Acting as accountable authors: Creating interactional spaces for agency work in teacher education

Author(s):

Lasse LipponenKristiina Kumpulainen

Conference:

ECER 2010

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 09 C, Research on Values, Beliefs & Understandings in Teacher Education

Paper Session

Time:

2010-08-27

08:30-10:00

Room:

AUDITORIUM XI, Päärakennus / Main Building

Chair:

Michel Grangeat

Contribution

In this paper, relying on the sociocultural framework of learning, we report the results of an ethnographically-grounded investigation of agency work among nine student teachers: How agency emerges and is constructed into being in situated discourse practices within the context of a teacher education program embedded in the collective inquiry approach. Our study shows that the negotiation and framing of agency, and acting as accountable authors, involves changes in teacher-student positions such as crossing and transforming traditional expert-novice boundaries, as well as recognizing and crediting this crossing of boundaries. In addition, agency work is distributed across people, tools, and environments. Methods and conditions for supporting students' agency work in teacher education are discussed.

Method

Our data source consists of 10 video-recorded sessions, a total of 20 hours of video material. Our data analysis is grounded on an ethnographic logic of inquiry. This approach to data analysis proceeds as a series of cycles during which questions are posed. We considered the videotapes as data sources, from which we constructed the data. Firstly, we took a rough overview of all the videos and indexed list of topics that we identified in the small group work sessions. We observed the videos several times to learn more and engaged in progressive refinement of hypotheses, to provide more specific questions for our research. After that, keeping our research questions in mind, we watched the videos several times in attempt to to identify patterns in the data source. We selected episodes, where agency emerged. These critical episodes, or 'telling cases', were then transcribed and analyzed.

Expected Outcomes

The negotiation of agency, and acting as an accountable author, involve changes in the positions of students and teachers; crossing and transforming traditional expert-novice boundaries, and recognizing and crediting this boundary crossing. In interactional spaces, where students can breake away from the traditional 'taken-for-granted' patterns of activities they are able to take initiatives to transform teacher-student positions. When framing and supporting students' accountability, teachers should not control and command the learning sessions, but instead, connect, reciprocate, and distribute the responsibility for activities. This should not be done at the expense of discipline but rather as a collective negotiation process in which the everyday knowledge and theories student teachers are likely to hold about educational practices and discipline are examined in a reciprocal relationship, comparing different perspectives to the phenomena in question. The identification of situated episodes of interaction in which agency work emerges is, not only valuable for academic research on teacher education, but also has pedagogical potential for teacher education and teacher professional development. Collective investigation of interactional episodes in which agency work becomes visible can at best develop future teachers' professional competences to notice powerful methods and conditions in which agency work emerges.

References

Castanheira, M.L., Green, J., Dixon, C., and Yaeger, B. (2007). (Re)formulating identities in the face of fluid modernity: an interactional ethnographic approach. International Journal of Educational Research, 46, 172-189 Edwards, A. (2005). Relational agency: Learning to be a resourceful practitioner.International Journal of Educational Research 43, 168–182. Edwards, A. (2007). Relational Agency in Professional Practice: A CHAT Analysis. Actio: An International Journal of Human Activity Theory 1, 1-17. Edwards, A. & D‟Arcy, C. (2004). Relational Agency and Disposition in Sociocultural Accounts of Learning to Teach. Educational Review, 56, 147-155. Engle, R. A. & Faux, R. B. (2006). Towards Productive Disciplinary Engagement of Prospective Teachers in Educational Psychology: Comparing Two Methods of Case- based Instruction. Teaching Educational Psychology, 1, 1-22 Erickson, F. (2007). Ways of seeing video: toward a phenomenology of viewing minimally edited footage. In R. Goldman, R. Pea, B. Barron & S. J. Derry (Eds), Video Research in the Learning Sciences (pp. 145-155). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Greeno, J. G. (2006). Authoritative, accountable positioning and connected, general knowing: progressive themes in understanding transfer. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 15, 537-547. Gresalfi, M., Martin, T., Hand, V. & Greeno, J. (2009). Constructing competence: an analysis of student participation in the activity systems of mathematics classrooms. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 70, 49–70. Mitchell, C.J. (1984). Typicality and the case study. In R. F. Ellens (Ed.), Ethnographic Research: a guide to general conduct. New York: Academic Press.

Author Information

Lasse Lipponen

University of Helsinki

Department of Teacher Education

Helsinki

Kristiina Kumpulainen

The Finnish National Board of Education

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