Examining Communities of Practice (original) (raw)
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Examining Communities of Practice: Transdisciplinarity, Resilience, and Professional Identity
Journal of Basic Writing, 2020
He is the editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College and is co-founder and editor of the Teacher-Scholar-Activist blog. He recently co-edited a special issue of WPA on two-year college writing programs. His writing and research appear in a number of journals and chapters, including College English, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Pedagogy, Composition Studies, and Basic Writing e-Journal.
Issues of standardization, student achievement, and diversity have dramatically altered teaching within early childhood programs across the United States. This has created a situation in which teacher educators need to assist practicing and preservice teachers working in these contexts with formulating instructional responses that address policymakers' high-stakes demands, take into account the best practices of early childhood, and attend to children's linguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and political worlds. This article addresses this issue by examining findings from a qualitative study of a professional development course within a large urban school district for prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers. In the course, the teachers were asked to engage in action research projects that pursued learning experiences with their students reflecting issues central to their lives in and/or outside their classrooms. Analyzing and interpreting their experiences sheds light on how teacher educators can support practicing and preservice teachers in responding to the governmental, institutional, and local demands on their teaching while attempting to formulate learning experiences that reflect their students' sociocultural worlds.
Iceri2014 Proceedings, 2014
This paper presents the findings of a research project that investigated the views of a group of preservice teachers both before and after their exposure to practice within professional Childcare. A mixed methods approach was employed. Thirty students in their third year of a four year teaching degree at The University of Notre Dame, Australia were surveyed and interviewed before and after embarking on a ten week practicum within the Childcare sector. A key finding of the study was that there is currently great division within the Western Australian Early Childhood Education sector. This division has arisen following a recent Government policy decision that requires qualified teachers to be employed in Childcare Services by 2014. However, the current lead educators within these care based settings are resentful of the implication that qualified teachers are needed to improve consistency and quality in the early years. This resentment coupled with the lower levels of pay and conditions within Childcare settings in comparison to schools serves to make Childcare an unattractive prospect for qualified teachers. However, when the reasons for the resentment are explored, they expose an inequity of status that challenges the identity of those on both sides of the divide within what should be a community… a community of educators with the shared goal of supporting the holistic education of Western Australia's youngest children. This paper makes a necessary contribution to the current research context where research on perspectives of teacher-educators within Childcare is limited. It is particularly pertinent in the context of the implementation of the policy requiring a qualified teacher to be employed within Childcare settings from 2014 onwards. The central message of the research is that this community needs healing and support in order to move beyond the power struggle to be free to educate children within their related and equally important spheres of expertise. .
Chasms and bridges: Generativity in the space between educators' communities of practice
Teaching and Teacher Education, 2010
This article presents findings from an ethnographic study that explored how participation in an educator network contributed to the production of meaning, identity, and agency among the teachers and school district administrators involved. Prominent in this process were the differences between practice in the network, consisting of dialogue informed by theory, inquiry, and reflection on professional experience, and the practice of participants' workplace communities. I argue that identities afforded by multi-membership in these very different communities, along with the bridges participants worked to build between the communities, hold promise for generating change in the field of education.
Becoming Critical Friends: Developmental Portraits of Three Professional Learning Communities
National Teacher Education Journal, 2018
This descriptive, holistic multiple-case study examined three professional learning communities (i.e., Critical Friends Groups [CFGs]) with distinctive contexts, features, and participants, including: (a) cross-career educators at an urban Professional Development School (PDS), (b) first-year teachers in a master’s degree cohort using a virtual format, and (c) veteran literacy coordinators in a rural school district. The process, content, sustainability, and impact of the CFGs were explored across a school year. Qualitative and quantitative data (n=36) were collected via individual and focus group interviews, written reflections, and meeting observations. The findings reveal the groups as situated on a developmental continuum, with the PDS CFG in the initial stage of establishing, the virtual CFG in the next stage of consolidating, and the veteran educator CFG in the mature stage of advocating. Considerations and implications for teacher development via CFGs are discussed in light of the growth stages.
Connecting Communities of Practice Through Professional Development School Activities
Journal of Teacher Education, 1999
This analysis of professional development school projects across multiple sites began as a discussion in the Teacher Education Research Study Group (TERSG) at the 1996 annual meeting of the National Reading Conference. Teacher educators interested in literacy shared their collaborative projects and examined their professional development school (PDS) activities at four universities. Participants were interested in challenging the traditions of conventional teacher preparation programs, specifically the contexts in which programs that pushed against orthodoxy were formed, the governance structures by which they operated, and the benefits and challenges of the collaboration between two disparate cultures. Although projects demonstrated idiosyncratic responses to varying contextual conditions, the results of our separate efforts were surprisingly similar. We believe that the ongoing challenge of reforming teacher education will benefit from an analysis of our experiences.
This paper reports findings from an 18-month qualitative study that followed the experiences of nine teacher residents, their site professors, site coordinators, clinical teachers, and principals in three Professional Learning Schools (PLSs). The study examined the tensions that emerged as teacher preparation theory intersected with the context-bound realities of daily life in schools and the political constraints that diminish possibilities for inclusive education. The paper addresses implications for teacher preparation programs by reporting how teacher residents negotiated their understanding of and commitment for inclusive education through three themes: