Moral work in teacher preparation: care pedagogy in a student teaching supervisor‘s urban practice.

Abstract

Little is known in the literature about the practice of student teaching supervision. In this self-study, I explore my pedagogy as a student teaching supervisor through a lens of care theory (Noddings, 2003). In so doing, I acknowledge a moral decision to prioritize in my practice the aspirations of beginning teachers while helping them learn to do the same with their students. Overall, I sought to build caring relationships with student teachers while challenging them to think about their practices, their students, and the urban contexts in which they were placed in moral and analytic terms. The purpose of the research, then, is to illustrate how care theory can inform the work of student teaching supervision. The study offers narratives to illustrate my supervision practice with four student teachers. The context is a post-baccalaureate social studies 5th-12th grade teacher preparation program at the University of Minnesota. Data consists of interactions and correspondence between the student teachers and me. Dimensions of caring (Noddings, 2003) served as a heuristic during data collection and analysis stages.

Findings suggest that learning about the student teachers and their goals for professional development became important first steps in my pedagogy of care. My care manifested itself in how I married my ideas about effective teaching to the goals student teachers identified for themselves. Furthermore, my pedagogy oriented our conversations toward learning about the middle and high school students in the urban classrooms of the student teaching placements. Overall, my pedagogy of care positioned me to receive the student teachers and their goals for student teaching and guided my practice to help the student teachers do the same with their students. Findings also suggest that employing care pedagogy gave me a framework for wrestling with moral dilemmas that arose in my practice. Additionally, the research provides evidence of how I modeled care pedagogy for the student teachers and how they demonstrated caring teaching in their own pedagogical pursuits. Findings also suggest difficulties in employing care pedagogy and that self-study incurred in me a changed orientation toward my practice over the course of the research.