Source: Studying Teacher Education, Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2010, 75–93.
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)
This self-study explores the author’s mediation as a literacy teacher educator in the context of a professional development undertaking that involved developing and leading an early school years literacy course.
The author examines the tensions that arose in the light of her own professional history and explore ways that the tensions led her to reconcile conflicting messages through processes of reframing. The author describes how she puts her reframings into action in the way the author designed and presented the professional development course.
The author documented her work in developing the module.
Phase I focused on the development of the course and explored the author’s interrogation of the literacy nexus and how the author reframed her mediation of relationships between literacy research, policy, and practice.
Data involved course materials that included teachers’ course notes, facilitator notes (the module also was taught at another venue with different facilitators), workshop activities, and PowerPoint slides.
Phase II involved documenting the author’s teaching of the early years literacy module. Where practicable, teachers’ actions, reactions and interactions were documented as running records during each two-hour session; anecdotal records were made immediately following each two-hour session. These observations were supplemented by ongoing unstructured conversations with teachers as they analysed their engagement with research and policy messages, and how these messages connected with their personal perspectives and experiences.
Triangulation was done across these different data types and across the four different teacher cohorts to cross-check for converging, inconsistent, and contradictory evidence. Data analysis involved thematic analysis (Glesne, 2006) of course materials, discussions, and workshops.
As the author compiled the self-study in Phase III, the central theme became reframing her mediation as a teacher educator in the literacy nexus, with four sub-themes emerging.
This self-study advances knowledge about teacher education in terms of its role in mediating connections between research, policy and practice, identifying some of the tensions that occur in this mediation and illustrating how, as teacher educators, we can use these tensions to reframe our mediation.
References
Glesne, C. (2006). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction. Boston, MA: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.
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