Self-Study and Practicum Learning

The practicum is an integral part of teacher education and has been widely studied from a variety of perspectives, including teacher candidates, associate or cooperating teachers and supervisors. However, few self-studies have focused on teacher educator learning from examining the practicum experience, apart from Bullock (2012) and Cuenca (2010). This special issue of Studying Teacher Education presents five articles relating to teacher candidate learning on the practicum as examined from a self-study perspective by teacher educators. The five articles are accompanied by four critical responses by scholars who are active both in self-study of teacher education practices and in the practicum component of the teacher education programs. The specific contribution of this special issue involves bringing the complex and multi-faceted components of the practicum into the forefront of professional discussions about teacher candidates’ learning from experience within teacher preparation programs. A self-study approach has given the five authors the means to explore teacher candidate learning during the practicum from their students’ and their own perspectives and to bring a wide variety of insights and understandings about this experience to the broader education community.

The Research Articles

The five research articles are written by members of a research team from four universities who have examined the processes of learning from experience that occur during the practicum. This research was set up as four case studies, permitting the researchers to adapt the research to their own contexts. Each has written a self-study describing a personal journey of coming to understand various aspects of learning during the practicum from the perspective of students in programs at their respective universities, as well as their own learning about their assumptions and hypotheses about the practicum as a site for learning for themselves as teacher educators. Each author also acknowledges the contributions of the other team members, who, as well as co-researchers, acted as critical friends during the self-studies. The four following articles provide additional perspectives on the findings of the self-studies through critical commentary on the articles and on the practicum itself as a place for learning to teach.

In her article In Search of Ways to Improve Practicum Learning: Self-Study of the Teacher Educator/Researcher as Responsive Listener, Andrea K. Martin of Queen’s University (Canada) examines “the role of a teacher educator in improving the quality of professional learning in the practicum by facilitating on-campus discussion of practicum experiences.” She asks the questions: “How does adopting and promoting a listening perspective improve practicum learning?” and “What is transformative about responsive listening?”, framing her self-study around the notions of transformative learning, the seminal importance of caring and relationship-building, the need to authorize student perspectives by listening to their voices, and the connection between voice and reflective practice. She states that the self-study allowed her to make explicit the connections between what she was learning by facilitating the focus groups and the attendant data collection and analysis and her own practices as a teacher educator in the courses that she teaches. As Martin worked through the student comments and re-examined her journal entries and other data sources, she was able to see where she could actively construct spaces and push harder at ensuring that candidates’ voices are authorized, that their pedagogical voice is heard, and that caring and trusting relationships receive the attention they merit and are allowed to flourish.

David Dillon of McGill University (Canada) describes his approach to a seminar he offered to undergraduate teacher candidates in an elementary program in an article entitled Straddling Teacher Candidates’ Two Worlds to Link Practice and Theory: A Self-Study of Successful and Unsuccessful Efforts. Unlike most typical courses, he sought to make the teacher candidates’ teaching experience the content of the seminar by focusing on their developing questions and challenges through socio-constructive discussion of their practice in an attempt to help them re-imagine and enhance their practice as teachers. Dillon found the student response to his seminar prompted him to adjust his pedagogical approach to be more clear and transparent about the objectives, principles, and strategies that he was using in the course since they are different from those which candidates have experienced in other coursework. He also learned to make the process of learning and development more apparent and concrete in the pedagogical steps that are followed in the course.

The article Learning to Learn about the Practicum: A Self-Study of Learning to Support Student Learning in the Field describes the insights that author Lynn Thomas of Université de Sherbrooke (Canada) has gained from examining her assumptions about what and how teacher candidates learn on the practicum through using a self-study approach. Thomas outlines her many assumptions about teacher candidates’ learning experiences on practicum, including the assumption that students view the practicum as a place to practice teaching, rather than as a performance. Her article describes the importance of being open to learning from students about their experiences on practicum and of the value of taking the time to reflect on this learning through regular journal entries. Thomas also discusses the impact of the collaborative approach to this self-study and the multiple perspectives gained from exchanging ideas and insights with colleagues.

In Shawn M. Bullock’s article entitled Understanding Candidates’ Learning Relationships with their Cooperating Teachers: A call to Reframe my Pedagogy, he focuses on the crucial role of the cooperating teacher during the practicum. Bullock (Simon Fraser University, Canada) has conducted interviews with teacher candidates about their experiences on practicum in learning relationships with their cooperating teachers. He notes that his participants have consistently emphasized the importance of being supported in their learning through professional trust and autonomy, and as a result of his self-study, he now focuses on promoting the development of these good relationships during his courses, despite the fact that, in his words, “I have absolutely nothing to do with cooperating teachers.” His self-study explores this notion of “action-at-a-distance” to describe his role in contributing to a positive, meaningful practicum experience for his students.

