learning
TRANSCRIPT
JOURNAL OF TEACHING AND
LEARNING
December 2018 Volume 12, Issue 2
Challenges and Possibilities
of Scaffolding Critical
Reflection and Cultural
Responsiveness for Pre-
Service Special Educators Bindiya Hassaram, Phyllis M.
Robertson, & Shernaz B. García
“It Would Be Better If You
Can Hang Out With Different
People”: An Examination of
Cross-National Interaction in
Postsecondary Classrooms Christopher J. Johnstone, Diana
Yefanova, Gayle Woodruff, Mary Lynn
Montgomery, & Barbara J. Kappler
Emergent Professional
Learning Communities in
Higher Education Julie A. Mooney
The Effects of Holistic
Diagnostic Feedback
Intervention on Improving
Struggling Readers’ Reading
Skills Edith van der Boom & Eunice Eunhee
Jang
Book Reviews:
Transforming Conversations:
Feminism and Education in
Canada since 1970
Jillian Authier
Making Men, Making Masculinities:
Canadian Masculities across Time
and Place
Alethea Cassano
The cover for this issue of the Journal of
Teaching and Learning is a sound cover by
Sefton, Terry & Ricketts, Kathryn. (2017).
Postcard 3. From Stories of Windsor: Sites
of fascination and performances of place.
ISSN: 1911-8279 (online)
The Journal of Teaching and Learning (JTL) acknowledges the land we operate on as part of the traditional territories of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. There are few places on earth where others have not walked before us or called it home. The JTL is an international, peer-reviewed journal. The journal seeks manuscripts that provide a critical examination of historical and contemporary educational contexts. The journal publishes original research that contributes to theoretical and applied questions in teaching and learning. These may include: issues related to indigenous education, gender, class, race, ethnicity and diversity, educational policy, teacher education, educational leadership, and theories of teaching and learning. The journal also welcomes critical and exploratory essays that focus on current educational issues. The JTL is published twice a year. Submissions to the JTL are anonymously peer-reviewed.
About the cover:
Sefton, Terry & Ricketts, Kathryn. (2017). Postcard 3. From Stories of Windsor: Sites of
fascination and performances of place.
Terry Sefton, cellist, and Kathryn Ricketts, dancer, created a body of improvised
performances that re imagine, or trans-mediate stories from text to sound and movement.
For Stories of Windsor, we included an “unknown” collaborator – stories from the public,
which they submitted as “postcards.” Each story was a vignette, located in a particular
place in Windsor – a process we entitled ‘carto-elicitation.’ The audio we have included
for this inaugural audio cover of the Journal of Teaching and Learning is “Postcard #3.”
You will hear the cello improvising a variant of a Bach Prelude, and you will hear the
heavy footfall of the dancer, as she runs through an imagined landscape, and the swish-
swish of her soft shoe exit. The entire artwork was performed and exhibited at the Art
Gallery of Windsor, for the 2017 Triennial of Contemporary Art.
i
December 2018 Volume 12, Issue 2
ARTICLES
Challenges and Possibilities of Scaffolding Critical Reflection and Cultural * * * * * * * * * 1
Responsiveness for Pre-Service Special Educators
Bindiya Hassaram, Phyllis M. Robertson, & Shernaz B. García
“It Would Be Better If You Can Hang Out With Different People”: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 23
An Examination of Cross-National Interaction in Postsecondary Classrooms
Christopher J. Johnstone, Diana Yefanova, Gayle Woodruff,
Mary Lynn Montgomery, & Barbara J. Kappler
Emergent Professional Learning Communities in Higher Education * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 38
Julie A. Mooney
The Effects of Holistic Diagnostic Feedback Intervention on Improving * * * * * * * * * * * * 54
Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills
Edith van der Boom & Eunice Eunhee Jang
BOOK REVIEWS
Transforming Conversations: Feminism and Education in Canada Since 1970 * * * * * * * 70
by Dawn Wallin and Janice Wallace (Eds.)
Jillian Authier
Making Men, Making Masculinities: Canadian Masculinities Across Time and Place * * * 73
by Peter Gossage and Robert Rutherdale (Eds.)
