Post-observation conferences with bilingual pre-service teachers: revoicing and rehearsing

ABSTRACT

Pre-service teachers need support in developing their teacher identities as they navigate the uncertain and complex terrain of student teaching and face the pressures of high-stakes accountability. This support is particularly important for bilingual pre-service teachers as they negotiate the many complexities of the bilingual classroom, and as their emergent bilingual students often encounter hostile and subtractive school environments, brought to the fore in this post-election moment. Previous research has shown that critical reflective spaces like those found in post-observation conferences are helpful, but few studies have examined the nature of these interactions. In this multicase study of three Latinx bilingual pre-service teachers in early childhood student teaching placements in one urban district in Texas, we, in our dual role as researchers and university facilitators, utilized a Bakhtinian framework to conduct a qualitative discourse analysis of post-observation conferences during the Spring 2015 semester. Findings revealed the conferences as dialogic and supportive spaces where bilingual pre-service teachers and their university facilitators revoiced and rehearsed classroom interactions in complex and dynamic ways, contributing to participants’ abilities to author themselves as successful teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-service teachers
• teacher identity
• bilingual education
• post-observation conferences
• Bakhtin

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Dr Deb Palmer for her unwavering support and guidance on this project and for providing invaluable feedback on a later draft. We would also like to thank members of the faculty writing group at CSU Chico for their helpful insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.