Designing for the Future

Claim 1: Learning Occurs as People Participate in Social and Cultural Practices

Traditionally, educational psychologists studied learning processes as if they were independent from the settings in which they took place. The dominant perspective in psychological studies of learning treated cognition as an individual, mental process that took place apart from social interactions with other people and tools in personally and culturally meaningful circumstances (Lave, 1988; Rogoff, 2003). Learning Sciences researchers challenge this decontextualized view of learning. Drawing on theory and research from anthropology, cultural psychology, and sociology, they propose that learning is situated in broad cultural, historical, and economic contexts and local interactions between people and tools in settings.

A starting assumption from this perspective is that individuals’ socioeconomic, linguistic, and racial backgrounds along with their gender and sexual orientations shape the opportunities available (or not available) for them to learn. Following from this is the fact that members of historically marginalized groups are confronted by systemic challenges to their academic achievement, social and emotional well-being, and future possibilities. Although these structural inequities are great, they do not determine what individuals can do. As Learning Sciences researchers have documented, family, community, school, and religious practices are important resources for mediating and working around inequitable structures and processes located beyond the individual (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992; Nasir, Rosebery, Warren, & Lee, 2006). For example, after-school programs have been shown to help young people from historically underserved populations develop strategies for becoming academically successful, challenge discriminatory practices in their communities, and imagine productive futures for themselves (Kirshner, 2008; O’Connor & Penuel, 2010). Confronting power structures and practices is by no means simple or easy, but localized efforts by individuals and organizations can effect desirable and sustainable change (Erickson, 2004).

In addition to being situated in broad contexts, learning is also situated in moment-to-moment exchanges between and among people, as well as exchanges and interactions with physical and representational tools (Erickson, 2004; Greeno & Hall, 1997). Language, the mediational tool par excellence, is especially valuable for thinking and communicating because of its denotational and interactional functions (Wortham, 2001). It facilitates the accomplishment of individual and collective tasks by denoting or pointing directly to objects, people, and activities. This basic function of language is intertwined with its interactional function. That is, language can position people in interaction in particular ways in relation to the activity and to each other. As an example, consider the impact of prefacing a request for children’s participation in an activity with an encouraging versus a discouraging remark. This can affect whether the task gets done and opportunities for the student to engage in similar tasks in the future. Awareness of how these two functions of language shape how an interaction could unfold highlights the situated nature of learning and teaching.

Learning Sciences researchers have built on these fundamental insights about how learning is situated broadly and locally to investigate a range of pedagogical and theoretical issues including the nature of productive academic discourse practices (e.g., Engle & Conant, 2002; Hand, 2010; Jurow & Creighton, 2005), the design of participant structures that explicitly aim to disrupt inequitable patterns of power and authority in learning environments (e.g., Cornelius & Herrenkohl, 2004), and the roles adults and other experts might play in learning/teaching interactions with youth and children (e.g., Kirshner, 2008). Viewing learning as situated in broad and local social and cultural contexts provides preservice teachers with tools for reflecting on and reorganizing learning opportunities so that they can be more inclusive and potentially transformative (Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010). These insights can aid them in developing robust understandings of children and youth that a focus on disciplinary content and pedagogy alone cannot.

Claim 2: Children Learn Outside of School

Research on outside-of-school time (OST) is a central feature of interdisciplinary Learning Sciences. Researchers have documented learning processes in a range of OST settings, including the family (Rogoff, 2003), workplace (Rose, 2004), and after-school programs (Kahne et al., 2001; Mahoney, Eccles, & Larson, 2006). A great deal of attention has been placed, in particular, on features of effective community programs for youth, such as safety, belonging, cognitive challenge, and relationships with caring adults (Eccles & Gootman, 2002). One of the reasons that community youth programs have gained attention in the Learning Sciences is because of studies showing that they provide rich opportunities for learning and engagement for youth from nondominant backgrounds, which are often lacking in schools (Nasir et al., 2006).

Although there is wide variation in program quality, effective community programs embody many of the practices that are central to contemporary theories of learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; McLaughlin, 2000). For example, such programs aim to create opportunities for youth to take active roles in organizing, directing, and facilitating learning in program activities (Irby, Ferber, & Pittman, 2001). One way in which they attempt to do this is by drawing on the funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) or assets that young people bring to program activities. Activities in high-quality programs tend to be organized around cycles of practice, performance, and feedback, as novices work with veterans to accomplish authentic, open-ended projects ranging from theater performances to activism campaigns (Larson, 2000; Larson & Brown, 2007; Kirshner, 2008). In so doing, youth participants gain access to mature community practices, rather than being restricted to age-segregated activities. Such opportunities enable youth to develop the kinds of creative, resourceful, improvisational thinking that is rewarded in an increasingly information-based economy (Sawyer, 2006).