Alethea Cassano
ii
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The Journal of Teaching and Learning
Vol. 12, No. 2 (December 2018), pp. 1–22.
http://dx.doi.org/10.22329/jtl.v12i2.5767
1
Challenges and Possibilities of Scaffolding Critical
Reflection and Cultural Responsiveness for Pre-Service
Special Educators
Bindiya Hassaram
Learning Differently
Phyllis M. Robertson
Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi
Shernaz B. García
University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
Given the nature of their responsibilities in field-based settings, university
supervisors play an important role in preparing pre-service teachers to become
culturally responsive and critically reflective special educators. However,
supervisors themselves may not have the experience and training necessary to
do so, and limited guidance is available regarding effective mentorship practices
to foster implementation of culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy
(CLRP) and critical reflection. This exploratory qualitative study examined how
three supervisors engaged in post-observation conferences with their student
teachers to promote critical reflection about CLRP using content and discourses
analyses. Findings indicated that, although student teachers engaged in
discussions about CLRP and were able to critically self-reflect, supervisors were
unable to facilitate critical reflection vis-à-vis institutional practices and
systemic bias. Theoretical and practical implications for supervision of
practicum experiences in pre-service teacher education programs are offered.
Although essential in the education of pre-service teachers (PSTs), the role of the university
supervisor has been largely unexamined in recent research. Typically, supervisors observe and
then reflect with PSTs, guiding their thinking about instruction and its impact. Such supervisory
conversations provide opportunities to discover how PSTs think (Holland, 1989; Zeichner &
Liston, 1985) and how supervisors actively cultivate the level and types of thinking in which they
engage.
Cultural Responsiveness for Pre-Service Special Educators Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
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Although supervisors contribute to the formal evaluation of PSTs to ensure compliance
with preparation program requirements, their primary purpose is to provide a platform for PSTs to
talk about pedagogical practices, reflect on beliefs, knowledge, and past actions, and engage in
problem-solving through an iterative process of observation and feedback (Chamberlin, 2000;
Zeichner & Liston, 1987). Reflective practice (Schön, 1987) is the act of thinking back on an
experience, evaluating it, generating possible solutions, and testing the solutions in practice. In
education, it involves a teacher creating an active dialogue between theory and practice (Weshah,
2007) by studying his or her own teaching methods, curricula, students, and classroom
environment, to determine what works best for students.
Cultivating reflective practice requires PSTs and supervisors to build an interpersonal
relationship based on trust, support, effective communication, and shared goals (Goldhammer,
1969; Richardson-Koehler, 1988). PSTs co-construct knowledge actively and collaboratively with
their supervisors, whose objective is to create the optimal conditions for reflection. Fostering this
relationship and achieving desired outcomes requires considerable knowledge and skill on the part
of supervisors. However, there is limited research available on best practices for supervisor
preparation and practice and often, supervisors have limited preparation for the critical role they
play (Bates, Ramires, & Drits, 2009; Cuenca, 2010; Zeichner, 2005).
Critical Reflection
Critical reflection has been posited as a measure of PST’s thinking about the practice of teaching
beyond the classroom walls and to its wider sociopolitical impact (Hatton & Smith, 1995). In order
to effectively and equitably teach in today’s increasingly diverse schools and society, critical
reflection of curricula, teaching, and students is essential (Jacobs, 2006). Teacher education
programs should support PSTs in developing an inquiry- and data-based approach to critical
reflection, problem solving, and decision-making. In the field, supervisors can provide the
scaffolds needed for PSTs to become critically self-reflective and transformative practitioners by
providing opportunities for reflective practice, building trusting relationships, modeling critical
reflection, and engaging PSTs using think-alouds and discourse to identify and reframe problems
of practice (Achinstein & Barrett, 2004; Bates et al., 2009; Bean & Stevens, 2002). Such
experiences provide a forum in which PSTs can learn how to “apply, reflect on, and refine their
practice within a supportive environment of continuous, focused, professional dialogue” (Little &
Robinson, 1997, p. 434).
