Community Fieldwork in Teacher Education

Theory and Practice

Heidi L Hallman, Melanie Burdick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317746386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In teacher education, field work in community-based spaces (including foster homes and programs for homeless youth) is frequently contrasted with "traditional" field experiences in classroom settings, where beginning teachers are immediately introduced to teacher-centered models of instruction. This volume works against such a model, presenting a counter-narrative of new teachers' understanding of the act of teaching. By exploring their work with at risk youth in community-based sites, the authors uncover how non-traditional spaces for teaching and learning have the potential to open new doors for reimagining the teaching act and teacher identity.

This volume examines how prospective teachers have used writing within unconventional spaces as catalysts for considering what it means to become a teacher, as well as how the work of teaching can be conceptualized. It unites the practical aspects of field work and with theoretical conceptions of teaching, and envisions how the work and the definition of "teaching" can be broadened.

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Community Fieldwork in Teacher Education and Composition Studies

Fieldwork in Teacher Education

Teacher education programs have identified early and diverse field experiences as one of the keys to successful teacher education (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1987; Sleeter, 2008; Zeichner, 2010). Holistically, such field experiences exist to foster teacher candidates’ understanding and practice of culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2001), as well as assist beginning teachers’ understanding of the constructs of theory and practice (Shulman, 2005). Although field experiences have been acknowledged as an important component of teacher education programs, little work has explored the unique qualities of community-based settings as potential sites for teachers’ learning (see Coffey, 2010). Suggesting that community-based settings have the power to transform the ways that beginning teachers think about the effects of schooling in their students’ lives, Coffey (2010) also suggests that community-based sites can encourage beginning teachers to examine the extent to which social factors influence students’ success in school. Community-based settings offer sites for beginning teachers to consider how schools reside in the greater context of a community, and this can potentially broaden beginning teachers’ understandings of where learning takes place (Rogers, Marshall, & Tyson, 2006). Extending teacher education programs’ commitment to preparing teacher candidates for environments that not only are part of schools but are also situated within communities, becomes a commitment to preparing beginning teachers for understanding that teaching and schooling extend beyond the walls of the classroom and into the world.

Some scholars (e.g., Coffey, 2010; Rogers et al., 2006) have suggested that community-based field experiences can potentially work on multiple levels to enhance beginning teachers’ insight into both students’ lives outside of school and the ways in which the institution of school responds to students. Community-based field sites, often contrasted with traditional ‘apprenticeship of observation’ models of fieldwork (Lortie, 1975) within classrooms and schools, work toward the goals of broadening beginning teachers’ conceptions of where student learning takes place as well as support the idea that teachers are not only part of a school but part of a larger community. Community-based field experiences encourage beginning teachers to contextualize students’ lives as part of the fabric of the larger community, and emphasize that familiarity with students’ communities is important to the work of teaching.

Service-Learning in Teacher Education

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in what is known as service-learning in teacher education (e.g., Carter-Andrews, 2009). Service-learning has also been applied to many different disciplinary domains within teacher education, and most recently, service-learning has been highlighted with its application to literacy teacher education (e.g., Kinloch & Smagorinsky, 2014). Practitioners in the PK–12 context, as well as teacher educators, have benefited from this connection, which focuses on how service-learning can be integrated with disciplinary knowledge. Smagorinsky’s (2014) efforts to connect service-learning to the English education program at the University of Georgia serves as a model for our work, and Smagorinsky states that the goal for the service-learning project that he initiated was to “place each of [his] students in a one-on-one tutoring relationship with a student who came from a radically different cultural environment in terms of race, ethnicity, social class, educational aspiration, family situation, and other such factors” (p. 92). In doing so, he hoped to provide beginning teachers and students in the community a mutually beneficial educational experience. Our book begins in the space of also aiming to create an experience both youth in the community and teachers in our university programs that would be mutually beneficial.

As Moore (2014) states, the concept of service-learning has been fraught with “mixed messages” (p. 109) and in common parlance is sometimes referred to as volunteerism. Yet, service-learning’s relationship with and history of the concepts of server and served demand a more complex and nuanced understanding of service-learning’s goals. Service-learning, a component of the educational system in the United States since the 1800s, is, as Eyler and Giles (1999) state, concerned with the “links between personal and interpersonal development and cognitive, academic development” (p. 9). Community service, Flower (2008) notes, brings “idealism and social consciousness into the academy. It brings a human face and complex lives into discussion of ideas and issues. But it can also plunge teachers and students into its own set of contradictory and sometimes profoundly conflicted social and literate practices” (p. 153). As service-learning situates itself with both the notions of ‘service’ and ‘inquiry,’ scholars (e.g., Flower, 2002, 2008; Schutz & Gere, 1998) have debated the balance act that service-learning must strike between the two; as Kaufman (2004) observes, “English education students often arrive in Methods classes eager to learn the ins and outs of lesson plans, but, through service-learning, they also discover that they need to understand something more about themselves; the question of what they need to be effective about is a crucial one” (p. 178).

