Fostering solidarity and transforming identities: A collaborative approach to elementary science teacher education

Item

Title
Fostering solidarity and transforming identities: A collaborative approach to elementary science teacher education
Identifier
d_2009_2013:c19bedf0c7e2:10294
identifier
10215
Creator
Siry, Christina A.,
Contributor
Kenneth Tobin
Date
2009
Language
English
Publisher
City University of New York.
Subject
Teacher education | Science education | Elementary education | cogenerative dialogues | coteaching | pre-service teacher education | solidarity | teacher identity
Abstract
This study explores the use of coteaching and cogenerative dialogue in pre-service elementary teacher education, and the ways in which collaborating to share responsibility for learning and teaching can afford the development of solidarity and new teachers' identity transformations. Specifically, the research detailed in this dissertation focuses on learning to teach science in a field-based methods course taught partially on a college campus and partially in an urban elementary school.;I used critical ethnography guided by the theoretical frameworks of cultural sociology and the sociology of emotions. The lens of phenomenology provided the contextual aspects of the individual experience, and design experiment was utilized as the research unfolded, affording continual redesign of the work. Issues of identity and group membership are central to this research, and I have explored connections between the emergence of solidarity within a group of teachers and the individual identity transformations supported through a collective sense of belonging. A key component of this study was an analysis of the co-responsibility nurtured through coteaching and cogenerative dialogue, and thus the dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective is critical to this research. At the individual level, I examined identity development, and individual participation in a field-based methods course. At the collective level, I considered the ways that participants form collective identities and group solidarity. Two of the chapters of my dissertation are coauthored with students, as I have sought to dismantle teacher-student hierarchies and replace them with complex relationships supported through polysemic and polyphonic approaches to research.;In examining identity and solidarity as they emerged from this approach, I make the following contributions to science teacher education; (1) identify resources and practices in elementary science teaching that surface in a collaborative field-based framework, (2) investigate identity transformations that occur among participants in a collaborative field-based framework and (3) explore the ways in which this approach helped pre-service teachers and myself develop a sense of community. By fulfilling these connected goals, this research draws implications for teacher education programs and provides insights towards creating collaborative approaches to teacher education courses.
Type
dissertation
Source
2009_2013.csv
degree
Ph.D.
Program
Urban Education