Tom Russell’s self-study focuses on a central challenge: Can the practicum supervisor help to improve the quality of practicum learning, specifically by helping teacher candidates manage and learn from the tension between education classes and practicum experiences? The goal of his article, entitled Improving the Quality of Practicum Learning: Self-Study of a Faculty Member’s Role in Practicum Supervision, is to identify what he learned about his teacher education practices while exploring this question. Russell notes that as a result of this self-study he has become more aware of how a longer practicum leads teacher candidates to become more aware of the disconnect between their university courses and the requirements of effective teaching. It is as if their education program becomes less significant and less pertinent the longer they spend in schools, which is of concern. Russell also noted the benefits of building close relationships with students while they are at the university as this leads to better communication and invitations to continue to interact with students on practicum. He writes that “focusing on improving the quality of professional learning in the practicum and on the possibilities of developing an epistemology of practice has the potential to generate a new set of goals for both formal and informal practicum supervision.”

The Commentaries

In the first commentary on these articles, Stefinee Pinnegar of Brigham Young University (USA) draws our attention to how each of the articles reveals a teacher educator positioning and repositioning themselves as they “engage in becoming” while “they move through the zones of maximal contact” (Bakhtin, 1981) that describes the practicum experience. Pinnegar articulates how each of the articles focus on “the intractable conundrums of teacher education”, and she states that these can be identified across the articles as the problematics of structure, the press of experience, the knowledge dilemma and the complexities of relationship. She explains how each of the self-studies provides insight on how to explore and respond to these complex aspects of teacher education, and that way contribute to further understandings of the place of the practicum in teacher education. In her words,

the great power of these studies is that they make visible to other teacher educators how they might join with these scholars in enacting mundane stories that shift the sacred story of teacher education specifically field experiences to one in which teacher educators with cooperating teachers shift teacher education to a different sacred story of teacher education.

Rachel Forgasz of Monash University (Australia) begins by explaining that she uses the term “professional experience” rather than “practicum” for the time that “students of teaching” (rather than student teachers or teacher candidates) spend in schools. In her article entitled Seeing Teacher Education Differently through Self-Study of Professional Practice, she remarks on the differences in terminology from one continent to another and states that language matters “since different choices reveal different emphases in purpose, underlying assumptions, and relational dynamics.” Forgasz suggests that each of the articles in this special issue illustrates the lack of coherence between university and practice-based learning in teacher education programs, and she describes how the authors have learned to better understand that incoherence through self-study. She also comments on the absence of the university-based teacher educator as related to the professional experience, and describes her own learning about finding her own role in the process. She includes insightful comments on the ways in which cooperating teachers are positioned in relation to teacher educators and invites us to join her in her reflections on her emerging simultaneous roles as both “university-based teacher educator of our students of teaching and teacher educator educator as a dimension of our teacher education and self-study research.”

In Missing Voices in the Study of the Practicum, Renée T. Clift of the University of Arizona (USA) is clearly preoccupied with the missing voices of the classroom mentor teachers in research about the practicum, including the self-studies in the issue. She laments the lack of change in the “personal, professional and power relationships” among the different participants in the professional experience of teacher education, which are illustrated by several of these articles, but applauds the research that is leading to a greater understanding of this experience for all concerned. Clift focuses on “selected statements that referred to supervision and the university supervisor (the authors), the mentor (or cooperating) teacher, and the learning that may or may not be occurring during the experience,” and finds “that relationships; understandings and misunderstandings of purpose; awareness of tensions among content, pressures and contexts; and limited opportunities for productive conversations were common to each of the accounts.” Clift invites readers to continue to examine the practicum as a site of research but to ensure that we listen carefully to all voices, including classroom-based mentor teachers, in order to work towards improving teacher education practice.

Allan MacKinnon of Simon Fraser University (Canada) provides an evocative literary reading of the practicum using the lyrics and music of the song Wrapped around your finger (Sumner, 1983) as a metaphor for the experience of practice teaching for teacher candidates in his commentary on the five articles of this special issue. He comments on each of the articles and draws parallels between the issues explored in the self-studies and the lyrics of the song, claiming that both are “about the relationship between teacher candidates and their mentor teachers, the epistemological terrain and the risks associated with the practicum as a site of learning, and the foundation and direction provided by practicum for future practice.” MacKinnon also finds that there is much in these articles that connects directly to Schön’s (1983; 1987) work on reflection as related to practice, and states that “their learning through self-study mirrors the learning they are researching in (the) practicum, and the resulting reciprocity and respect they have for teacher candidates is illuminated.”

We invite you to explore these nine articles – five self-studies followed by four commentaries – and to consider them in light of your own experiences, research and understandings of the important place practice teaching (or professional experience) holds in your own teacher education programs. Examining the practicum with a self-study approach has been richly rewarding for all of us, and preparing this special issue has given us an incentive to continue to consider how we can work to improve learning on the practicum in our roles as teacher educators.

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 410-2011-0399].

Lynn Thomas
Université de Sherbrooke, Canada
[email protected]