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Teacher education must prepare teacher candidates for diverse contexts and diverse learners. Such preparation involves teacher candidates unearthing their assumptions about diverse populations and understanding the roles candidates' own backgrounds play in these assumptions. Queer theory can facilitate this process through attention to culturally constructed notions of “normal” and “deviant.” This chapter investigates a strategy intended to identify teachers' cultural expectations through disrupting candidates' perceptions of “normal” students. Data sources include responses to a specific learning activity, interviews, and demographic surveys. Findings indicate that teacher candidates are reluctant to discuss certain demographic descriptors, such as race/ethnicity and sexual orientation, preferring to focus on students' interests and social behaviors. candidates' conceptions of a “normal” student mirror their own experiences. Interview responses suggest that the learning activity disrupted these conceptions. Implications point to the importance of discussing diversity in teacher education courses and the necessity of fieldwork in diverse contexts. © 2011, Copyright Association of Teacher Educators.
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Understanding how experienced teachers share and articulate effective mentoring practices can guide efforts to prepare quality mentors. This qualitative study focused on mentoring practices within a teacher-designed student-teaching program conceptualized while the mentor teachers within the program were students in a graduate-level mentoring course and implemented upon the mentors’ completion of their graduate studies. Data sources included interviews and field notes from meetings with mentors and student teachers. The results detail specific mentoring practices: explicit instruction through scaffolding, developing the whole teacher, student-teacher-directed learning, fostering student teachers’ individual practice, explicit mentoring of one another, and reflecting on mentoring. These practices were enabled by program structures such as mentor meetings, an online forum, and mentors’ observation of all student teachers in the program. © 2016, © 2016 CCNY and ATE.
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Initiatives to increase the number of teachers of color in U.S. public schools must be accompanied by culturally relevant teacher preparation for candidates of color. This study is a cooperative inquiry (Heron, 1996) conceived, conducted, and analyzed by five preservice teachers of color and one of their professors, a white lesbian. The women met biweekly for a year to co-construct meaning from their experiences in a teacher education program. They analyzed data sources together, including meeting transcripts, autobiographical sketches, and reflective writing on themes from the data. Key findings include the complexity of teacher candidates' identities; the importance of support systems for teacher candidates of color, particularly within predominantly white contexts; the connection between teacher candidates' backgrounds and their visions as teachers; and the role others' perceptions, particularly teacher educators, have played in teacher candidates becoming teachers.
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- Journal Article (3)
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- English (3)