Cultural Studies to Help Us Understand
More specifically, we were interested in and recorded statements that teacher candidates used to describe themselves as teachers-in-training and the skills they identified as worthy of further development. For example, teacher candidates would state that they needed to ‘know how to ask questions [of their students] in a Canadian way’. Statements of identity included the way teacher candidates referred to themselves in relation to their Canadian-born peers. For instance, they would repeatedly mention the desire to speak English ‘like [mainstream] Canadians’, because it would lead to cultural acceptance, a characteristic identified as critically important for teaching in Canadian schools (for details, see Dlamini & Martinovic, 2007). At the end of each class meeting, as instructors, we met to discuss, reflect and analyse these statements and to plan activities for the next class. In our reflections, we used readings on critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies to help us understand teacher candidates’ learning experiences both at the university and in their practicum classrooms.
In this seminar we worked with the goal of helping teacher candidates achieve the maximum of positive experiences in the programme, experiences that we were well aware were not a norm for lETCs. We thus embarked on what Simon refers to as a ‘pedagogy of possibility’ (1992), which allowed for changes in how teacher candidates viewed themselves as learners and how they developed and engaged in relationships with those from dominant Canadian groups. In other words, we embarked on practices that aimed at empowering the teacher candidates with whom we worked. Following Simon, we define the process of empowerment to include countering ‘the power of some people or groups to make others “mute”. To empower is to enable those who have been silenced to speak. It is to enable the self-affirming expression of experiences mediated by one’s history, language, and tradition’ (Simon, 1987, p. 374). An ethnographic approach for such an undertaking allowed for observing these interactions and possible changes in relationships, because of and through empowerment.
From the very beginning of teaching this seminar, we viewed ourselves as reflective classroom ethnographers. Thus, though not formally structured in the early parts of the first year of teaching, toward the end of this year we began to collect data about teacher candidates’ learning as well as on seminar processes. Consequently, this paper draws from an ethnographic study of classroom interactions in which we participated in teacher candidates’ learning over a period of time, watching what happens, listening and recording what was said and asking questions and gathering empirical data through surveys in attempts to understand their teaching practice and classroom social interactions.
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