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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Disturbing practice : reading and writing (social studies) teacher education as text Segall, Avner

Abstract

Although preservice teacher education comprises only a small part of student teachers' socialization into the teaching profession, it nevertheless has an important impact of student teachers imagination through an educative world it renders both possible and the intelligible. Anchored in a secondary social studies methods course at the University of British Columbia, and following six of its student teacher participants through their university- and practicum-based experiences, this year-long ethnographic study explores the production of knowledge and knowing in presevice teacher education. As such, it examines how particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are made possible as well as on what they, in turn, make possible for prospective social studies teachers learning to teach. Exploring how teachers' ways of being are dependent, in part, on student teachers' ways of becoming, this study examines what happens to student teachers during their preservice education and, as a result, what they make happen because of what happens to them. Examining the complex relationship between the knowledge student teachers are given and the knowledge they themselves produce, this dissertation considers not only what student teachers choose to say and do but also what structures their choices. Disturbing the practice of teacher education by examining how discourses use and are used and what, in the process, gets covered over, silenced, and ignored, this dissertation attempts to extend the traditional exploration of how prospective social studies student teachers learn to manage ideas and theories in the teacher education classrooms to the examination of how the use of ideas and theories in those very classrooms manages those who attempt to engage them. Organized as a multivocal text in which the running narrative is interrupted and interrogated by the researcher's own reflexive comments about the impossibilities of knowing and those of the participants about the study and its textualization, this dissertation focuses on the problematics and possibilities in the process of learning to teach, highlighting and publicly engaging them in order to bring more of what we do in university-based teacher education classrooms into the fold of the discussion both about and in teacher education

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