Knowledge, Pedagogy, and Postmulticulturalism

Shifting the Locus of Learning in Urban Teacher Education

Gay Wilgus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137275899
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275905
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

This volume identifies, problematizes, and discusses issues specific to the design of educational programs for teacher candidates from working class, ethnic- and language-minority, and immigrant backgrounds, taking as its starting point the distinctive, complex perspectives that these candidates bring to the university classroom.

Chapter 1

Discovering Inquiry-Based Learning through Oral History Projects

Megan Blumenreich

Introduction

HELPING TEACHER CANDIDATES REASSESS THEIR EDUCATIONAL philosophy is a vital aspect of preparing the current generation of candidates to become innovative teachers. Because of federal mandates that have emphasized accountability for the last two decades (Ravitch 2010), this generation of American teacher candidates, most often educated in schools that were focused on accountability rather than children’s learning, may have never experienced student-centered teaching as students. This trend of focusing on accountability has been strongest in urban schools (Schneider 2011), making it even less likely that teacher candidates from these settings might have had firsthand experience with inquiry-driven curricula.

This chapter argues that the experience of crafting an oral history project is an effective way to guide undergraduate teacher candidates to rethink their traditional beliefs about education and to investigate inquiry-based learning. After describing the context of this study and key related educational concepts, I provide links to three of the students’ digital final projects in order to demonstrate the type of oral history work urban teacher learners created in a course titled Inquiry in Education. Following these examples, I discuss the three themes that emerged across the class’s work throughout the semester: students’ appreciation for having authority over their own work; excitement experienced by students when learning something new; and students’ desire to learn more about their oral history topic following this experience. Finally, in the discussion of the findings, I describe the value of these experiences through the lens of the educational concept “Funds of Knowledge.”

Context: The Setting and the Inquiry in Education Course

This study takes place at a public university in New York City that boasts 16,000 students who “represent nearly every culture, every language, every religion of our global community” (The City College of New York). In fact, 16 of the 25 students in my class were either immigrants themselves or children of immigrants, representing countries such as Cambodia, Dominican Republic, China, Peru, Guyana, Bosnia, and Togo. Most of the students reported that they were the first in their families to attend college. Inquiry in Education is the first course that undergraduate teacher candidates take when considering whether to become childhood education majors.

The 21 preservice undergraduate students featured in this study were members of a recent section of my Inquiry in Education course. Many began their education coursework with less-than-innovative perceptions of elementary schooling, as shown in the answers to questionnaires they completed about their educational experiences. They attended New York City public elementary schools or parochial schools, and while some described teachers who taught with the use of songs or who incorporated “hands-on” learning experiences in science class, many more remembered “repetition” as a pedagogical technique in elementary school. One student who had already had taken a couple of education courses described her elementary school experience this way: “My typical learning experiences were that the teacher and the textbook are always right. Students were required to listen and agree to all the teacher was saying. We basically had little or no voice.” Other typical memories included reading aloud in front of the class, learning grammar and penmanship, and receiving rewards such as stickers for good work. My students’ educational histories suggested that they could benefit from an inquiry-driven approach to learning. Most of these students were born the early 1990s, a time that marked the emergence of market-driven education policy (Ravitch 2010). Many went to public schools that were strongly influenced by a new, federal focus in education on data collection and accountability rather than curriculum and children’s learning (Ravitch 2010). Given the changes in the national educational system over the last two decades, exposing today’s preservice teachers to inquiry is vital to the development of teacher learners who can draw on such experiences when they are teachers themselves.

Related Research Literature

It is troubling that today’s teacher education students have experienced such narrowly prescribed approaches to education, since, as Lortie (1975) notes in his work on “apprenticeship of observation,” teachers’ notions of schooling often stem from what they have unofficially learned about the teaching process throughout their own education. Following Lortie, some educational researchers have looked at how teacher candidates’ beliefs about education have been influenced by their own schooling experiences or life experiences (Agee 1997; Calderhead 1989). Calderhead (1989) found that these influences affected what information the new teachers adopted from their teacher education programs, how they thought about teaching, and what type of teachers they became. Along these lines, Moore (2003) explains that in recent years the field experience during preservice students’ education programs has become more procedure oriented and less inquiry oriented. Moore, however, also notes that there are some teacher educators who currently encourage preservice teachers to gain a better grasp of inquiry-based approaches to teaching. These teachers learn about inquiry by seeing it enacted in real classrooms during field experiences, rather than learning about it as an abstract concept in theory seminars (2003).