Being effective in the act of service-learning means being open to inquiry and reflection. Short stints of ‘service’ in the community, such as forays into soup kitchens and homes for the elderly, referred to by Mertz as “guerrilla service” (Mertz & Schroerlucke, 1998, as cited in Flower, 2002, p. 181), have been criticized for being superficial acts of service lacking opportunities for critical reflection about such experiences. Furthermore, these short service acts reinforce the distance between the ‘giver’ and the ‘receiver’ in the service act, thereby reinscribing the server–served dichotomy.

Flower’s (2002, 2008) exploration of service-learning problematizes the server-served dichotomy that service-learning often creates, and articulates a more complex picture of the potential role reversals present in the act of service-learning. Her work features reciprocity—a concept that refers to both the interchange in roles between teacher and student as well as the interchange between university and community partnerships—as central to service-learning’s definition, thus seeking to reverse the long-standing practice of the academy using the community for the academy’s own ends (Zlotkowski, 1996). As Flower (1997) notes, some people in the service-learning act have been continually cast as “the knowledgeable servers, while [others are cast] as the clients, patients, or the educationally deficient—the served” (p. 96), and a server-served dichotomy is often perpetuated in service-learning’s connotation. Flower’s (2008) recent work, however, theorizes service-learning as having the capacity to break this dichotomy through an exploration of the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other.’

We view our work as squarely inhabiting the tenets of service-learning, yet we also seek to distinguish it as primarily residing within the realm of teacher education. Our term, community fieldwork, seeks to reconcile a need to be both service-learning and teacher education fieldwork and subscribes to Flower’s conclusion that the primary goals of service-learning are twofold. First, service-learning must have a goal of viewing self and other as ultimately intertwined. A breaking of the self-other dichotomy through the act of service-learning is essential for participants’ reflection on self as well as for participants’ recognition of their prior, and perhaps limited, understandings. Second, the act of service-learning must be pursued alongside a process of inquiry. Flower (2008) notes that inquiry must begin by “confronting the conflicts within the everyday practice of outreach” (p. 154). These two tenets, as applied to the field of teacher education, are embodied within the community fieldwork experience. Community fieldwork, as inquiry, becomes not a series of interventions or programs but, instead, is treated as a situated sociocultural activity—an activity that is always socially, culturally, and historically located.

More than Technical Rationality

Schön (1987) used the concepts of ‘artistry’ and ‘reflection-in-action’ to move the discussion about competence away from reliance solely on what is known of as technical rationality, or the idea that competence is based only on systematic, scientific knowledge. When applied to teaching, or what Schön refers to as the “swampy zones of practice” (p. 3), artistry in teaching urges the teacher to reshape practice while engaged in practice. Hence, the term reflection-in-action seeks to keep the flow of practice intact while encouraging teachers to reshape practice. Schön stresses that different types of reflection serve different purposes in acquiring artistry.

Like the goals of service-learning and reflection-in-action, community fieldwork has the potential to disrupt deficit theorizing on the part of teachers (Sleeter, 2008, p. 1948), thus encouraging teacher candidates to critically question schooling and patterns of inequity. Because we know that many preservice teachers learn to teach by teaching their university peers in mock teaching environments (Shrofel, 1991), many beginning teachers have little direct, field-based experiences working with youth before student teaching. Therefore, the attitudes that beginning teachers express early in their careers may influence how they will develop as teachers.

Tenets of service-learning are useful in describing how community-based field experiences can be theoretically situated within teacher education programs (e.g., Anderson & Erickson, 2003; Boyle-Baise, 2002). Service- learning, as applied to teacher education, has been conceptualized as more than volunteerism, and Feinstein (2005) states that “the broad intended outcome of service-learning is to blend service and learning so that the service reinforces the college students’ understanding of the learner and educational practices, and in return the learning improves and strengthens the service they can provide as teachers” (p. 3). Service-learning offers the possibility of reenvisioning the relationship between teacher and students, therefore becoming a site where teacher candidates can mitigate and reevaluate their prior beliefs (Feiman-Nemser, & Buchman, 1987).

Service-learning in teacher education is frequently contrasted with ‘traditional’ field experiences in classrooms where beginning teachers are immediately socialized into the role of teacher as ‘expert’ (Cuban, 1993; Lortie, 1975). Portes and Smagorinsky (2010) have noted that teacher candidates are still by and large socialized into traditional, teacher-centered models of instruction, composed, in part, of “a conception in which a teacher stands before students who face forward in seats and who are supposedly poised to listen and learn” (p. 236). Service-learning, and community-based fieldwork, works against this model, thereby becoming both a counter-narrative and conduit for beginning teachers to reconsider the relationship between teacher and students. The work that teacher candidates do in community-based field sites, then, can be conceptualized as service-learning for prospective teachers. Because the role of teacher as expert is put into question in the service-learning act, beginning teachers are prompted to critically examine the relationship between teacher and students, something that is often ignored in more ‘traditional’ field placement or practicum/student-teaching experiences.

