This interview features insights on the article entitled, “Imagination, Brokers, and Boundary Objects: Interrupting the Mentor–Preservice Teacher Hierarchy When Negotiating Meanings” by Marti Canipe and Kristin Gunckel. The article was published in the January/February 2020 issue of the Journal of Teacher Education.
Article Abstract: The mentor–preservice teacher hierarchy, that privileges mentor teacher talk and experience, often dominates mentor–preservice conversations. To realize the full potential of teacher education approaches designed to engage preservice and mentor teachers together in shared learning and teaching tasks, attention is needed to better understand the dynamics and implications of mentor–preservice teacher interactions. We analyzed how and when preservice and mentor teachers introduced ideas to group conversations and whose ideas were taken up by the group during a co-learning task. We found that mentor teachers tended to dominate group sense-making. However, preservice teacher use of imagination, the actions of teacher educators as brokers, and the use of boundary objects temporarily interrupted the dominant hierarchy. We conjecture that these moments raised preservice teacher status within the group so that mentor teachers took up preservice teachers’ ideas. Implications for promoting more equitable preservice teacher participation in sense-making with mentor teachers are discussed.
Question 1: What were some difficulties you encountered with the research?
One difficulty that we encountered with the research was with using our framework in a way that enabled us to interpret our data deeply and in a way that would help us see something new. We used Wenger’s Modes of Belonging as a way to interpret the interactions that occurred between mentor and preservice teachers working on a co-learning task. In our process of working through our data with this framework we recognized that the most salient interpretation is not always the first thing that you see in the data. We learned that spending sufficient time with our data and framework allowed us to peel back the layers to develop a deeper understanding of the interactions we were examining. The rounds of review and revision helped us in this process by pushing us to reconsider our initial interpretations and explicate these interpretations for our readers. Our deeper engagement with the data also brought forth brokers and boundary objects as pieces of our framework that were not part of the early interpretations. This “difficulty” provided us with an opportunity to delve deeply and repeatedly into our data, which allowed us to see things that were not necessarily apparent upon initial consideration.
Question 2: Writing, by necessity, requires leaving certain things on the cutting room floor. What didn’t make it into the article that you want to talk about?
Writing about a qualitative research study always means making difficult choices about which examples from the data should be included in order to best present the findings. In this study we had many hours of small group conversations to analyze, but we could only share a small portion of them in the article. For example, there were a variety of ways in which the mentor teachers took on a role as principal participant, but we had to choose only one to share, a case where the mentor teachers seemed to ignore the idea from the preservice teacher. However, there were also cases where mentor teachers seemed to more explicitly reject the ideas of preservice teachers and we did not have room to share those too. In addition to wishing we could add more examples for some categories, there was also a conversation among the preservice and mentor teachers about the challenges with teaching in the school garden given recent rattlesnake sightings in the area. While this example gave a great feeling of place to the findings, in the end it turned out to not be the most salient example to share.
Question 3: What motivated you to pursue this particular research topic?
We were drawn to tackling one of the most persistent challenges of teacher preparation – the gap between what preservice teachers learn in their university-based course work and their experiences learning to teach in field placement classrooms. Researchers have struggled for years to understand and fill this gap, yet we felt that there was still more to be learned. We were not so naïve to think that we would solve the challenges that so many others before us have investigated. However, we believed that we could build more continuity between the two learning environments by bringing preservice teachers, mentor teachers, and teacher educators together to learn from and with each other about teaching mathematics and science in elementary schools. Because mentor teachers often do not know what or how preservice teachers are learning to teach mathematics and science in their university-based course work and teacher educators might not have many opportunities to leverage the experience of mentor teachers in the classroom, we recognized that filling the gap between course work and field placement experiences would require more than just putting everyone together in the same room. Nevertheless, what we learned is that the hierarchy between preservice and mentor teachers is real and enduring, constructed by both preservice and mentor teachers. This paper emerged as we began to see not only how persistent the hierarchy can be, but also some of the little ways that it can be interrupted. In the face of one of teacher education’s biggest challenges, making progress in little ways seemed to have practical potential.
Question 4: What advice would you give to new scholars in teacher education?
Getting this paper published was a long process with several rounds of revise and resubmits. Based on this experience, we would have two messages for new scholars. The first is to seriously consider the suggestions reviewers offer. Often, this means the revision process involves reconceptualizing your work, not just adding or deleting a paragraph here or there. Writing is not the final step in a project. Rather, it is the pathway that leads to new places. We never could have imagined our final paper when we set out to write the first draft. The process of reflecting on reviewer feedback, which was sometimes difficult, pushed us to new understandings and new insights that we never would have reached without their suggestions. The second message is that persistence pays. As hard as it is sometimes to push on after a manuscript is not accepted, the effort is never wasted unless you give up. As one colleague told us, a gold miner does not have a chance to strike it rich if they are not standing in the cold stream and dipping their pan again and again. So our message to new scholars is to keep dipping your pan; eventually it will pay.
Corresponding Author: Martha M. Canipe, Department of Teaching & Learning, Northern Arizona University, 801 S. Knoles Dr., P.O. Box 5774, Flagstaff, AZ 86011, USA. Email: marti.canipe@nau.edu
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