Melissa Mosley Wetzel

Studying Agency in Literacy Teacher Education: A Layered Approach to Positive Discourse Analysis.

Critically oriented forms of discourse analysis have focused largely on oppression and injustice. Signaling a new turn in the field, scholars have called for an analytic focus on moments of liberation and agency, referring to this orientation as “positive discourse analysis” (PDA). In this research, we turn our attention to a case study of agency and leadership in teacher education. We analyze the discursive contours of a workshop designed and presented at an Educating for Change Curriculum Fair by a preservice teacher, whom we refer to as Leslie, about culturally relevant teaching. Arguing that PDA is not a new approach but a shift in analytic focus, we draw on the tools of narrative analysis, critical discourse analysis, and multimodal analysis. This turn toward the “positive” provided us with insight into the discourses processes associated with agency: how Leslie accepts and extends invitations for agency, uses problems to extend learning, uses narratives and counter-narratives and creates multiple storylines for herself and others. We call for further research that considers agency across contexts so that we might be better able to identify agentic stances and deepen such acts.

“It’s Our Writing, We Decide It”: Voice, Tensions, and Power in a Critical Literacy Workshop

This qualitative case examines two focal elementary students’ experiences in a critical reading and writing workshop within a high-stakes testing context. Drawing on qualitative and discourse analyses of field notes, audio and video recordings of literature discussions, semi-structured interviews, and workshop artifacts, we demonstrate students’ critical text analysis through the lens of their own experiences. The critical workshop spaces allowed students the opportunity to practice skills associated with writing and reading practices while also entering into larger social and political conversations about the way their world works. Further, the findings highlight the tensions of the critical workshop, in particular, what happens when students use socially active voices in a school and state where testing has a stronghold on curricular and instructional decisions.

Pull Up a Chair and Listen to Them Write: Preservice Teachers Learn From Beginning Writers

This qualitative study was conducted in the context of a preservice teacher education program with a focus on early literacy. The study focused on the insights preservice teachers gained from working closely beside one emergent writer. The authors report on six focus cases and identify five cross-case themes—describing preservice teachers who (a) approached young children’s efforts to compose texts with deep appreciation regardless of the child’s level of development; (b) deeply valued the time spent near a young writer and described their own learning as emanating both from the writer and the writing; (c) gained an understanding of how literacy emerges/develops, and made efforts to take up the discourse of literacy teachers; (d) talked sensitively about the importance of their teaching moves—the “just right” invitations or steps that enabled children to take risks; and (e) valued the purposeful writing that emanated from children’s interests and lives and motivated them to write. The findings are interpreted within Grossman’s (2011) framework for reenvisioning teacher education as “practice” supported by representations, deconstructions, and approximations.

A Video-Based Mentoring Tool for Cooperating Teachers Coaching Preservice Teachers: Supporting Reflection around Literacy Practice

Originality/value Teacher educators will find the RCA model to be a new way of approaching collaborative work with teachers in the field within a practice-based teacher education program.

Learning to teach, learning to act: becoming a critical literacy teacher

ABSTRACT Critical literacy requires an exploration of privilege and social justice. This includes an exploration of power and action in one’s “inner” and “outer” lives. This qualitative case study illustrates the ways in which Jonah, a preservice teacher, navigates social practices and actions in his roles as a student, activist, and literacy teacher. Through critical discourse analysis, we conceptualize social action in relation to critical literacy teaching, using a framework of discourses of, discourses as, and discourses in action to construct a nuanced understanding of social action in relation to critical literacy. Given the demands of a standardized curriculum on teachers’ autonomy, this is an important illustration of how social action can be enacted and embodied through the act of teaching.

