Teacher Candidates Learn to Enact Curriculum in a Partnership-Sponsored Literacy Enrichment Program for Youth

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a multiyear formative experiment of a summer enrichment program that served as literacy enrichment for middle-school students, a field experience for preservice teacher candidates, and a professional development and leadership opportunity for practicing teachers. The analysis focuses on how the design team conceptualized, implemented, and researched inquiry-based, literacy-infused curriculum within the program, which was embedded in a broader university–school partnership. Findings report curriculum-related decisions and adjustments made over two iterations of the program before detailing the data-driven adjustments planned for the program’s third iteration in 2017. Findings reveal that literacy supports were richer when the curriculum with which preservice teacher candidates worked was explicit about the content they must address and well sequenced. Such explicitness left more bandwidth for candidates to focus on literacy and reduced the chances it would get lost in candidates’ other concerns. Implications are discussed for others designing clinical experiences intended to interrupt the status quo in both literacy teacher education and K–12 schooling, with the goal of promoting more equitable outcomes for all.