Cultural-historical analysis of feedback from experts to novice science teachers on climate change lessons

ABSTRACT

This study uses the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), to investigate the dialogic interaction between preservice science teachers (PSSTs) and mentor teachers (MTs). We focus on the cultural and historical nature of feedback by MTs while PSSTs are learning to teach climate change. The primary data was video recordings of feedback sessions. The written feedback from MTs, PSSTs’ lesson plans, and reflections were used as auxillary data. We used grounded theory and discourse analysis to analyse the data to answer the question, ‘What is the cultural-historical nature of MTs feedback to PSSTs on their climate change lessons?’ By highlighting components such as division of labour within classrooms, CHAT provided a lens to make sociocultural and historical aspects of teaching activity more visible to inform research on teacher education. We then conducted a frequency analysis to identify what aspects of CHAT were most and least attended by MTs. We noticed that MTs mostly highlighted educational and scientific norms that influence the sociocultural rules of science classrooms. The framework also helped us to identify other sociocultural components of teaching that were lacking such as the community of school. We suggest that CHAT can provide a guideline for MTs effective feedback to PSSTs.

KEYWORDS:

• Preservice science teacher
• teacher learning
• CHAT
• climate change education
• mentor teacher feedback

Acknowledgement

Authors would like to thank Dr. Jane Wolfson for her help in designing the preservice teacher learning environment and her feedback on the earlier versions of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation [grant/award number 1239758].