Editorials

English/Language Arts Education

An Inquiry Into the Possibilities of Collaborative Digital Storytelling

by Stephanie Anne Schmier
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This article explores the possibilities of incorporating collaborative digital storytelling into preservice teacher education to support teachers in learning about their students’ rich perspectives on teaching and learning. Data were gathered in an elementary literacy methods course at a public university in the northeastern United States to explore the possibilities of a digital storytelling collaboration between undergraduate preservice teachers and elementary students. The article concludes with a discussion of ways teacher education researchers and practitioners might utilize digital storytelling to keep record of the ways diverse students experience teaching and learning.

Fostering Culturally Sustaining Practice and Universal Design for Learning: Digital Lesson Annotation and Critical Book Clubs in Literacy Teacher Education

by Laurie Rabinowitz & Amy Tondreau
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Supporting novice educators in developing culturally sustaining and universally designed literacy practices, which are also socially situated and contextual, can seem challenging in online learning environments without access to classrooms. This study sought to understand how novice educators developed literacy teaching practices infused with culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and universal design for learning (UDL) in an online learning environment. The authors used the P+E Framework to support the conceptualization of social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence in an online graduate elementary literacy methods course. While all three forms of presence were necessary in the course, social presence and teacher presence needed to be frontloaded and intentionally cultivated to support the type of cognitive engagement necessary for UDL and CSP informed literacy instruction. Additionally, elements of UDL modeled through course design served as a secondary layer of learning that participants were able to notice and name without explicit teacher presence. Implications for teacher education are discussed, including how high-touch online literacy methods courses should model the bending of curriculum toward learners.

“All the Talks, All the Bonding, All the Love”: Women of Color Feminist Multimodalities as Interruptions to the Whiteness of Teacher Education

by Grace Player, Gabby Bachoo & Cindy Lopez
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Teacher education (TE) programs have been historically white spaces that too often devalue and marginalize women of color (WOC) and their intellectual contributions. This paper, cowritten by two graduates of a predominantly White institution TE program and one of their professors –all three authors WOC with familial roots in Latin America – traces the ways that the centering of WOC knowledges and ways of knowing in teacher education can serve as an interruption to whiteness and a salve to the racial trauma too often inflicted on WOC in these programs. Specifically, it takes a WOC feminist lens to analyze the ways that multimodal projects, at times aided by digital technologies, provided WOC opportunities to utilize and explore their raced, cultured, and gendered experiences and knowledges within their TE program. This work suggests shifts in teacher education that allow for the centering of WOC perspectives, theories, and ways of knowing to reimagine TE built for and by WOC and their future students of color.

Mathematics Education

Representations of Practice Used in Mathematics Methods Courses

by Christine K. Austin & Karl W. Kosko
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This preliminary study explored how many representations of standard videos, animations/comics, and 360 videos are being used in mathematics methods courses to teach future teachers. Drawing on knowledge from prior studies on standard videos, this study aimed to address the gaps in literature to encompass other representations that are being utilized and obtained. Analyses show that standard videos are the primary medium being used to teach future teachers in math methods, followed by animations/comics, and then 360 videos. Findings suggest that teacher educators are more likely to use a medium that they are more familiar with than a medium with greater perceived usefulness. Further, findings indicate that teacher educators perceived usefulness and frequency of use as not related to their level of familiarity with all representation types, suggesting more factors are at play.

Science Education

Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Engineering Design During a Robotics Project

by Jiangmei Yuan, ChanMin Kim, Lucas Vasconcelos, Min Young Shin, Cory Gleasman & Duygu Umutlu
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Engineering design provides students with an authentic context to apply science and mathematics to solving problems and motivates them to learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Thus, teachers need to experience and become familiar with engineering design. However, little is known about how preservice teachers learn to do engineering design work. This study examined the engineering design practices of preservice teachers as they worked on a technology-enhanced design activity. The authors video-recorded a group activity in which preservice teachers designed, built, and programmed robots and then analyzed their discourse using verbal protocol analysis. The authors examined what design activities were practiced and how they were practiced and analyzed design-related conversational moves, which yielded an understanding of how preservice teachers collaboratively constructed knowledge during their engineering design process. The findings showed that preservice teachers frequently generated ideas to solve problems and evaluated their ideas. Their least frequent activities were judging the feasibility of solutions and modeling. Furthermore, they seldom disagreed with their partners after an idea was generated. Suggestions for preparing preservice teachers to incorporate engineering design into K-12 classrooms include providing engineering design opportunities, exposing preservice teachers to design examples, and creating design tasks that require the application of science and mathematics knowledge.

Using Preservice Teachers’ Transcript Coding of Simulated Argumentation Discussions to Characterize Aspects of Their Noticing About Argument Construction and Critique

by Pamela S. Lottero-Perdue, Jamie N. Mikeska & M. Shae Nester
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In this report of an action research study, the authors describe how one elementary science teacher educator used transcript coding of simulated classroom discussions as a pedagogical approach to learn about her elementary preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) abilities to notice key aspects of scientific argumentation discussions. Elementary PSTs (n = 19) enrolled in a science methods course engaged in transcript coding before and after facilitating their own argumentation discussions in the Mursion® simulated classroom environment with five upper-elementary student avatars. The first transcript was from a PST outside of the course; the second was from PSTs’ own discussions. The study examined how PSTs’ coding of the transcripts could provide the teacher educator with insights regarding PSTs’ noticing about engaging students in argument construction and critique. The study also aimed to investigate PSTs’ perspectives on the utility of transcript coding. Findings showed that PSTs can code with accuracy, yet they may be more apt to miss coding teacher prompts that encourage students to share reasoning. Results also revealed that PSTs sometimes coded nonexamples of argument construction and critique, suggesting a need for more targeted learning experiences to connect teaching principles with classroom interactions, and the PSTs perceived coding their own and other’s transcripts as uniquely valuable learning experiences.

General

What’s Being Taught? An Analysis of Corporate EdTech Certification Programs

by Todd Cherner, Alex Fegely, Lynsey Heffner & Cory Gleasman
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Corporate EdTech Certification Programs (CECPs) have the potential to disrupt the traditional ways professional development has been offered to teachers. With large companies creating CECPs to demonstrate the ways their products can be used for educational purposes, this study utilized a content analysis methodology to analyze which knowledge bases from the Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework were being integrated into CECPs. Overall, the knowledge bases that included technological knowledge were emphasized, and the ones connected to content knowledge were seldom addressed, if at all. The study is first contextualized, followed by a description of its methodology before reporting findings. The implications section identifies the collective strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the CECPs before concluding with recommendations for stakeholders to improve and use CECPs for educational purposes.

Seminal Articles