Teacher Education as a Process of Socialization

Developing as a teacher inherently invites a process of socialization. Participating in fieldwork within teacher education is influenced by the process and structure of teacher education, more broadly, and being and becoming a teacher, Britzman (1991) argues, is part of a process of socialization influenced by chronologies. The concept of chronologies conveys a simultaneity of time, place, events, and the meanings that we give to them (Britzman, 1991, p. 55). Britzman acknowledges that beginning teachers are influenced by at least four chronologies during the process of becoming teachers and each chronology makes available a different range of voices and discourses. As beginning teachers move through these four chronologies, they encounter discourses that have shaped the chronologies, yet, at the same time, they bring their own experiences to the process of becoming a teacher.

Beginning teachers bring the first chronology with them, which is their educational biography and the synthesis they have created to make sense of the rules that govern schools, the nature of knowing, and the purpose of schooling. The second chronology involves the beginning teachers’ experiences in the university and teacher education. The third chronology is the student teaching experience, where Britzman argues that beginning teachers begin to become privy to aspects of the teacher’s world and departmental politics, and the fourth chronology begins when the teacher becomes a new, first-year teacher. The fourth chronology, as Britzman describes it, invites a teacher’s newfound contemplation and understanding of the influences of “the school system, students, the teacher union, the community, public policy, professional organizations, and the cumulative experience of their classroom lives” (p. 56).

Our work seeks to uproot the assumption that the chronologies that Britzman (1991) describe must be solidified. Instead, we embrace the possibility that facets of the awareness and knowledge that teachers gain in the fourth chronology (first year teaching) can be introduced earlier. Britzman notes that the “sense we make of each chronology depends on the discourses we take up” (1991, p. 56). We see that taking up particular discourses—such as deliberating the nature of students’ learning in ‘nontraditional’ spaces of learning and teaching—can be beneficial for teachers before they enter the first year of their teaching career. Furthermore, using the first chronology, one’s biography, as a site for dialogue with the process of teacher education, student teaching, and in-service teaching, is viewed as a continual process and one that can be fostered throughout the development one undergoes while in a teacher education program.

We also see that teacher education must capitalize on helping students understand from early in their teacher education program that schools exist as part of a larger community. We imagine that community-based field placements can assist in the disruption of normative discourses. Britzman (1991) writes that the “normative discourse in teacher education reduces the complexity of competing chronologies by authorizing a functionalist version of socialization that is incapable of attending to the site of socialization as contested terrain, and the ways in which the individual becomes the site of struggle” (p. 56). The individual as a the site of struggle, to us, produces the possibility for agency, and this agency gives rise to the potential that beginning teachers may rethink prior assumptions and may question the normative discourses at work. In the next chapter, we discuss the relationship between the agency that teachers have and the discourses in which they participate.

We are cognizant that the way we position agency does not mean self-actualization in the sense that individuals operate free from context. Instead, we recognize the cultural contexts in which teachers work always push back on teachers’ ability to possess agency. At times, this pushback may be rather indoctrinating, and may cause beginning teachers to resist seeking a voice that contradicts the cultural context in which they find themselves. Other times, the cultural context pushes beginning teachers to act and question. In many ways, this dialogic relationship between the self and the context mirrors the relationship between self and other, as both seek to position the teacherly self as existing within a multiplicity of competing ideologies and discourses. The dialogic relationship between self and context, and between self and other, constitutes the theoretical backbone of our book. Rather than seeing this continual back and forth as antagonistic, we see this relationship of negotiation and change as productive.

Fieldwork in Composition Studies

Traditionally, composition classes have been designed to teach students the basics of writing within the academy. Correspondingly, education classes have traditionally been designed to teach students the basics of instruction within a traditional K–12 classroom space. These courses often apprentice students into the status quo, without asking them to question or interact critically in their learning. Bar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Beginning at the Margins
• 1. Community Fieldwork in Teacher Education and Composition Studies
• 2. Composing Teachers, Teachable Students, and Teachable Spaces
• 3. Questioning through Writing: Writing as Dialogic Response
• 4. Questioning Teaching: Disrupting a Teaching Mythology
• 5. Questioning Curriculum: Reenvisioning Assumptions about Curricular Control and Expectations
• 6. Questioning Normal: Composing Ethical Representations of At-Risk Youth
• 7. The Promise of Work at the Margins: Community Fieldwork in Teacher Education
• Appendix A: Syllabus for Curriculum and Instruction in Middle School/Secondary English Language Arts Classrooms
• Appendix B: Syllabus for Advanced Composition—Teaching Emphasis
• Appendix C: Henry Taylor's Life Graph
• Appendix D: Anne Chisholm's Life Graph
• References
• Index