Educational Studies

Cooperating teachers, while key role in the preparation of preservice teachers, seldom receive any kind of systematic preparation or guidance in their role as coaches. The goal for this research study was to develop a model for coaching of preservice teachers by cooperating teachers in a preservice teacher education program focused on literacy. This was a  design-development study that employed qualitative research tools to examine the appropriation of the model by nine cooperating teachers enrolled in a masters program focused on mentoring and leadership in literacy. The findings revealed that teachers viewed the model as substantially different from any mentoring or coaching experience they had received or applied in the past.  The implementation moved from mechanical to routine with several of the teachers innovating on the model. The researchers used the experiences of the cooperating teachers and preservice teachers to revise the model in planning for the next phase of research.

Given the role of literacy education in (re)producing both oppressive and emancipatory language ideologies, teacher education must attend to teachers’ developing understandings of language and language learning. In this study, we examine one possible tool for building such understandings: through the telling of small stories. Focusing on small stories told during discussion of language variation within a graduate education course, we analyzed thirty such stories to identify how they were used to build identity positions and discourses of language. Three types of small stories were identified, each positioning the teller in distinct ways with regards to power and agency: as passive observer, as active resister, or as uncertain participant. These findings suggest affordances and constraints for using these types of narratives to examine and construct language ideologies within teacher education.

Literacy development involves not only the cultivation of new practices but also of new identities. Drawing on theories of stance and positioning, this study examines the identity negotiations of one first-grade student with his teacher across a semester. Through close analysis of the stance bids and negotiations within a series of writing conferences, it demonstrates how the pair negotiated between four stances (feedback, instruction, management, and collaboration) in disrupting the student's initial institutional positioning as a struggling writer. These findings illustrate how teachers might use stance as a pedagogical tool, highlighting three patterns of negotiation between the pair that supported the development of the student's literate identities while showing how new discursive patterns and positions emerged as the pair interacted across a semester. This analysis suggests the necessity of negotiation as a pedagogical orientation in (re)positioning students, as well as the need to look across multiple timescales in examinations of identity.

Purpose
By recognizing high-stakes testing as a key constraint to teacher agency, this paper aims to provide a close analysis of one teacher’s testing narrative to illustrate how emerging positioning is relative to high-stakes testing shapes perception of pedagogical agency.

Design/methodology/approach
Data were generated through a series of semi-structured interviews with an early career fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Moore, in a school facing pressure to raise test scores. Using theoretical lenses of narrative positioning and a linguistic anthropological centering of constraint and emergence, 67 narratives of accountability were analyzed, with particular focus on how Ms. Moore positioned herself relative to other actors involved in high-stakes testing and the consequent rights and duties these positions afforded.

Findings
In narrating the constraints of high-stakes testing, Ms. Moore positioned herself relative to three groups involved in high-stakes testing: “purposefully tricky” test creators, “disjointed” administrators and “worried” students. The rights and duties associated with three positions varied with respect to two dimensions – proximity and hierarchy – in turn providing her distinct resources for responding to the pedagogical constraints of high-stakes testing.

Practical implications
Teachers might use positioning analysis as a tool to locate possibilities for agency amidst high-stakes testing, both by exploring the resources afforded by their positioning and by considering how alternative positions might afford different resources.

Originality/value
These findings suggest that high-stakes testing serves as a dynamic and perhaps malleable constraint to teacher agency. Teacher positioning, particularly relative to hierarchy and proximity, provides possible resource for responding to such constraints.

Humanizing pedagogies present a promising framework for contesting dehumanizing practices all too common in U.S. urban schools. To co-construct such pedagogies, however, teachers and students must negotiate between the humanizing and dehumanizing discourses that circulate within their school context. Drawing from data collected from a qualitative study of literacy conferences in three urban elementary classrooms, I use microethnographic and critical approaches to discourse analysis to explore two sets of conflicting discourses mobilized by teachers and students in their pedagogical interactions: curriculum as tailored versus standardized and as present oriented versus future oriented. To further explore how teachers and students interact amidst the tensions between these discourses, I present a close analysis of a writing conference in which a teacher-student pair prepare for the upcoming high-stakes writing test. This analysis makes visible challenges and possibilities of teachers and students co-constructing humanizing pedagogies while suggesting the need to attend to its temporal dimensions.

Neoliberalism influences teaching not only through educational policies like high-stakes testing but also through more fundamentally shaping understandings of teaching and learning. This case study explores how neoliberalism framed the sense-making of one critically-oriented teacher in an accountability-constrained school through a discursive analysis of her teaching narratives. While documenting the teacher's consistent critique of accountability policies like high-stakes testing, the analysis also identifies the more insidious ways neoliberal logic shaped her thinking through frames of individual responsibility and of equating neoliberalism with reality. These findings suggest implications for how critically-oriented teacher educators and researchers consider teacher agency and resistance.

Attending to both the political and pedagogical dimensions of silence in schools, this article engages in a close analysis of the silences constructed within an interaction between one first-grade student and his teacher in order to build theory regarding how silence is constructed in the classroom. Drawing on theories of neoliberalism as well as humanizing pedagogy, it presents multiple readings of this interaction to illustrate how interpretation of silence is shaped by ideology. Further, it emphasizes the mediating role of mandated standardized curriculum in the production of silence in this interaction. Through this analysis, it argues that neoliberalism creates both ideological and material barriers to the practice of silence in contemporary classrooms, while also suggesting how silence might be strategically used by teachers as a humanizing pedagogical resource.

The body of peer-reviewed research investigating literacy preservice teacher education is vast and broadcast widely in a variety of journals. What if there was a single, searchable, interactive platform where the literature was collected and synthesized? How might such a database inform research, practice, and policy? These were the questions faculty and graduate students from a large university in the Southwestern US set out to answer in 2015. Four years later, the authors introduce CITE-ITEL, a Critical, Interactive, Transparent, and Evolving review of literature on Initial Teacher Education in Literacy, an effort toward answering these important questions. The purposes of this paper are to share the methodology guiding the development of CITE-ITEL, to review some of the initial findings from the systematic review of the literature from 2000-2018, to describe the user experience of the CITE-ITEL database, and to propose future possibilities for CITE-ITEL and similar databases.

Discourses of social justice are becoming increasingly prevalent in educational spaces, with rising numbers of teachers and teacher education programs expressing their aims to teach towards social justice. Yet, recent scholarship has documented the contested meanings of social justice in contemporary educational contexts. This qualitative case study aims to build upon existing literature by examining how two equity-oriented Black educators in an urban elementary school conceptualized and critiqued the discourses of social justice circulating in their school. Through thematic and discourse analysis of data generated through teacher inquiry group meetings and interviews, it examines their experiences with the language of social justice becoming associated with dehumanization and white saviorism, and it documents the equity-oriented pedagogical positions constructed by these teachers in opposition to such discourses. This analysis draws attention to contemporary (mis)uses of social justice discourses and proposes implications for justice- and equity-oriented teacher education.

Although the call for teachers to address the demographic imperative has existed for decades, recently, there has been an uptake of frameworks of multicultural education, culturally responsive pedagogies, critical literacy, and others into literacy teacher preparation. In this study, we examine connections that pre-service teachers make as a result of experiences focused on sociocultural knowledge and literacy and barriers they face in building these connections. Areas of connection include examining one’s past; recognizing students’ lives and resources in literacy teaching; considering race, racism, and students’ racial identity; drawing on multilingualism as a strength of students for literacy learning; and engaging actively and inquiring into literacy.