Multimedia cases embedded in the course

Introduction course

(student teacher)

Professional dialogue (student-teacher & mentor-teacher)

Lesson (student-teacher)

Videoportfolio

(student-teacher)

Multimediacase

Content: Emergent literacy

Maaike Vervoort Ellen van den Berg Teacher Education College Edith Stein Teacher Education College Edith Stein / University of TwenteThe Netherlands The Netherlandsvervoort@edith.nl e.vandenberg@gw.utwente.nl

Introduction

Multimedia cases have great potential to support teacher learning by

analyzing the full complexity of teaching and to develop a teachers’

professional knowledge base (Sherin, 2004).

Using multimedia cases in multiple ways could help student teachers

to connect practical knowledge to a formal body of knowledge.

1

An exploration of the use of multimedia cases for the elicitation of teachers’ practical knowledge

Primary use

involves a

participant

in the direct

construction

of the case

Secondary use

a participant

interprets

a finished case

through the lens of

her/his own

experience

Tertiary use

the case

provides

a leitmotif for

the readers’ or

viewers’

interpretative act

Divide the dialogue in episodes (in every episode a video case is discussed)

Link the mentor teachers’ utterances to one (or more) categories of practical knowledge

Divide the episodes of dialogue in utterances

Compare the categories of practical knowledge in the dialogue (within & cross case analysis)

.

Conclusions Tertiary use of multimedia cases stimulates the elicitation of

mentor teachers’ practical knowledge. Multimedia cases have

the potential to make tacit knowledge accessible to prospective

teachers.

Mentor teachers reflect on various aspects of their practical

knowledge, especially on instructional strategies and

learning processes of pupils in own group and cases.

Mentor teachers hardly use the explicit concepts for subject

matter

that are taught to student teachers in teacher education.

6

Objective

• Do multimedia cases function as a means to eliciate mentor

teachers practical knowledge?

• What are the characteristics of this type of knowledge?

2

Teachers’ practical knowledge Teachers’ practical knowledge is viewed as an amalgam of all

teachers’ cognitions, including declarative and procedural

knowledge and beliefs that influence teaching activities

(Zanting, 2001).

Teachers’ practical knowledge is: personal, contextual, content-

related, based on (reflection on) practice, mainly tacit

(Meijer,Verloop & Beijaard, 1999).

• Categories of teachers’ practical knowledge (Van Driel, Verloop &

De Vos, 1998) were used in an instrument for analysis.

3

Navigation

Background of emergentliteracy (text)

Learningprocesses for

emergentliteracy (text)

Discription of the school, the group & the acts of the teacher

(text)

Reflective remarks of the teacher (audio track)

Figure 2: Screen dump of a multimedia

case

Method In a professional dialogue 3 couples of prospective and

experienced teachers discussed 3 multimedia cases

(good practices of teaching emergent literacy in Kindergarten).

Transcripts were made of the video-taped professional dialogues.

The elicitation of practical knowledge was examined with content

analysis of the transcripts of the professional dialogue.

4

Figure 3: Steps of the analysis

Findings5

6

To explore how multimedia cases can be used to provoke a

professional dialogue between prospective and experienced

teachers in which practical knowledge is elicitated.

Figure 1: Use of multimedia cases (Wallace,

2001)

Type of teachers’ knowledgein the professional dialogue

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Dialogue 1

Dialogue 2

Dialogue 3

Instructional strategiesCurriculum & mediaPurposes

Student learning and conceptions

General pedagogy

Subject matter (concepts)