Despite the fact that there is a rich literature describing the opportunities for learning and development that children and youth experience in community programs, few teacher education programs purposefully situate preservice learning in such contexts. Doing so is important, we believe, because of its potential to help preservice teachers develop new teaching repertoires. For example, as guidance practices in community programs tend to be less obvious because they are distributed across adults and youth as well as built into activities, preservice teachers may then focus more on the learning environment—its social, cultural, and physical organization—rather than on teacher behavior. They may also see nondominant youth positioned differently—in ways that avoid deficit orientations—than they are in schools (García Coll et al., 1996).

Summary

The Learning Sciences encompasses a wide variety of views on what constitutes learning and how to design effective educational environments. We have considered research from two strands of the Learning Sciences to appreciate what research from this perspective says about how learning is organized socially, culturally, and historically and how it takes place in informal learning environments. In the next section, we discuss how we—as Learning Sciences researchers, educational psychologists, and teacher educators—used these ideas in our courses to challenge and extend preservice teachers’ views of learning.

Students’ Written Work

We collected students’ fieldnotes, interim data analysis papers, and their final research papers. These data sources allowed us to consider how the students participated at their sites, what they noticed, and how they interpreted the events and interactions they observed using course tools and activities; these also gave us insight into students’ historically developed perspectives and values.

Observer Notes from the Course

A graduate student teaching and research assistant took observer notes for 14 of 15 class meetings of the elementary educational psychology course. In general, her notes documented the nature of the days’ discussion, where possible indicating direct quotes, and the structure of the class that day (e.g., small group work, lecture) as well as how students were or were not engaging with the day’s lesson. In addition, she noted and reflected on her own involvement with the students and the discussion.

Approach to Analysis

To understand how students participated in the social practices of the course including using its required tools (e.g., fieldnotes, course readings) and engaging in its routine activities, the authors reviewed all of the data sources with an eye toward identifying variation in student learning trajectories. We began by reading students’ work in the chronological order in which they produced it. Specifically, we read each student’s set of three fieldnotes, interim data analysis paper, and final paper and created a table, which we shared in the research team via Google documents, to keep track of our analyses of how students engaged with the intentions of the course. We found that students focused on different aspects of the learning environment of their sites and used course readings to varying degrees to reflect on their experiences at the site. For example, students wrote about their role in relation to the children at the site, concern about whether and/or how to maintain their authority as adults at the site, and how they might allow children to take on the role of “expert” during an activity. Regarding the variable use of course readings to analyze their site experiences, we found that some students used the weekly readings as tools to make sense of their interactions with children whereas others mentioned course concepts either superficially or not at all. When we analyzed the students’ interim data analysis and final papers, we attended to the content of the research question that focused their inquiry, their findings, and their interpretations of what they learned through their analyses. Similar to our analysis of students’ fieldnotes, we considered what these foci and findings revealed about students’ engagement with course concepts. This contributed to our understanding of how the students traversed the course practices over the semester.

As we reviewed students’ written work, we also read the course observer notes and instructor feedback on students’ written work to help us understand how class activities, discussions, and instructors’ guidance shaped the students’ participation in the course. Because we were interested in how students’ learning trajectories might be shaped by the after-school site where they participated, we reviewed student participation by site and then as a whole.

We then used Wenger’s (1998) five types of trajectories as a starting point for categorizing our students’ learning pathways. These trajectories are defined as follows:

In our data, we found evidence of peripheral, inbound, and outbound trajectories in relation to the social practices of the course; we did not identify learning pathways that could be described as insider or boundary. As a research team, we shared our ongoing analyses of the student trajectories, discussed those cases on which we held different opinions, and referred back to our data sources to clarify our positions. These conversations helped us to define our understandings of the trajectory categories more clearly and apply them more consistently. For example, we decided to create a category called “peripheral/inbound” because we found that there were students who seemed to stall or disengage as they headed into course practices. Peripheral did not capture the direction of their trajectory well enough so we agreed, after reconsidering the data, to classify their path as a blend of two trajectories. After categorizing all of the students’ learning trajectories, we reviewed each of them as a team, discussed discrepancies in our categories, and settled, through discussion, on agreed-on categorizations. We draw on this analysis to present the variation across all students in the section titled “Variations in student learning trajectories.”

