Introduction to the Guest-Edited Issue

We believe few events in future teachers’ education are more important than their early field experiences, a belief supported by numerous professional associations’ and policymakers’ calls for the integration of enhanced clinical experiences into teacher preparation programs (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 2012; Association of Teacher Educators, 2016; Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation [CAEP], 2013). Clinical and practicum experiences are so foundational to preservice teachers’ learning because these are where prospective educators typically engage with PreK–12 students for the first time, from the perspectives of their future roles as classroom teachers. It is also in these field experiences that teacher candidates first have the opportunity to apply and refine the ideas and strategies—the pedagogies and possibilities—they have learned in their university classes.

This guest-edited issue represents an effort to describe an important innovation in teacher preparation, one that responds to current professional association, practitioner, and policymaker calls for enhanced clinical experiences for future teachers. Critical, project-based (CPB) experiences are clinical experiences that are intentionally designed to create partnerships among university faculty, veteran teachers, teacher candidates, and K–12 students. These clinical field experiences are collaborative, short-term, and explicitly rooted in notions of social justice. Although CPB experiences are implemented to meet the goals of the constituents involved and therefore vary depending on context, these field experiences are guided by the following tenets:

1. University faculty and inservice teachers, who take on the role of school-based teacher educators, are situated as collaborative partners in preparing teachers to teach. Therefore, CPB field experiences offer teacher candidates the opportunity to document and reflect on their growth as professional educators, learn about the strengths of their increasingly diverse communities and students, and implement research-based instruction while guided by university and school-based teacher educators.

2. CPB field experiences are explicitly rooted in justice-centered pedagogies and are designed to challenge the assumptions society and educators often make about children and youth and teaching and learning. Such experiences intentionally provide all of schools’ constituents—teacher candidates, classroom teachers, young people, and boundary-spanning university faculty—opportunities to learn to “teach against the grain” (Cochran-Smith, 1991).

CPB clinical experiences offer the field of teacher education a way forward, one that provides teacher candidates with exemplary on-the-ground training, honors veteran teachers as the school-based teacher educators they have always been, and offers university-based teacher educators new roles that enable our practices and our scholarship to be explicitly relevant to all of our schools’ constituents.

We have devised and refined the notion of CPB clinical structures in response to our own experiences as products of traditional and alternative teacher preparation tracks, as doctoral students studying and working with these traditional models, and as early career teacher educators and education scholars. Across these experiences we recognized that the traditional model of teacher education—in which we were both trained and in which we were working—was not as effective as it could be. In responding to our concern about these teacher preparation traditions, we also worked to ensure that any new model of field experiences would be relevant to the middle- and high-school students being served and to the veteran teachers serving as mentors to teacher candidates.

This guest-edited issue first began as a conversation in which we came to appreciate our mutual beliefs about early field experiences and the teaching and research we were doing about these experiences. Although we recognize the many similarities in how we each facilitate CPB clinical experiences, the unique structures of our programs and the schools with which we work dictate how we implement these clinical experiences. For example, Kristy’s scholarship focuses on how preservice teachers learn to teach writing to students often marginalized and disenfranchised by society and pushed out of schools. This teaching takes place at a local juvenile detention center, where preservice teachers are learning conceptually and pedagogically about the teaching of writing while also gaining an understanding of the juvenile justice system and school policies that target certain populations of students—specifically, students of color and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Kristien’s CPB projects and scholarship also focus on preservice teachers learning to teach writing to adolescents, but he works with veteran and preservice teachers in a variety of middle- and high=school classrooms, and mostly with English-language-learning adolescents. His CPB efforts were a direct extension of the participatory action research project—“Through Students’ Eyes”—he has implemented over the past decade, which was founded on the core belief that those young people who are typically disenfranchised by schools and society have some of the most important perspectives on teaching and schools.

