Michael Dias

Using Digital Video for Professional Development in Urban Schools: A Preservice Teacher's Experience with Reflection

Abstract This study used a variety of qualitative methods within the context of an exploratory single case study to examine the use of digital video as a means for a preservice teacher to capture personal teaching episodes and reflect on them as an integral part of her professional development. Results demonstrate how an urban preservice teacher’s work with digital video of her teaching promoted reflection and the development of teacher identity. Results also demonstrated how a teacher educator was able to use the digital video as a tool to help the beginning teacher identify effective practices.

Youth Activism: Considering Higher Ground

We were raised in river cities. Brendan’s first home was on the east side of the Susquehanna River, while Mike grew up near the confluence of the Tennessee, Cumberland and Ohio Rivers. Water flows some 1,200 miles to get from Harrisburg to Paducah, yet one event joined our thinking as sure as the flow of the rivers. On March 28th, 1979, a partial nuclear meltdown occurred on one of two reactors at the Three Mile Island plant in Dauphin Island, Pennsylvania. This environmental disaster in Brendan’s “backyard” made international news. Although neither of us remembers many details of that accident, we have always been skeptical of nuclear power as an alternative to the hyper-fossil-fuel-based society in which we live. Perhaps because the proliferation of nuclear power plants never progressed in the United States following this accident, or maybe just because we were kids who thought more about sports and other ventures than the environment, this event did not inspire us to learn or do anything.

Practicing What We Teach

Science Teacher Educators as K-12 Teachers: Practicing What We Teach presents the professional purposes and benefits realized when science teacher educators arrange opportunities to teach children and adolescents in public schools and informal settings. This monograph for the Association for Science Teacher Education (ASTE) offers practical and theoretical insights for science teacher education articulated by ASTE scholars who have acted on their conviction that K-12 science teaching practice is integral to their work as science teacher educators. Each of the 16 narratives is placed in one of four groups defined by level of immersion in the teaching role. These groupings range from full-time “teaching with no ties to university” to part-time “teaching while university professor,” thus providing different models for integrating K-12 teaching with the professoriate. Each chapter presents science teacher educators as professionals engaged in reflective analysis of experiences in teaching children or adolescents science. This is not a collection of chapters that depict teacher educators as role models, showing the classroom teacher “how it’s done” or even that they’ve “still got it.” Rather, it is the willingness to learn anew about teaching youth that generates these honest accounts of praxis enhancing credibility and relevance for the teacher educators authoring these chapters. This introduction surveys the strengths and distinguishing aspects of each chapter.

Teaching Youth Again: Reflecting on Renewal

Most of the professors contributing to this book had spent several years away from teaching children and adolescents, and they yearned to return to K-12 teaching to prove to themselves that they could (still) be effective teachers of youth. They could not move forward as credible people of reform and reform-based practices without putting into practice with K-12 students what they espoused as science educators. The preservice and in-service teachers with whom they worked needed to know, for example, that inquiry learning could be supported in the context of their schools and with their students (Lunenberg et al. 2007). By teaching again, they also aspired to updating and strengthening knowledge and skills in practice, practical knowledge for leading productive learning environments for science (Van Driel et al. 2001). Most of the contributing authors sought to regain credibility with fresh experiences teaching youth of diverse backgrounds and in schools with twenty-first-century technology and high-stakes testing. More boldly, a few ventured into teaching science for the first time, working with learners in grades below their prior teaching experience.