Extant literature indicates that PSTs should engage in critical self-reflection first, through
examining their own teaching and classroom, before moving to critical reflection of school and
society (Jacobs, 2006). While research on critical reflection in teaching is extensive, little is known
about how to cultivate this broader level of critical reflection in beginning teachers (Bates et al.,
2009). In order to consider the moral and ethical aspects of social justice in addition to the technical
aspects of teaching, PSTs and their supervisors must first have the knowledge, skills, and
understanding to practice culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy (CLRP).
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) B. Hassaram, P. M. Robertson, & S. B. García
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Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Pedagogy (CLRP)
For supervisors and PSTs, lack of exposure, familiarity, and opportunity to interact with people
from diverse groups (Cochran-Smith, Davis, & Fries, 2004; Seidl, 2007) can result in cultural
conflict (Marxen & Rudney, 1999), as predominantly white educators bring their unexamined
assumptions to teacher preparation programs (Sleeter, 2008) and classrooms. Differences in
attitudes, values, beliefs, and traditions can also contribute to low expectations and deficit thinking
(Valencia, 2010). Deconstructing these influences requires that supervisors themselves be
knowledgeable regarding CLRP and critical reflection, so that they can model CLRP for their
PSTs.
CLRP is “based on the assumption that when academic knowledge and skills are situated
within the lived experiences and frame of reference of students, they are more personally
meaningful, have a higher interest appeal, and are learned more easily and thoroughly” (Gay, 2000,
p. 106). Responsive teachers understand that culture and language shape the thinking processes of
groups and individuals, with both culture and language strongly influencing the attitudes, values,
and behaviors that students and teachers bring to the instructional process (Gay, 2002). CLRP
involves building on students’ cultural and linguistic capital by using student-centered
instructional methods, building connections between students’ homes and school, and using
intercultural communication and multicultural resources in instruction (Gay, 2002; Villegas &
Lucas, 2002).
CLRP in Special Education
Special education has long been recognized as part of the outcome of the larger
systematic failure of schools to recognize the ways in which cultural diversity, such as
ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic class-based diversity, influence different ways of
being and knowing in children. (Seidl & Pugach, 2009, p. 58)
To avoid such consequences, special educators must understand the intersectional nature of
culture, language, and disability (García & Ortiz, 2013) to implement CLRP and meet the needs
of students with disabilities from culturally and linguistically diverse communities (Orosco &
O’Connor, 2014).
Teacher education programs must therefore provide opportunities for PSTs to build cultural
self-awareness (Abt-Perkins, Hauschildt & Dale, 2000), as well as to practice the principles of
CLRP in special education. This includes (a) considering principles of language development in
assessment, instruction, referrals and IEP development (García & Ortiz, 2008; Harry & Klingner,
2014; Linan-Thompson & Ortiz, 2009; Orosco & O’Connor, 2014); (b) using research-based
linguistically responsive strategies such as peer collaboration, using language for communicative
and authentic purposes, teaching literacy in students’ dominant languages, and teaching
vocabulary in explicit ways (Hoover, Klinger, Baca & Patton, 2008; Orosco & O’Connor, 2014);
(c) providing instruction that maximizes students’ funds of knowledge, using culturally diverse
Cultural Responsiveness for Pre-Service Special Educators Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
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materials, and finding a balance between holistic and explicit instruction that helps students access
prior knowledge, make connections, and build new knowledge (Amanti, 2005; Cloud, 2002;
Hoover et al., 2008); and (d) seeking an understanding of families’ belief systems around disability
in order to involve parents in decision-making about the education of their children (Kalyanpur &
Harry, 2012; Kozleski & Waitoller, 2010). Many teacher education programs purport to follow the
guidelines provided by the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC; 2009) related to knowledge
and skills standards for multicultural competence in special education in an effort to ensure their
candidates are adequately prepared to provide equitable services.
Supervision for Equity
The study of supervision to foster CLRP and equity is minimal in both special education and
general education. In a unique review of literature on culturally responsive supervision, Jacobs
(2006) found only nine articles published between 1982 and 2003 that related supervision to issues
of equitable teaching. Her review revealed that while critical reflection is an essential component
of equitable teaching, PSTs may not have the experience to engage in critical reflection unless
supervised by someone who can model this way of thinking. Jacobs (2006) concluded by stating
that more empirical studies are needed to investigate the outcomes of this type of supervision on
views and actions of PSTs as well as on their students’ learning.
