It is a common practice in teacher education
classrooms to engage student teachers in the kinds of practices
we hope they adapt in their classroom teaching. In an elementary
literacy classroom, for instance, we can’t pretend that they are
learning to read but we can teach them about the processes
of teaching reading by asking them to read difficult texts
and reflect on and analyze their strategies for doing so. Another
way we do this is by asking student teachers to read a young
adult novel and then to participate in a literature circle
first as a student/reader and then as a teacher, reflecting
on the practice and how they might use it in their own teaching.
The multimedia websites gave us new opportunities for students
to investigate teachers’ practices and then reflect on
and discuss ways they might use these practices in their own
teaching. For both the literature circle and nonfiction writing
classes, rather than asking students to copy or try out specific
practices, we asked them instead to focus on how the teachers
established a classroom community and the range of pedagogical
practices that allowed them to know students while building
a cohesive group. The student teachers found the websites to
be important resources for imagining new kinds of interactions,
relationships and pedagogies. Teaching is always filled with
surprises. One surprising connection that student teachers
made was when they turned to Yvonne Hutchinson’s website
as a resource for thinking about the dynamics in our teacher
education program. Our use of the website for rethinking
the norms of our own classroom allowed us to have a different
kind of discussion about what was necessary and possible
in their current and future K12 classrooms. This double layered
teaching--always thinking about the current and future K12
classrooms through the practices of the teacher education
classroom--was deepened through the layered images of practices
in the websites.
