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Article Excerpt
In his study of a university's first-year composition program, Durst (1999) describes the "collision course" that instructors and students travel when they arrive with very different beliefs about the raison d'etre for the class. At the University of Cincinnati, the site of his research, many students take a pragmatic view of their college education, matriculating to elevate their station in society. First-year composition, in these students' view, should have a utilitarian emphasis, teaching them writing skills that will help them succeed in their upper-level coursework and ultimate careers.
The first-year composition instructors, however, typically adopt a critical theory stance toward writing pedagogy. Rather than simply teaching students how to write in accordance with college expectations, they take a more political perspective in which they instruct their students to use writing as a means to critique and transform society into a more equitable place. Often, this effort involves requiring Students to critique their own privilege. This emphasis, in the view of many students, assumes of them a privilege that they do not believe that they have and further provides for the course a purpose they believe it ought not have. These competing assumptions and interests, argues Durst (1999), make first-year composition courses problematic in terms of the various stakeholders' beliefs about what is appropriate for the class's curriculum, instruction, direction, and assessment.
The intersection of oppositional interests in a social setting has been described by Pratt (1999) as a contact zone. To Pratt, contact zones are sites where members of different cultures "meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power" (p. 76). The examples Pratt provides are often extreme in this regard, such as the inequitable relationship between master and slave. However, more nuanced versions of a contact zone are often in evidence in schools, where a host of relationships--often involving people of disproportionate power--intersect in complex ways. At times such a nexus of competing values and interests provides the site for the violence implied by Durst's (1999) "collision" metaphor or Pratt's "clash" of values. At other times, however, the different conceptions of the classroom's purpose provide for a more subtle, less cataclysmic convergence of interests.
In this study, we investigate a student teacher's pedagogy in a 12th grade English class called Applied Communications. The class was designed to teach vocational-track students both a literature-oriented curriculum and the skills they presumably needed to find jobs and succeed in the workforce. We analyze teacher candidate Joni's experiences in relation to the four primary perspectives that intersect, interact, and come into conflict in her teaching of the Applied Communications class: (a) Joni's stated beliefs about effective teaching based on her experiences as a student, (b) the Applied Communications curriculum as interpreted by her mentor teacher, (c) the student-centered pedagogy advocated by her university professors and supervisor, and (d) the students' reported beliefs about the appropriateness and usefulness of the Applied Communications curriculum. In light of these interests, we explore the following research question: What are the consequences for Joni's teaching as a result of the ways in which she acknowledges and interprets these four perspectives?
Theoretical Framework
Leont'ev's (1981; cf. Wertsch, 1985) account of the motive of a setting provides a useful construct for understanding the dynamics of a contact zone (Grossman, Smagorinsky, & Valencia, 1999). Borrowing terms from Sarason (1972), Wertsch (1985), and others, we refer to the contexts that mediate the development of consciousness as activity settings. Lave (1988) makes a distinction between an arena, which has visible structural features, and a setting, which represents the individual's construal of that arena. Thus, although two teachers may work at the same arena (e.g., a school or English department), they may have distinctly different understandings of it based on their own goals, histories, and activities. They thus experience the same arena as different settings. When a teacher candidate is subservient to both the university's and the school's priorities during student teaching, there is great potential for an educational arena to become a contact zone in which different conceptions of setting come in conflict.
As outlined by Cole (1996), settings are proleptic; that is, established assumptions about appropriate social futures implicitly shape people's present action to bring about those very futures. Rheingold and Cook (1975), for instance, found that parents often both anticipate and help to construct their children's gendered futures, decorating boys' rooms with transportation motifs and other worldly pursuits and girls' rooms with dolls, lace, and other domesticalia. The shaping of children's environments by adults projects a life trajectory that is often reinforced across the many settings in which young people are socialized into appropriate adult roles. This sense of optimal outcome, both for individuals and whole social groups, has been described by Wertsch (2000) as teleological; that is, having a sense of design toward a preferred purpose. The constructs of telos and prolepsis suggest that every social setting has a motive (Leont'ev, 1981), or broad social destination, that is continually encouraged through both explicit and implicit means. At the same time, the notion of a contact zone suggests that this official or predominant motive may be contested by those who are outside the power structure.
Merging the goals of various stakeholders into a common motive is highly complex. Multiple and competing goals and destinations often coexist within a setting, although typically the goals of the most powerful people and groups predominate. The motive for a setting, then, while not specifying the actions that take place, provides channels that encourage particular ways of thinking and acting, and discourage others. Student teaching illustrates the ways in which a setting may accommodate diverse and sometimes antagonistic goals, with schools and universities often envisioning different roles for the teacher. Student teaching often becomes a setting in which different stakeholders vie for control over the instructional approach, resulting in a two-worlds pitfall for teacher candidates (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985) in which they must be responsive to the demands of competing interests. Further, another set of stakeholders, the students, may invest the arena with other goals and expectations, resulting in classrooms in which, while an official destination is operationalized in a curriculum, the sense of setting and attendant goals constructed by different participants may be at odds and come in conflict.
Our study of Joni's teaching in an Applied Communications class employs the construct of the activity-setting-as-contact-zone as a lens for understanding her decision-making during student teaching. We next outline how this theoretical framework has provided us with the terms and concepts through which we collected and analyzed the data for our study.
Method
Data Collection
The research design as a whole was conceived by the first author along with his colleagues Pamela Grossman and Sheila Valencia as part of research conducted through funding acquired by the Center on English Learning and Achievement (CELA) from the U.S. Office of Educational Research and Improvement. The research team for this study collected the following data.
Data not formally analyzed. Some data sources were not subjected to a formal analysis. We consulted these data to provide the context of the investigation. For example, information about the teacher education program emerged in Joni's gateway interview, our interviews with her professors and supervisors, and the concept maps that the students produced for the research. We extracted what we saw as germane to the focus of this study and included it in our account. The following sources were employed for such purposes:
1. We conducted a gateway interview with Joni during which she spoke in response to questions in the following categories: her apprenticeship of observation (i.e., what she had learned about teaching based on her experiences as a student; see Lortie, 1975), her personal philosophy and conceptions about teaching, her preservice coursework, and her field experiences prior to student teaching (data collected by the first author).
2. We conducted interviews with Joni's university English education professors about their experiences as teachers and their approach to teacher education (data collected by the third author).
3. We conducted interviews with Joni's mentor teacher and university supervisor at different points during her student teaching (data collected by the third author).
4. We solicited two group concept maps produced by the cohort of research participants before and after student teaching (data collected by the first author).
5. Joni provided us with curriculum documents and planning books that influenced her decisions about teaching (data collected by the third author).
Data subjected to formal analysis. The formal analysis was conducted on data collected during three observation cycles. An observation cycle consists of a preobservation interview, two classroom observations recorded via field notes, and a postobservation interview (data collected by the third author).
Data Analysis
We developed a coding system derived from prior work in this line of inquiry to identify the pedagogical tools that Joni emphasized in her student teaching (e.g., Bickmore, Smagorinsky, & O'Donnell-Allen, 2005; Smagorinsky, Sanford, & Konopak, 2006; Smagorinsky, Wright, Augustine, O'Donnell-Allen, & Konopak, 2007). This coding system is grounded...
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