Our conversations and our collective efforts to define the work we were doing led us to find colleagues also facilitating these types of clinical experiences. This guest-edited issue of The New Educator grew from these many discussions. The articles in this themed issue describe clinical field-based experiences with a literacy focus. Collectively these articles provide a unique look into how literacy teacher educators are broadly conceptualizing CPB clinical experiences, as well as an in-depth examination of such structures across a range of contexts. Crafted by an esteemed team of teacher-education scholars and practitioners who are living the hybrid roles required for such a clinical model, the articles offer research findings and suggest implications of a CPB approach for teacher education, teacher development, educational research, and K–12 student learning. Each article describes important, nuanced impacts particular to the specific contexts and goals of its respective clinical experiences and for the constituents of each teacher-education program and school. Here we highlight five key insights we drew from our consideration of this collection of research reports.

CPB clinical experiences are mediating spaces

One of the goals of CPB clinical experiences is to bridge the divide between the traditional model of clinical experiences—typically occurring in university methods courses that are isolated from the schools where preservice and veteran teachers (operating as mentors) work—and the ideal of embedded, long-term, residency-based experiences. Research on clinical experiences describes this disconnect as a “theory–practice divide,” with university methods courses identified as the place where preservice teachers learn conceptual or theoretical perspectives on teaching and schools as the sites where they learn to enact pedagogical practices. Numerous scholars over the last several decades have documented—and lamented—how these two contexts often do not complement each other. Many have noted that preservice teachers often implement instruction in their clinical sites that contradicts the lessons they have learned in university settings.

In this issue, each of the articles details and demonstrates how the CPB clinical experience model mediates this well-documented, historic divide. For example, in their context-spanning research, Johnson and Barnes summarize how two CPB projects supported teacher candidates as they learned about and then used tools of inquiry-based instruction. CPB served as a bridge between understanding the theoretical underpinnings of inquiry-based instruction and the opportunity to enact this instructional approach.

Partnerships are relationships

A partnership is more than an agreement by a principal or a mentor teacher to have a clinical field experience associated with a university teacher preparation program take place in a given school. The authors in this guest-edited issue do not just have partnerships with the schools and teachers to which they introduce us in these articles. Rather, they have relationships with these teachers, school-based teacher educators, middle- and high-school students, and school administrators. The word relationship is critical because it signals that clinical experience activities are professional work that needs to be fostered, developed, and nurtured. These relationships become the foundation that allows teaching, learning, and learning about teaching to take place.

As one example among several, Dutro and colleagues highlight how the relationships they have fostered with teachers and students allow their teacher candidates to enact teaching practices that are justice-centered. As a result, teacher candidates are learning about equity-oriented pedagogies not just through course readings, discussions, and teaching rehearsals but via the opportunities they encounter to infuse this orientation into their daily instruction and interactions with elementary students. This collaborative work is important not only for helping preservice teachers foster dispositions needed for justice-centered pedagogies but also for providing them the experiences to enact these instructional approaches.

Valuing students voices and literacies

At the heart of CPB clinical experiences is the belief that PK–12 students’ voices must be recognized, valued, and amplified in ways that make their learning relevant, critical, and meaningful to them and to audiences beyond teachers and schools. As teacher educators, we must be thoughtful in our design of clinical experiences so that the children and young adults in the classrooms where we are partnering with veteran teachers and preservice teachers are recognized as more than “learners” in a traditional, hierarchical way; instead, they are key members of the teacher-education community, and their participation, engagement, and learning simultaneously become opportunities for teacher candidates to learn about teaching. Such an orientation challenges and expands the ways we allow students to demonstrate their learning, as CPB clinical experiences include literacy practices that are inherently valued by children and youths and literacy pedagogies that assume that literacy is dynamic and multidimensional.

In this volume, the work of Burke and colleagues is just one of the illustrations of how youths’ voices must be valued in our teaching and research. Using a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) lens, young people were appreciated as colearners, coteachers, and coresearchers in a CPB project. This design allowed for teaching and learning experiences that provided new insights for all involved, particularly related to the ways adolescents encounter and produce texts, including written and visual work.