Development of Case Studies

We decided to develop case studies of two different student learning trajectories (inbound and outbound) so that we could understand them more fully; we did not focus on peripheral trajectories because we felt they were easily apprehended through our definition of the category. Once we had made this decision, we considered a number of additional factors for selecting students for case studies. We selected students from the same site for analytic clarity when comparing their trajectories, because they had experienced the same site activities, norms, and expectations. We wanted to examine the learning of students who indicated that they wanted to become elementary school teachers at some point in their lives, completed all of their course assignments, and attended their site regularly. These characteristics, along with the fact that the experiences and ideas to which we introduced them in the course were new, made Reese and Miranda ¹ appealing candidates for examining how they engaged with the course practices. Comparing them, we thought, could allow us to appreciate what led them to take different pathways in relation to the course practices and what they learned through their participation over the semester.

While keeping the intent of the course redesign in mind, during our comparison of their experiences in the course, we considered how they talked about their prior experiences and indicated their future goals, how they interacted with the course instructors (Jurow and Tracy) during class time and outside of class (e.g., in office hours and informal conversations before class), how they used their fieldnotes as tools for reflection, their oral participation in class activities and at their site (as reported in their fieldnotes), and their interim and final research reports. The cases present a narrative representation of the students’ diverse learning trajectories through the course.

Study Limitations

Our analysis of student learning trajectories was constrained by the fact that we studied students’ experiences only during our one-semester course. We tried to address this limitation by collecting and analyzing multiple sources of data including student fieldnotes, their final analysis papers and presentations, and our fieldnotes documenting their contributions to class discussions. Triangulating these data sources gives us a rich sense of the students’ current locations on their admittedly, still-developing learning trajectories.

A second drawback of our study was that we relied heavily on students’ writing as a way of understanding their learning trajectories. This is problematic because some students may not have been articulate about their experiences as revealed in their written work, and, as a result, we may not have gotten a full sense of their participation in the course practices. We tried to counter this limitation by capturing students’ activities and talk during formal and informal class times, which enriched our view of how they made sense of the course. As a last point, we did not observe the students at their sites to get a sense of how they might have used course ideas to inform their interactions with children. In our future work on students’ learning in this course, we intend to address this limitation by tracking students’ learning across the university-site contexts. Despite these limitations, our current analysis has helped us to gain insight into how our course facilitates student learning and how it could be organized more effectively in the future.

Peripheral

Peripheral trajectories describe student learning paths that remained at the edges of the course’s social practices. In terms of their participation in the course, the three students who enacted peripheral trajectories neither engaged reflectively with course concepts in their fieldnotes or in class activities nor consistently submitted required assignments. Students who took peripheral learning trajectories did not substantively consider the ideas and practices offered in the course. For instance, one student in this group was in his second semester of his senior year and told the instructor that he was primarily concerned with getting a passing grade in the course so that he could graduate.

Inbound

The majority of the students in the class (21) showed inbound learning trajectories. We reviewed and compared the data sources for the students who fit into this category and distinguished between those who were “directly inbound” (14) and those who took more tentative inbound pathways, what we call “peripheral/inbound” trajectories (7).

Students with inbound trajectories focused on entering into the social practices of their site, considering the roles they could play with children, and learning about the routines and aims of the learning environment. Noting the different expectations of their site from school classrooms, students struggled with whether they should act as “disciplinarians” when, for instance, children used “bad” language or if they might overlook such minor offenses as they engaged with the children. Other students wrote about their newly gained insights about what children could learn outside of school (e.g., gender roles) and how they learned it (e.g., through collaboration with peers, the use of hybrid language practices). As we found across students’ written work and contributions to class activities, students with inbound trajectories generally used course tools including readings, class discussions, and instructor feedback, to inform and reflect on their interactions at the site.

Students who took inbound/peripheral trajectories followed paths into the social practices and perspectives of the course, but stayed on its fringes. In one instance, a student was already aligned with the perspectives on the importance of community and diversity that were discussed in the course; her written work did not, however, show strong evidence that she read many of the course readings. Over the semester, her views on learning and learners did not seem to deepen or change. Other students in this group similarly did not use course concepts to engage reflectively at their site or in their writing about their site experiences. We categorized their trajectories as inbound/peripheral because all of these students tried, to some extent, to connect with and understand the experiences of learners at their site. These students showed engagement with the site activities but less so with the course concepts and readings.