This study builds on Moore’s perspective, exploring how conducting an oral history project can develop in preservice teachers a more inquiry-oriented approach to learning. Inquiry-driven education is an often misunderstood teaching theory that has been derived from the work of educators such as John Dewey and Paolo Freire and that values, in Freire’s words, educational experiences in which the students are not “docile listeners” but rather “critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher” (1993, 62). This approach differs from my students’ educational experiences—experiences in which, as Freire describes, teachers are rewarded for seeing the students as mere receptacles or containers that need to be filled. According to this standard, Freire writes, “the more completely [the teacher] fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is” (1993).

On the contrary, inquiry-based teaching does not focus on filling students with content information. In inquiry-based curriculum, after becoming familiar with a topic, the students are supported in exploring and finding significant questions to ask about the topic, which can help them make new discoveries. The students then research their questions using a variety of methods and tools—looking at the question from multiple perspectives. Finally, they share their discoveries and develop new questions that build on previous work, creating a recursive and cyclical aspect of inquiry, in keeping with the belief system that learning is an ongoing process (Short et al. 1996).

In addition to demonstrating the concept of inquiry, oral history offers a second crucial benefit to students: it helps them recognize the knowledge that they bring to the classroom in the form of their own family and community backgrounds. Funds of Knowledge provides a framework for understanding teaching that calls attention to the important role that family and community knowledge play in supporting children’s learning (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti 2005). Originally developed by Vélez-Ibáñez and Greenberg in the late 1980s (Oughton 2010), Funds of Knowledge is an educational concept that began as a reaction to deficit theorizing, a commonly held viewpoint even in research of contemporary teachers’ viewpoints, that blames the underachievement of ethnic minority children on perceived inadequacies relating to the children’s experiences (Hogg 2011). The work of researchers of Funds of Knowledge grew as a rebuttal to these deficit beliefs, building on the work of literature related to multicultural education and culturally relevant pedagogy (Hogg 2011). According to Oughton (2010), it was through Moll et al.’s (1992) extension of the idea of Funds of Knowledge from anthropology to education that the concept gained much of its power to disrupt deficit theorizing and to transform teachers’ beliefs and attitudes. Educators informed by the concept of Funds of Knowledge draw on what they learn about families in their classrooms to develop curricula relevant to their students’ experiences and understandings. However, there are still few models for developing such a connection to one’s students’ funds of knowledge, and those who do this work find that the connections are not always easy or apparent. For instance, in her study of the funds of knowledge that her second-grade students bring to her urban classroom, Sugarman (2010) required several readings of data and help from colleagues before she could uncover the strengths of her students’ families.

Engaging students in constructing oral histories has been recognized as a teaching method to enact students’ funds of knowledge in the preservice classroom (Olmedo 1997; Hogg 2011). Of particular importance to my study is Olmedo’s (1997) research, which describes the value of using oral histories in K–12 classrooms as a way to tap into children’s funds of knowledge. Olmedo argues that using oral histories in the classroom is a way to make the social studies curriculum more accessible to ESL and bilingual students because it provides an opportunity to see parallels between countries, to incorporate students’ families’ experiences and knowledge into the curriculum, and to practice their oral skills in both of their languages during the processes of interviewing and translating (1997).

Despite Olmedo’s work, the research on how teacher educators use oral history to teach preservice teachers is sparse. Johnson claims that “in social studies teacher education, it is common to promote the use of oral stories and histories to seek multiple perspectives and historical thinking in the classroom.” However, Johnson adds, “pre-service teachers are given few opportunities to internalize this idea” (2007, 197). One example of using oral history to teach preservice teachers is described by Boyle-Baise, who introduced her students to oral history when she had her class work on a community oral history project in order to learn about service learning (2005). Oral history as a narrative form is most commonly integrated in the K–12 social studies education curriculum.1 But as yet no research exists that specifically uses oral history to develop an understanding of inquiry-driven education.

The Study

This study examines the culminating oral history projects and other related coursework during one semester of an Inquiry in Education course. It explores the following research questions:

1. What evidence suggests that the work the students did for their own oral history inquiry projects helped them understand inquiry-driven instruction?

2. How do the oral history projects model the use of Funds of Knowledge in the classroom?

Participants

The participants are 21 students from my course, Inquiry in Education. The participants were recruited at the beginning of the semester. I described the study and asked the members of the class for their consent, explaining that they would be referred to by pseudonyms and that there would be no negative ramifications if they chose not to participate in the study. Of the 25 students who enrolled in the course, 22 signed the Internal Review Board consent form and agreed to be part of this research project. Later, one of the 22 students decided to not participate in the study, leaving 21 participants.

