Preservice teachers' practical arguments for decisions about content area reading: The influences of personal histories.

Current teacher education research (Hollingsworth, in press; Zeichner, 1980, 1981) focuses on beginning teachers' efforts to translate education principles into practice and concludes that field experiences and their socializing influences pre-empt teacher thinking acquired via university course work. The social context of schools, the power of personal histories, and the mutidimensionality of classrooms have been suggested as explanations for this apparent phenomenon. The assumption that preservice teachers have indeed developed principled ways of thinking about classrooms which are fragile in the face of practice has not been seriously questioned. This study explored preservice teachers' rationales for decisions about the value of principles taught through course work about content area reading. Using a series of six unstructured interviews with preservice English and math majors preparing to become secondary teachers, this study explored the relationships between preservice teachers' personal history-based beliefs and their decisions about principles of content area reading. These preservice teachers' beliefs about good teaching were developed inductively from attributions about the causal elements they associated with critical incidents of their own schooling. Despite being personal history based, participants shared beliefs. Positive responses to course principles signalled ability to map course ideas onto existing belief systems rather than modification or expansion of beliefs. Negative responses centered around principles of direct instruction during reading and reflected course demands for restructuring lay definitions, demands which were too difficult for these preservice teachers given current course structure. Course assumptions about preservice teachers' skill for transferring concrete examples from an out-of-major area into content-specific applications also appeared to be unjustified. This study exposes the ineffectiveness of teacher education pedagogies based on assumptions that preservice teachers will adopt professional rationales and definitions. It demonstrates why personal histories are important relative to specific professional principles of teaching, identifies specific principles of content area reading which may be problematic given the lay concepts preservice teachers bring to their study, and suggests an expansion of Shulman's (1986) Domains of Teacher Knowledge for describing the range and complexity of teacher knowledge as it is encoded by principles of content area reading.Ed.D.EducationReading instructionTeacher educationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128617/2/9116101.pd