Outbound

In contrast to inbound trajectories, outbound trajectories describe learning paths that moved into and then headed out of the social practices of the course into other communities of practice. The seven students whom we described as having outbound trajectories engaged with the social practices of the course, used its artifacts and technologies to examine teaching and learning, and considered its values and perspectives for their own purposes. That is, students with outbound trajectories demonstrated that they were explicitly thinking about how they might use insights from the course in other contexts; a form of participation that was qualitatively different from those students with inbound trajectories. It was this future-oriented engagement with the course concepts and ideas that marked the outbound trajectory. Future contexts toward which the students were oriented included elementary school teaching and further work at the service-learning sites where they participated during the course.

A broad understanding of student trajectories provides a useful perspective on students’ experiences in our course, but it does not help us appreciate how trajectories unfolded over time and in relation to different course activities, technologies, and forms of instructional mediation. To gain this level of understanding, we next share in-depth case studies of students who took different inbound learning trajectories in relation to the course practices. We focus on variations across inbound trajectories because this was the kind of path that most of our students enacted during the semester.

Case 1: Developing an Inbound Trajectory Into the Practices and Perspectives of the Course

For Reese, the transition from peripheral participant toward an inbound trajectory was the central work of the class. Reese presented herself in class discussions and her fieldnotes as private-schooled, middle class, and White. She expressed pride in her upbringing and the active role that she felt her parents played in her formal education. At various times she contrasted her hometown experiences with what she imagined were the experiences of the children with whom she worked at her site and their families. When Reese first arrived at CDI, she felt that her beliefs about what Latino families lacked in terms of respect for adults and the importance of education were reinforced. However, over time and with nudging from the instructors, Reese’s assumptions about culture and learning were challenged, and she began to display an inbound trajectory as she considered the ideas of the course. As evidenced by her statements in class and her fieldnotes, this was a difficult and uncomfortable experience for Reese.

During her initial time at CDI, Reese remained on the periphery of the course and site practices. She looked to blame learners, their families, and the organization of the site for her discomfort without considering or questioning her assumptions. As she reflected after her first interaction with children at the site,

I am used to being in a private school setting and helping kids that want nothing more than to learn and strive to be better. It’s very hard to go from that to kids that could care less about books or learning. I am a mentor to the kids at home, to these kids, I feel like a maid and babysitter. (Reese_Fieldnote 1, 2/9/2010)

The fieldnotes were meant to help students reflect on their experiences at the site and to use theory to think about the nature of the interactions they had with site participants. Reese completed her fieldnotes, but she did not use them as we intended. She used them to vent her frustrations about the site and conjecture about the limited and poor-quality life experiences of the children with whom she worked. In addition, Reese did not analyze her fieldnotes using course readings despite the fact that doing so was a requirement of completing the fieldnotes and that she was repeatedly reminded to do so. Her fieldnotes thus served as a poor mediator between Learning Sciences theory and her experiences at the site. The fieldnotes were valuable, however, because they provided her a space for making sense of her current experience at CDI in relation to those in her past as a tutor. She consistently used the fieldnotes to propose how she thought learning environments should be organized. The fieldnotes were also valuable in that they allowed the instructors to see the assumptions that drove Reese’s evaluations and depictions of the experiences at the site. Once displayed in her fieldnotes, the instructors were then able to leverage them to help Reese understand the assumptions she was making and to mediate the way in which she approached them.

For example, during a meeting with Reese during Professor Jurow’s office hours (which Reese requested), Jurow pointed out how Reese made inferences about children’s attitudes toward learning that were not grounded in data. Specifically, she asked Reese to think about her broad claim that the children at her site “could care less about books or learning.” Jurow, referring to the feedback she provided on Reese’s fieldnotes, then asked her to compare this claim with a brief observation that she made in her notes that indicated the children did show some enthusiasm for learning. The instructor’s intention was to help Reese to see that she was using her own experiences of learning and schooling as a bar from which to judge the children’s actions, and that she was doing so unfairly and without adequate grounds. She suggested that Reese compare the “cultural scripts” (which the class had read about in Stigler & Hiebert, 1998) that undergirded her assumptions about teaching and learning with those at CDI. The instructor also suggested that Reese consider how she might be more active at the site in terms of suggesting activities to the children rather than waiting for someone else to tell her what to do. Reese left the meeting saying that she was eager to try out this new approach at her site.