Approximating Literacy Practices in Tutorials: What is Learned and What Matters for Teacher Preparation

ABSTRACT In this study, we examined the learning of preservice teachers associated with the features of a literacy tutorial experience. Our qualitative study focused on the close inspection of the experiences of 7 focus cases out of the 19 preservice teachers enrolled in our program across a one-semester tutorial experience. Through our research we identified three preservice teacher learning themes and seven features of the tutorial experience that afforded opportunities for preservice teachers to build these understandings. Overall, our findings support the importance of this tutorial experience to the development of teachers who can adapt their practices to students and contexts. Our findings also resonate with what others have suggested as the importance of authentic contexts to try out practices of literacy teaching within preservice teacher preparation programs.

Dialogue in the Support of Learning to Teach: A Case Study of a Mentor/Mentee Pair in a Teacher Education Programme.

Abstract In this paper, we examine the role of reflection in teacher preparation, specifically within a mentoring relationship between cooperating and preservice teacher. We report findings from a case analysis of this pair who engaged in problem-posing dialogue within pre- and post-conferences around practice over one year of their work together in an elementary-level classroom. The context is an innovative programme in which cooperating teachers pursue their Master’s degree while undergraduates (preservice teachers) complete their elementary education degrees. Our analysis of talk about teaching during six coaching cycles as well as supporting documents illustrates how Jane’s mentoring supported reflective practices and disrupted a notion of a field experience as simply a place to ‘practice’ pedagogical knowledge with corrective feedback. Additionally, we explore the tensions in this approach to mentoring. This case study has implications for teacher educators who seek to bolster teacher preparation through the support of mentoring relationships.

Exploring Some Design Principles for Tutoring in Preservice Teacher Preparation

ABSTRACT In this article we summarize our research into literacy preservice teacher preparation. We situate our research on tutorials in the practice turn in teacher preparation. We describe the evolution of our work drawing on findings from seven different studies with the goal of identifying the design features of tutorial experiences that promote learning to teach. We describe each of these studies moving toward the identification of twelve design features that are considerate of: the structure of tutorial experiences; and the focus on intellectual and socio-cultural assets and identities of the tutee(s), and the mediating processes that support growth in learning to teach. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for research into tutoring in literacy preservice teacher preparation.

“I Couldn’t Have Learned This Any Other Way”: Learning to Teach Literacy across Concurrent Practicum Experiences

ABSTRACT The authors, a team of literacy teacher educators who are focused on extending our own understandings of preservice teacher (PST) learning, conducted a cross-case analysis of how PSTs learned to teach literacy in three concurrent practicum experiences. We draw on Grossman’s framework of representations, decompositions, and approximations to describe and interpret what PSTs learned. Through a focus on one student, Deanna, the authors illustrate three findings: PSTs came to value the variety of forms of students’ literacies that reflected their ages, language backgrounds, and cultures/identities; they came to understand that relationships are essential to teaching and learning, and building relationships requires “putting myself out there” as well as “getting to know you”; and coming to know about students’ literacies in contexts in which students can talk, read, make images, and write from life allowed PSTs to coconstruct a curriculum that followed the students’ leads. The concurrence of practicum experience allowed for deepened reflections and understandings of literacy teaching. To extend Grossman’s work, the authors suggest the importance of using artifacts of PSTs’ own practices as representations in a cycle of reflection.

A Digital Tool Grows (and Keeps Growing) from the Work of a Community of Writers.

This article reports on a collaborative inquiry into the use of a researcher-designed digital tool for the support of writing instruction in elementary classrooms. The digital tool in question is an online collection of original writing samples produced by elementary children that was conceptualized as a resource for coaching new writers using easily retrievable samples of “gems” produced by other young writers. This article describes the teacher education context from which the design of this tool emerged as well as the evaluation of this tool by a group of Master Reading Teacher candidates. Grounded in the literature on the use of mentor texts in writing instruction, this article highlights the role that authentic child-authored texts can play in supporting teachers’ instructional moves. The article ends with a discussion of implications for enhancing teacher professional development through the use of digital tools that can be utilized to promote reflective inquiry into writing pedagogy.