A Clash of Cultures: Exploring Teacher Movies and Their Effect on Pre-Service English Teachers’ Models of Being Literacy Teachers
Abstract
Introduction: As teacher educators in a secondary English Education Program at a large Midwestern university we have observed that our pre-service teachers bring cultural models (Gee, 2008) of being literacy teachers that pre-exist their participation in our program. These cultural models inform their conceptions about the attitudes, behaviors, and social practices appropriate to being literacy teachers. Our program offers pre-service teachers different cultural models of being literacy teachers: some embedded in books and articles, some constructed from professional standards, most emerging from instructors’ secondary teaching experiences. As teacher educators, we attempt to prepare our pre-service teachers to be novices by creating opportunities for them to take up aspects of cultural models that reflect our judgment of what it takes to be an effective literacy teacher in the 21st century. We conceptualize the tension between the cultural models that our pre-service teachers bring into the program and the models that they encounter in our program as representing different cultures of teaching, and their experience of them as a clash of cultures. We have used Hollywood teacher movies as a means to engage our pre-service teachers’ cultural models and through discussion to disrupt them. Our objective is to move them away from the more unrealistic attitudes, behaviors, and social practices of the teachers modeled in the movies toward a more critical and realistic stance so they are able to take up aspects of cultural models in line with professional consensus of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for effective literacy teaching. Our assumption was that doing this activity early in the semester was enough to dispatch the problematic aspects of the teacher movies. Once that was accomplished, our pre-service teachers would be ready and willing to take up aspects of our models. We found that by the end of the semester some students had experienced the disruption of their cultural models as a positive occurrence that enabled them to embrace what were to them new cultural models of being literacy teachers. Others resisted this disruption and dismissed aspects of our models that we felt they needed to take up. We have developed a theoretical frame that we believe can make a significant contribution to theorizing pre-service teacher socialization. In this article, we use data we collected during our teacher movie activity to illustrate its potential to examine these different cultures and their effects on our pre-service teachers. Study begins on pg. 235 of the yearbook.
Reference
Cowan, P. M., & Mickleborough, T. L. (2009). A Clash of Cultures: Exploring Teacher Movies and Their Effect on Pre-Service English Teachers’ Models of Being Literacy Teachers. In R. T. Jiménez, V. J. Risko, M. K. Hundley, & D. W. Rowe (Eds.), 58th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp. 235-247). Oak Creek, WI: National Reading Conference.
Journal
Yearbook of the National Reading Conference
Analysis
Is this article part of a larger project or series of studies?
no
Does this study draw on a large, preexisting data set?
no
Research Approach
Geographic Setting
Institutional Context
Certification Level
Programatic Focus
Research Location Context
Preservice Participants
- Undergraduates (university based program)
Preservice Sample Size
11
Duration of Data Collection
Data Sources
- written reflections/class papers
Data Analysis Tools
Researcher Positionality
- inside (staying their own students)
- Inside (studying their own practices)
Research Questions
" what do pre-service teachers find in teacher movies? "
Is this research question explicit from the manuscript? Yes