As revealed in her third set of fieldnotes, Reese’s description of her interactions at site was more detailed than what she wrote in her first fieldnote. Specifically, she paid closer attention to what was happening during her interactions with the children. However, her note is still evaluative though, now, it is a positive evaluation of the child’s actions.

Rihanna and I also played with oversized Legos and some plastic toys that stuck to each piece. Rihanna was very good and sharing this week. We built three towers with the Legos and she even helped me put them back in the bag. There is a certain way that you have to put them in the bag for everything to fit. Rihanna was throwing the Legos into the bag and I would fix it. She watched how I put them in the bag, and then stopped throwing them and copied what I was doing. She would sit next to me on the couch and be very patient. (Reese_Fieldnote 3, 2/23/2010)

Furthermore, in these notes, Reese wrote about a close relationship she had developed with a particular boy at site. As she explained, this boy depended on her, missed her when she didn’t come to the site, and worked with her one-on-one. This relationship seems to have helped Reese enjoy her time at the site and to express more clearly and in greater detail the interactions she had with the young boy. This shift may have been because her relationship with the child aligned with her view that children should respect and follow the authority of adults. Whatever its root cause, the new direction Reese undertook at the site and the attention to capturing the details of what she and the children did in her notes indicate that she appropriated at least some of the instructor’s comments into her role at CDI.

Another example of Reese appropriating comments from the instructors came two weeks later when Tracy, the teaching assistant, sat in with the CDI volunteers as they discussed their site experiences. In the excerpts from Tracy’s notes below, we see that Reese was still experiencing frustration at the site:

Two students in particular are really having a difficult time at the site (namely, Reese and Tom) . . . I just listen to the conversation for a while and notice that two other students (Liza and Miranda) are attempting to show how they are interacting with kids and explain what they are doing.

During this time Reese is listening to what they have to say, but then turns to me and says in an exasperated tone “I don’t want to be their babysitters, I’ve babysat before. I wanted to be helping kids with learning, with their homework.” (Class fieldnotes, 2/24/2010)

Reese’s comment suggests that she was still frustrated with her experiences at the site. And, as in her meeting with Professor Jurow, she looked to Tracy to help her understand her difficulties. The teaching assistant responded to Reese in a way that put the responsibility for making sense of the site in Reese’s hands:

I said: we picked these sites like CDI and the others that weren’t in schools on purpose. We wanted you to be able to see that learning happens everywhere. We didn’t want the structure of school to limit your view of learning.

At this point in the semester, the class had read about the affordances of out-of-school learning environments (e.g., Gutiérrez, Baquedano-Lopez, & Alvarez, 2001; Thorne, 1993) and had discussed the different roles that such settings offer for adults and children. The teaching assistant’s comments underscored these ideas and linked them directly to the students’ experiences at their sites.

Reese’s final fieldnote entry revealed an emerging inbound trajectory as she began to make efforts toward using instructor feedback to appreciate and enhance her experiences at CDI. In the excerpt below, Reese reflects on the relations between her assumptions, course discussions, and her site experiences:

I got to CDI with low expectations because of my previous experience there. Expectations lead me to disappointment. So, I went with no expectations and received better results than I could have imagined . . . I think that my previous expectations really affected my experience at CDI. [The teaching assistant, Tracy] explained to us in class that the whole point of the sites chosen was to be at places without organization and to create our own classroom. I wish I had better understood this. This was my fault. (Reese_Fieldnote 3, 2/23/2010)

Reese’s analysis of her experiences in her third fieldnote shows evidence of change and stability of her earlier assumptions. She misinterpreted the teaching assistant’s earlier comment about the purpose of the placements in such a way that reinforced her notion that the setting was “without organization.” In the same note, however, Reese’s comments suggest that she was beginning to grapple with the intentionality behind the placement and her need to be more agentive in interacting with the children at her site. Her statements that “expectations led to disappointment” and “this was my fault” are significant in that they indicate she is trying to reconcile her own experiences with her new ones. Recognizing that it was her expectations that disappointed her and not the actions of the children indicates that she is beginning to acknowledge and work through her deeply held assumptions. We see this as the first step toward catching a glimpse of the complexity of the site as opposed to what she had expected to see at the site. This demonstrates a shift from her previous peripheral participation toward an inbound trajectory. However, we acknowledge that her statements also indicate that she may not see value in learning outside of a school-like environment.