Data Collection

To understand the data collection process, it will be helpful to know how my course is organized. We begin by creating timelines of our lives, including important historical dates; we share these sketches of our histories in a “gallery walk” (Stokes 2000; Short et al. 1996). I then introduce some classic texts about inquiry in education such as those by John Dewey, Paulo Freire, and Eleanor Duckworth. Simultaneously, we begin exploring the subject of oral history. I show the class examples of documentaries, StoryCorps audio recordings, fiction about oral history, and peer-reviewed oral histories articles; together we identify key components of this research form. To learn about interviewing, I invite a guest for whom we prepare by developing interview questions. We then interview the guest and collectively analyze our interview techniques (Stokes 2000).

Each student proposes his or her own oral history project. When the proposed projects are approved, the students begin interviewing their participants, collecting information about the historical context of the topic, and finding interesting visual data, such as photographs, newspapers, artifacts, or films, for the presentation. I encourage the students to be creative in how they present their work.

The students work again in groups to discuss and analyze their data, to develop emerging themes, and to narrate or otherwise present the histories that they have researched. The semester ends with the oral history presentation and a synthesis paper in which students forge connections between theoretical written concepts about inquiry, the personal experience of conducting an oral history project, and how they believe the experience influenced their thinking about elementary education in general.

For this study, data collection began with an initial inventory about the students’ educational background and experiences. This inventory provided information about the students’ experiences in elementary school. The students’ work throughout the semester was collected; this included updates written in class about the oral history projects, their reflections on the readings, blackboard discussions, two fieldwork assignments (papers related to the students’ experience in classrooms), a synthesis paper written at the end of the semester, and the oral history projects. I also collected items of my own from the course, such as the course syllabus, my lesson plan notes, my own teaching logs, and other relevant artifacts.

Data Analysis

For this chapter, I analyzed copies of all the coursework from the Inquiry course during the fall 2010 semester. I took the following steps in analyzing the data:

1. I read and reread these data, noting initial codes.

2. Through this grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967), I then moved to “focusing” the codes as relevant themes were revealed (Charmez 2006). I chose themes because they were supported by ample, relevant data, and I interrogated the themes for disconfirming evidence.

3. For each working theme I collected all the supporting data—for example, quotes from papers or quotes from my class notes—in separate files. I then read the materials until I could develop a way of describing the theme that best characterized the data.

4. Through some, but not all, of the data analysis of this work, I shared my data and codes with a colleague who provided feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of my analysis.

5. In addition to these emergent themes, the data were also analyzed for the a priori theme of how the oral history project facilitated the use of Funds of Knowledge in the classroom.

Despite these efforts to support my analysis with multiple data sources, I acknowledge that qualitative research is interpretive and is my own “attempt to make sense of what I have learned” (Denzin and Lincoln 2003, 37). The story of the research is my interpretation of the experiences in my classroom.

Examples of Student Work

In order to show the type of work conducted in this class, and to show how the studies build on the students’ culture and community, I will provide links to three of the students’ digital oral history projects. These projects are not representative of all the projects done by the class but were selected because they demonstrate the diversity of subject matter, the types of topics that interested the students, and the construction of the projects. Each of these students selected his or her own topic, interviewed friends and relatives in his or her community to learn about his or her research topic, and conducted library or Internet research to provide a historical context for the work. The students who created th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Discovering Inquiry-Based Learning through Oral History Projects
• 2. “I’m Not Just Gonna Settle for Anything”: Inciting Teacher Efficacy through Critical Pedagogies
• 3. Intertextuality, Music, and Critical Pedagogy
• 4. Transforming Classrooms: Teacher Education, Social Studies, and Curriculum Drama
• 5. Incorporating Teacher Candidates’ Prior Beliefs and Funds of Knowledge in Theories of Child Development
• 6. Prioritizing the Social in Academic Writing: The Experiences of Ethnically, Linguistically, and Generationally Diverse Early Childhood Teacher Candidates
• 7. Special Education Teacher Preparation: Growing Disability Studies in the Absence of Resistance
• 8. Postmulticulturalism: Cultivating Alternative Canons, a Critical Vernacular, and Student-Generated Understandings of Their “Lived-Situatedness”
• Appendix A: Writing Background Survey
• Appendix B: Interview Questions
• Notes on Contributors