Researchers have advocated that universities should provide supervisors with professional
development in order to increase their cultural responsiveness (Jacobs, 2006; Zozakiewicz, 2010).
Abt-Perkins et al. (2000) suggest that supervisors should be prepared to guide PSTs to “shape their
own problems in their own classroom contexts along ‘cultural dimensions’” (p. 45); that is, to
question their practices from the perspective of race, ethnicity, gender, beliefs and assumptions
about teaching and learning. Although there have been some efforts to infuse cultural
responsiveness in special education preparation programs (e.g. Robertson, García, McFarland &
Rieth, 2012; Robertson, García & Rodriguez, 2016; Sobel, Gutierrez, Zion, & Blanchett, 2011)
and provide professional development for special education faculty (e.g. Prater & Deveraux,
2009), these efforts have not addressed the critical role of university supervisors in bridging
university classroom theory to actual classroom practice.
A closer look at supervision conferences. Supervision conferences, typically conducted
immediately after observation of a lesson delivered by the PST, provide a source of data from
which the nature of supervisory conversations can be gleaned. Discourse analytic methods have
been recommended as a tool with which to examine these interactions (Holland, 1989; Zeichner
& Liston, 1987). Very few studies have been conducted to examine PST’s thinking about
pedagogy during the process, and much of the existing research was conducted in the 1980s and
1990s. Zeichner and Liston’s (1985) analysis of 26 supervision conferences revealed that most
PST reflection discourse occurred at the factual level–where PSTs provided facts about their
lessons; less than one percent of teachers’ thinking revealed in supervision conferences was at the
critical level. Zeichner and Liston (1985) hypothesized that PSTs may have a stronger influence
on the level of conversation than the university supervisor with supervisors being unable to
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) B. Hassaram, P. M. Robertson, & S. B. García
5
promote more complex modes of reasoning. In a follow-up study, Zeichner, Liston, Mahlios and
Gomez (1988) compared the discourse of PSTs enrolled in preparation programs with two very
different philosophies; one emphasized the technical aspects of teaching, while the other utilized
an inquiry-oriented approach. In the latter, “student teachers [were] encouraged to reflect and
examine the most effective and efficient means, to question the underlying assumptions embedded
in educational practices, and to deliberate over the ethical aspects of teaching and educational
institutions” (Zeichner et al., 1988, p. 351). Despite program differences, course requirements and
program structure were the same. Discourse analysis revealed no significant differences in the type
of thinking student teachers engaged in vis-à-vis program type. While the inquiry-oriented
program actively engaged PSTs in reflective thinking, such thinking was not frequently reflected
in post-observation conversations. The researchers posited that neither the inquiry-oriented
program philosophy nor the professional development provided to supervisors about reflective
supervision was successful in yielding evidence of critical thinking from PSTs.
Hatton and Smith (1995) derived five levels of reflection from their analysis of student
teacher written reflections:
Level 1—Technical: Reporting events and focusing on the immediate, with no attempt to
provide reason/justification;
Level 2—Descriptive: Providing reasons for actions and looking for ‘best practices’ based
on personal judgment, based on analyzing areas for growth and development.
Understanding that alternative reasons/perspective exist (e.g., I chose…because).
Level 3—Dialogic: Deliberate cognitive discourse within one’s self that includes weighing
different viewpoints and exploring alternatives. Stepping back and reflecting on
possible alternatives (e.g., there may be several reasons the student did not respond
to this…)
Level 4—Critical: Thinking about the effects of one’s actions on others, taking the broader
historical, social, and/or political context into account, and making practice
problematic (e.g., the student management in this classroom is reflective of the
power relationships between students and teachers in wider society).
Level 5—Contextual, Reflection in Action: Involves being able to apply Levels 1-4 as new
situations arise.