Our analysis suggests that Reese’s views on patterns of behavior at CDI were limited by her previous experiences, but that this did not impede her engagement with the intentions of the course. Reese seemed to believe that teachers should be responsible for organizing students’ learning, and learners should passively acquiesce to the teacher’s intentions. Reese’s interactions with the instructors indicate that she wanted us to tell her what to do and explain to her what was going on at her site. She also sought and desired this type of explicit direction at her site, but did not get it.

Furthermore, Reese felt that learning meant academic learning, and she struggled to recognize that there might be other kinds of valuable learning taking place at her site. As she expressed more than midway through the semester, “I have always thought of learning—I mean because I have always gone to school, that learning meant school learning. It’s hard to see learning as something not relating to school.” The perspective that important learning might include something other than academic content was new and unfamiliar for Reese. That she gained this insight through participation in the course adds to our view that Reese was on an inbound trajectory into the course practices.

At the end of the course, Reese was just beginning to grapple with the ideas that the course offered. How she chooses to challenge, embrace, and/or disregard these ideas as she continues through college and perhaps onto a career in teaching is an open question. It is our hope that we have, at the least, raised her awareness to the possibilities of varied learning environments and the rich life experiences of children from cultural backgrounds different from her own.

Case 2: Developing an Outbound Trajectory from Course Practices Toward Teaching

Miranda’s learning in the course centered around figuring out how to use insights that she gained from the course practices in her impending work as an elementary school teacher. Her experiences exemplify an outbound learning trajectory. Miranda, who was in her early 30s, was one of the older students in our course. She had traveled internationally and taught English abroad. Through these experiences, she felt that she had gained an appreciation for learning outside of formal educational contexts. She shared in class discussion that this was not a view that was shared in her family; rather, it was one that she came to value on her own. Miranda was among a relatively small group of students in the class who were near the end of the teacher education program. More than any other student in the class, Miranda’s written work suggested that she actively considered the ideas to which she was introduced in the course alongside the ideas on education that she was studying in her other teacher education coursework. That is, she was trying to integrate theories and practices in this course with her other teacher education courses as well as her service-learning experiences to deepen her understanding of teaching.

Like Reese, Miranda was also placed at CDI as her service-learning site. And, similarly, her experiences at the site led her to face her assumptions of what she thought teaching and learning should look like and where they might occur. Unlike Reese, Miranda embraced the challenge of figuring out what her role as volunteer (not teacher) should look and feel like. She took this on in her initial visit to the site by trying to play the role of a less-authoritative adult with children who she felt were misbehaving. As she wrote in her first fieldnote,

The more I reflect upon this experience at CDI, the better I understand my feelings of apprehension over whether or not I should have told the girls to stop throwing things. I think that after years of observing, learning, and practicing what I’ve come to regard as “appropriate behavior,” I’ve found myself lodged in my own cultural script.

Though the site required that Miranda act in ways that were at first uncomfortable for her, she used theoretical constructs (such as “cultural scripts” [Stigler & Hiebert, 1998]) and research to inquire into and transform her practices with children.

Miranda engaged with her site experiences, fieldnotes, and research papers in ways that we, as instructors, intended. She was very concerned, in fact, with completing assignments correctly and would ask for feedback on whether what she was doing was what the instructor wanted. As she shared in an informal conversation with Jurow, this was her usual attitude in school as she desired to get the most out of her coursework. In her first set of fieldnotes, for instance, Miranda discussed how she tried to embrace a new way of acting with children that was suggested in class. Specifically, she wrote about how she noticed and embraced the less-authoritative role as adult that the site offered her as a volunteer and not a teacher:

Observations—At some point during this conversation, the girls began teasing one another, and objects started flying. It was clearly playful in nature, so I resisted my urge to admonish them and pretended to ignore the situation instead.

Analysis—I found myself torn between being their friend and being their disciplinarian . . . This situation reminded me of what we read about in B. Thorne’s “Gender Play: Boys and Girls in School.” Much like Thorne, I found myself “. . . trying to sort out playful from serious intent. [This] alerted me to the nuances of kids’ meanings and to my personal readiness to look for trouble . . .” Despite the obviously playful nature of the girls’ interactions with one another, I still found myself feeling somewhat uncomfortable with the situation.

Miranda tried out the ideas that were offered to her through class discussions and the readings to make sense of her experiences with the children at her site. She used her interactions with the children at CDI as a kind of laboratory for testing the value of these new perspectives, and her fieldnotes as a place for reflecting on the utility of the ideas. Miranda’s fieldnotes frequently suggested a degree of tentativeness as she practiced what for her were new ways of approaching children. For example, consider in the excerpt above that she included the phrase—”I still found myself feeling somewhat uncomfortable with the situation”—after referencing a course reading that legitimized the role she took with the children at CDI.

