A multi-year study of pre-service teachers’ literacy practices in the content areas: time epistemologies and indicators of stasis and growth

ABSTRACT

This three-year study focuses on 42 pre-service teachers’ perspectives on integrating literacy into their content area teaching. Pre-service teachers described time as an influential factor shaping their teaching practices, and, we found, that perceptions of time influenced pre-service teachers’ reported ability and willingness to plan for and enact the implementation of literacy strategies as part of content area lessons. While we noted a number of factors related to time, we were particularly drawn to three time-related factors that signified for pre-service teacher participants’ active roles and agency in how they were enacted in the classroom. Identifying temporal concerns about curriculum, learner response to literacy practices, and use of classroom time to scaffold learning allowed us to specify aspects of participants’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) development as well as facets of limited PCK growth. Using time as a theoretical lens to view pre-service teachers’ accounts of literacy practices, we suggest, provides insights into their PCK, specifically indicators of stasis and growth, and understanding about pre-service teacher resistance or acceptance to the infusion of literacy into content area teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-service teacher education
• content area literacies
• pedagogy
• pedagogical content knowledge
• time epistemologies

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the participants of this study for their willingness to talk about their teaching practices and for the opportunity to observe their teaching during field experience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Writing to learn strategies are used to encourage students to informally write, draw, or otherwise represent learning of content in an ongoing manner. Public writing strategies tend to be used when writing is to be developed for more formal purposes (Daniels et al., 2007).

2. All participants’ names are pseudonyms.

3. In our programme, field experiences generally run for 5.5 weeks, twice an academic year during the two-year programme, for a total of 22 weeks.

4. We thank the anonymous reviewer for this insight.

Additional information

Funding

St. Francis Xavier University supported this research under an internal grant from the SSHRC Institutional Grant (SIG).

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Mitton-Kükner

Jennifer Mitton-Kükner is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her current research is in the areas of disciplinary literacy, classroom assessment, adolescent writers, LGBTQ education, and pre- and in-service teacher education.

Anne Murray Orr

Anne Murray Orr is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her current research is in the areas of disciplinary literacy, early literacy, indigenous language immersion programmes, and pre- and in-service teacher education.