Learning to teach literacy in a teacher education program: Integrating multiple frameworks to become a new literacies teacher

Research on how teachers learn has recently emerged as an important area of research in teacher education (Bransford, Darling-Hammond, & LePage, 2005). To study how teachers are prepared to teach literacy, we need to know how they learn to implement their new pedagogical knowledge and conceptions of literacy in real contexts and over time. In a response calls for studies of how teachers learn, this two-year ethnographic study documented how prospective teachers learn to teach literacy in a teacher education program through an examination of literacy teaching practices in courses and field experiences. Data were collected in various contexts including an urban elementary school and university classrooms, using video recording, interviews, participant-observation, and artifact collection. Along with ethnographic methods, a hybrid critical and mediated discourse analysis was used to move between examples of learning in social contexts and a microanalysis of talk and action. The findings of the study were reported through four case study summaries, a description and interpretation of literacy teaching practices, and a cross-case analysis.; The four participants in this study incorporated multiple pedagogical frameworks with their existing knowledge and beliefs. As their practices became culturally relevant, they also incorporated multiliteracies practices including play, music, and movement into their literacy lessons. A guided practicum in a school-based laboratory setting led the participants to articulate how and why they chose certain practices. The practices that participants designed are markers of new literacies teaching, and it is this flexible use of multiple frameworks that prepares prospective teachers to resist simple definitions of literacy. This study informs the field of literacy teacher education by suggesting the application of the New Literacy Studies (The New London Group, 2000) as a pedagogical framework and proposes that learning how to teach literacy is best observed and analyzed in action and over time.