Using the readings, her interactions with the kids at CDI, and her fieldnotes as “thinking devices” (Wertsch & Toma, 1995), Miranda tried out new ways of engaging with kids that she thought could better serve her as a future teacher. As indicated in and across her three fieldnotes, she developed insights about how activities on a continuum from informal–formal can engage children differently and how adults can interact with children to better support their motivation. In her second fieldnote, for example, Miranda recounted a spontaneous conversation that she had with the kids about going to and paying for college that led to a discussion of what the children think and know about higher education:

As I reviewed A’s homework assignment, I casually mentioned that I had homework, too. The girls (A, K, and N) seemed somewhat surprised by this, saying “You do? You go to school, too?” This led to a great discussion about education. Alexa mentioned a cousin that was going to college, and she said, “Studying is good.” Karen said, “Engineers get to go to college for free. They get money.” I confirmed that many students are able to get scholarships, grants, and loans to help pay for college, as it can be very expensive. Karen then asked me, “How do you pay for college?” I told her that I took out loans, and confirming her understanding of what a loan is, she nodded her head and said, “And then you pay them back.” (Miranda_Fieldnote 2, 2/16/2010)

In her analysis of this interaction, Miranda compared the enthusiasm that the children displayed for talking about college with their uninspired attitudes toward completing their math worksheets earlier in the day. She pointed out how when the children needed to complete their math worksheets, they were easily “distracted” and seemed disengaged. In contrast, pointing back to the dialogue that she included in her fieldnote as evidence for her claims, Miranda noted that the children asked “relevant questions” and “contributed their own knowledge and opinions” about the topic. To deepen her understanding of her interactions with the children, Miranda drew on an assigned (Gee, 2005) and a recommended reading (Nasir, 2008) to compare how kids’ interests were differently drawn out, engaged, and/or extended. Below is an excerpt from the analysis section of her fieldnote:

Our discussion about college . . . allowed N, K, and A the opportunity to participate in a dialogue that incorporated aspects of themselves, a key feature highlighted in Na’ilah Suad Nasir’s article Everyday Pedagogy: Lessons from Basketball, Track and Dominoes. Our impromptu discussion invited the girls to become connected to one another through contributing ideas and asking questions. The topic of college was something they could all relate to in one way or another; either they knew someone in college, wanted to attend college, or had heard something about college. The girls were able to learn and express themselves through participating in this conversation. (Miranda_Fieldnote 2, 2/16/2010)

Miranda’s analysis of the different learning opportunities that were created at her site through, for example, impromptu conversations and assigned homework tasks enabled her to notice how learning is socially situated in particular contexts. This was a major theme in the course and one that Miranda investigated through her interactions at site and in her writing for the class. The analysis of how learning environments emerge through collaborative conversations, activities, and genuine interest assisted Miranda in thinking about how she might design her future classroom. In other words, she used theory as a tool for reflection on her actions at CDI as well as a guide for what she might try out as a teacher. This attitude is especially clear in the set of questions with which Miranda closed her last fieldnote:

How could I learn more about student interests and strengths without having to explicitly ask each student? Also, how can I engage kids in meaningful dialogue and/or activities without having to explicitly push them in this direction? Finally, how can I create and foster a rich learning environment that lacks the rigid, structural framework that traditionally characterizes a classroom? (Miranda_Fieldnote 3, 3/16/2010)

How Miranda posed these questions shows that she is taking it on herself (e.g., “How could I . . .”) to figure out how to create an effective learning environment for her future students. Her questions also indicate that she acknowledges the tension between structure and flexibility inherent in teaching and sees her role as a teacher as involving learning from her students. These views, as she emphasizes in her final research paper, were new to her and have expanded her sense of the possibilities of teaching:

This study has awakened me to the fact that what defines a “quality education” has evolved tremendously since the 1980s when I was in elementary school. Classroom desks are no longer arranged in rows, students are assuming an increasingly active role in constructing their own knowledge, and that rigid line that once separated learning from playing is becoming less and less visible. Moving forward, I will make every effort to incorporate the lessons I have learned from this study into my own classroom. (Miranda_Final paper, 4/2010)

Miranda engaged the course practices from the perspective of a future teacher. She was near the end of the teacher education program and had begun to think about how she would use the ideas she had learned in her training out in the real world. The structure of the course facilitated this movement from theory to practice and vice versa. Miranda embraced this cross-context sense-making work and it seemed to have helped her to take off from the university classroom, CDI, and into her future as a teacher. Although our analysis gives us confidence that Miranda was on an outbound trajectory from our course, as with Reese, we do not know whether and/or how Miranda will use the lessons learned from this course in the future. Based on her approach toward the activities we offered, however, we are hopeful that if she continues her pursuit of teaching, her decisions in the classroom will be carefully considered.