As well, and perhaps most relevant to the focus of this issue, these clinical experiences provided preservice teachers with opportunities to center their teaching and learning around issues of equitable access to curriculum, relationship building with learners and mentor teachers, and rich literacy practices. However, grounding their work in YPAR allowed Burke and colleagues to explore how this project not only provided an intense learning experience for a range of school- and university-based constituents but also supplied critical moments that disrupted the expectations of all involved in these high-school and teacher-education learning exchanges. Such efforts are necessary as teacher candidates consider the youths with whom they will work in the day-to-day contexts of their future classrooms.

Now is the time to reimagine teacher education

In the past decade the nature and quality of teacher education has been at the center of numerous political and scholarly debates, which has resulted in state and federal policies that emphasize clinical preparation and teacher accreditation organizations’ attempts to more intentionally organize teacher candidates’ clinical experiences. As just one example, the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Preparation (CAEP) has put forth its Standard 2, “Clinical Partnerships and Practice,” which requires that educator preparation programs “ensure that effective partnerships and high-quality clinical practice are central to preparation so that candidates develop the knowledge, skills, and professional dispositions necessary to demonstrate positive impact on all P-12 students’ learning and development” (CAEP, 2013, p. 1).

Teacher educators—university-based, school-based, and boundary-spanning—must be at the forefront of these policy discussions and reimaginings of the possibilities for teacher education. This volume will inform those conversations and novel practices, which are increasingly critical because—as Lyiscott, Caraballo, and Morrell remind us in their article—the majority of U.S. teachers are white, female, and middle class, and schooling often replicates the norms and values of the middle class. Echoing the stances and scholarship of all of the authors in this issue, these scholar-practitioners poignantly highlight the fact that preservice teachers are not typically exposed to dynamic and critical practices, and that clinical experiences must become the foundational sites for this work. The Lyiscott, Caraballo, and Morrell article pushes the boundaries of this reimagining, exemplifying how a CPB field experience can also be founded on anticolonial perspectives. These projects allow for teacher candidates to be apprenticed into the field of education as they experience “dynamic pedagogies, dialogic intersubjectivities, and democratic practices.”

Innovative research methodologies

As teacher-education scholars we research our clinical experience efforts so we can understand their impact on the constituents of our teacher-education endeavors and so we might generate new structures that support our efforts to rethink the nature of teacher education more broadly. The authors of this volume help us to appreciate that if we are to successfully capture the nuances and the complexities of novel teacher education practices, and to best push our field forward, we must be prepared to use new research and implementation methodologies.

Whereas two of the articles in this issue draw on YPAR (the articles with Burke and Lyiscott as lead authors), Chandler-Olcott and her colleagues detail how they used a formative experiment to document the learning of teachers, teacher candidates, and students over the course of three years at “Camp Question.” The findings of their three-year study demonstrates how developing curriculum—intended, planned, and enacted—can be a learning process and tool for teacher candidates and in-service teachers, rather than a mechanism solely for delivering content to students. Relying on a formative experiment methodological design allowed them to document the long-term nuances and adaptations of the program, the teaching, and the learning, across the fullest range of schools’ and teacher education programs’ students.

Conclusion

The articles featured in this issue illustrate how CPB clinical experiences span institutions—schools, universities, and community settings—to provide preservice teachers with the conceptual and the pedagogical knowledge to examine the fullest range of teaching and learning possibilities. Although the authors in this issue have constructed CPB experiences to meet the needs of the particular contexts in which they are working, all of these projects are built around the notion that university-based teacher educators, school-based teachers and teacher educators, preservice teachers, and youths are equally important constituents in the teaching and learning process. Collectively, we propose the radical notion that all the individuals involved in these partnerships should and can play a central role in teacher education. These short-term projects in sustained partnerships allow for teaching and learning to be oriented around principles of equity. As top-down policies continue to influence both K–12 education and higher education, this volume reveals how it might be partnerships between schools and universities that best result in effective teacher preparation, in these justice-oriented pedagogies in both institutions, and in projects that are meaningful to all constituents in these exchanges.

We have been encouraged by the promise of CPB clinical experiences in our own contexts. We have been heartened by our discovery that our (Kristy’s and Kristien’s) shared commitments could find form in this CPB work. We are emboldened and compelled by the teacher educators whose work is featured in this issue to continue to reimagine teacher education, and we do so with a sense of urgency.