Scaffolding immigrant early childhood teacher education students toward the appropriation of pedagogical tools

ABSTRACT

Teacher educators and field placement supervisors in early childhood teacher education (ECTE) programs aid their students in learning a specific repertoire of tools and skills, including pedagogical tools they can mobilize in their future practice. However, these tools reify abstract notions about how to teach young children that are consistent with the values and beliefs of the specific community of practice or culture, and culturally diverse students may ascribe different meanings and uses to the tools. This one-year ethnographic study explored how 20 immigrant and refugee students constructed understandings of the authoritative discourse during their coursework and field placements in an urban ECTE college program in western Canada. Qualitative data were collected through field notes, spatial mapping, interviews, focus groups, and artifacts/documents. Framed by sociocultural-historical theory, this paper focuses on the scaffolding methods used by teacher educators and expert peers to assist students in appropriating children’s picture books and songs as tools to use during their field placement experiences. The most effective of these scaffolding strategies used mediational devices to evoke recollections of each student’s experiences “back home,” thus advancing possibilities for more culturally resonant teacher education classes.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank her former doctoral supervisor, Dr. Anna Kirova as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this manuscript. The funding for this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Killam Trusts.

Notes

^1. In accordance with Vygotsky’s theory, mediators are considered to be tools or signs. The term “mediators” has been used, however, to differentiate them from pedagogical tools.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Killam Trusts [Doctoral Scholarship]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Doctoral Scholarship].