Fieldnotes as Vehicle for Surfacing Assumptions

We encouraged students to explore how children’s learning is shaped by social and cultural contexts through writing and analyzing their own and others’ fieldnotes. Questions and comments posed by instructors about students’ fieldnotes became an important tool for supporting students’ learning. These questions and comments prompted them to consider their cultural assumptions and biases regarding how learning and teaching should unfold. As an example, in response to Reese’s first fieldnote entry, Professor Jurow asked, “How are your cultural scripts shaping what you’re noticing and observing (at your site)?” This proved to be a fundamental question for Reese—one to which she returned, but only with prompting, throughout the course. As researchers who study learning in situ can attest, uncovering and trying to understand the roots of one’s cultural assumptions is an important step toward appreciating the social and cultural organization of learning (Erickson, 1986).

Situating Practicum Experiences Outside of School

These cases show the powerful kinds of disequilibrium that can be prompted by situating teacher learning outside of the classroom, in community-based settings where the social organization of learning is perhaps less familiar to a newcomer. This experience of disequilibrium, and the resulting motivation to “make the strange familiar,” can be a catalyst for preservice teachers to learn, in an experiential way, the importance of understanding cultural practices—that, in fact, the teacher’s role is to be an ethnographer of her students. Such an experience has the potential to help preservice teachers broaden their repertoire of cultural practices so that they are more liable to “see” learning and knowledge when it is expressed by children from nondominant backgrounds (Rosebery & Warren, 2008).

This focus on learning versus teaching was facilitated by the kinds of roles that students were expected to play, which emphasized the roles of observer, guide, and friend. This enabled the students to focus on learning processes, rather than only on “teaching” techniques. As Miranda found, focusing on children’s perspectives enabled her to see them as more capable and goal oriented than she originally thought. This effort to de-center teaching does not imply that we think that developing teaching skills is not important. Rather, the de-centering that was accomplished in our service-learning placements is a strategy that is consistent with a community of learners approach. Preservice teachers in our course had the opportunity to try out this unfamiliar role with support and encouragement before they will have to perform it in their own classrooms.

Reese and Miranda used their service-learning experiences to reflect on these issues in different ways. The expectation that they pitch in at a community-based organization prompted them to reexamine basic assumptions about the social organization of learning. For Reese, this process was also tied to assumptions she held about students from nondominant backgrounds—she held on to a notion, perhaps reinforced by framing her work as “service,” that she was there to “fix” the students. Miranda, on the other hand, was more receptive to expanding her ideas about learning environments and engaged routinely in efforts to reconcile and coordinate what she was learning about classroom teaching with the kinds of learning processes observed at CDI.

Next Steps for the Project

Our recognition of variation in student learning motivates us to develop new iterations of the course—and its place in the broader teacher education program. For example, how can we better articulate the learning objectives of the Learning Sciences with courses in the sociology of education and teaching methods? Moreover, with recognition of the kinds of assumptions that students may bring to settings such as CDI, how can we design the experience to surface assumptions sooner and in ways that create greater opportunities for self-reflective student learning? Examining the theoretical contributions of the Learning Sciences and considering the diversity of ways in which they might practically inform teacher education is a necessary next step. What other ideas from the Learning Sciences might help preservice teachers understand and successfully manage the demands of teaching? How might we design field experiences that deepen preservice teachers’ understanding of cultural diversity and its impact on learning? How might we add critical perspectives—often missing in the Learning Sciences—to better prepare teachers to be agents of equity in their work with children? Bold and new ideas for improving teacher education must be grounded empirically and subjected to revision and refinement if they are to lead to sustainable change (Wang, Spalding, Odell, Klecka, & Lin, 2010). We accept this challenge with enthusiasm.

After the first iteration of the course, we feel that students’ written work demonstrates the value of our more situated, experiential approach to the study of educational psychology. Doing so, we anticipate, will make learning theory central to teachers’ emerging identities as teachers. Novice teachers receive so many messages about what it takes to be an effective teacher—we hope that their experiences as observers lead them to remember to also be students of their students. Being an effective teacher means being an effective learner.