These activities primarily fall into two categories: (1) working in schools where large numbers of children differing from themselves in race, language background, and socioeconomic status attend, and (2) offering multiple opportunities for students to critically talk about their interactions with children and families. Through these experiences, guided by their teacher educators, we hope university students will develop critical reflection on their own and others’ practices.