English Education May 1992 [antikvár]

Preservice Teachers as Researchers: Developing Practice and Creating Theory in the English Classroom Eleanor Kutz The students who enter my pre-practice course for English majors want to learn classroom strategies—answers to their as yet unformulated questions about what they will encounter and how they will respond when they enter their own classrooms. They have heard enough of educational theory and curriculum design and they are impatient to get on with the "real thing"—the "how to." They see teachers as answer-knowers, not only about the content of lessons—the year of Shakespeare's birth, the definition of a gerund—but also about what to do when the student in the fourth row puts his head down on the desk or calls out to a neighbor or doesn't do homework. And because they see teachers as answer-knowers they believe that I, as the teacher of this pre-practicum, can give them the information to write down in their notebooks and take with them into their own classrooms about what to do in each instance of their teaching. Of course veteran teachers know that teaching consists more of questions than of answers, for experienced as well as inexperienced teachers—that they informally learn about and generate their own theories about their teaching and students' learning daily in the immediate context of their particular classrooms. Teachers ask questions: "Why was Alice so quiet today?" They invent hypotheses: "Perhaps she didn't really understand the story, or maybe she was upset because of something going on at home." They gather data: "I'll ask her some more questions about the story tomorrow and see how she responds." or "I'll try to catch her after school." They look for larger patterns: "Actually, several other students who usually contribute a lot were quieter than usual in that discussion. Maybe the story was too far removed from anything they've experienced for them to enter it easily." They test out alternatives: "Tomorrow I'll start the discussion by finding out how much they really know about_." And they begin to shape theories of teaching and learning: "The students seem to understand a story better when we start out by finding out what they already know about the things it focuses on. From now on I'll try beginning 67