Following a review of 16 studies about student teacher reflection, Hatton and Smith (1995)
found “little evidence of critical reflection on the part of students, most of whom demonstrate the
technical and practical types” (p. 38). While student teachers engaged in constructive criticism of
themselves, with a view to improve and transform of their own practice (Bates et al., 2009;
Cochran-Smith et al., 2004; Larrivee, 2000), they did not critically reflect on schooling in a broader
sociocultural context.
Although many programs purport to emphasize the cultivation of reflective teaching
practice, little is known about how this is successfully achieved. Common strategies include: (a)
Cultural Responsiveness for Pre-Service Special Educators Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
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action research projects; (b) case studies, ethnographic studies, and examination of multiple
perspectives; (c) microteaching, supervised practicum experiences, and critical dialogue; and (d)
structured curriculum tasks, such as reading fiction and non-fiction, conducting oral interviews,
writing journals, narratives, biographies, or reflective essays (Hatton & Smith, 1995; Sparks-
Langer & Colton, 1991; Weshah, 2007), but there is little evidence of their effectiveness. In the
rationale for a research study, Bates et al. (2009) report that in the past and currently, there is
unwavering agreement on the “need of systematic and regular reflective practices” (p. 91). They
conclude from their study that “supervisors who not only model critical [self-] reflection but also
specifically, outwardly articulate the process are able to fully demystify critical reflection for their
students” (Bates et al., 2009, p. 108).
Rationale and Purpose
In summary, although supervision has been recommended as a tool for fostering critical
reflection (Hatton & Smith, 1995; Sparks-Langer & Colton, 1991; Weshah, 2007), few studies
have explored how supervisors cultivate critical reflection, investigated what form reflection can
and should take, or how reflection affects teachers’ beliefs and practices (Bates et al., 2009; Bean
& Stevens, 2002). Additionally, although there is a body of knowledge about the principles of
university supervision, predominantly in general education, there is limited knowledge about
supervision to foster CLRP and critical reflection in either general or special education.
The purpose of this study was to examine the dialogue exchanged during supervision
conferences to reveal special education PSTs thinking about CLRP in their student teaching
classrooms. The question guiding this research was: how do supervisory conversations promote
student teacher critical reflection about CLRP? The findings are part of a broader study
(Hassaram, 2013) which also explored contextual factors that appear to influence the nature and
quality of discussions about CLRP in supervisory conversations.
Method
This exploratory qualitative study was conducted at a Southwestern American university, in an
undergraduate special education program committed to teaching the theory and practice of CLRP.
An interpretivist framework was used to capture the richness and complexity of phenomena as
they occur in their naturalistic setting (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005).
Context
Supported by funding from the Office of Special Education Programs, program faculty
were working to develop, evaluate and institutionalize a restructured and improved undergraduate
program to prepare special educators for CLRP (for a comprehensive overview see Robertson et
al., 2012). To better understand the realignment efforts, the first author, a doctoral student in
multicultural special education at the time, began to attend project meetings. She soon realized that
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) B. Hassaram, P. M. Robertson, & S. B. García
7
the research on supervision practices to scaffold CLRP for PSTs was scant, and decided to pursue
this in her research.
Participating undergraduates engaged in a five-semester program of study. During the first
semester, they enrolled in four foundations courses including a field experience course in which
they completed extensive observations in six special education settings. Extensive field
experiences in a variety of special education settings continued to be an emphasis for the remainder
of their program. They were supervised by university supervisors and received formative and
summative evaluations every semester. During their final semester, student teachers (STs) spent
40 hours per week in a special education setting while simultaneously enrolled in a course on
Intercultural Communication and Collaboration with the emphasized expectation of
implementing CLRP in their classrooms.
Participants
Three university supervisors (two female, one male) of STs served as primary participants.
Michelle (all names are pseudonyms) who identified as female, white, and Czech/English/Scottish,
was pursuing a Ph.D. in special education administration, while seeking principalship certification.
She expected to see improvement, learning, and growth in her STs and she expected open
communication. Missy identified as female, white, and Portuguese, and was pursuing a doctorate
in learning disabilities/behaviour disorders. She expected STs to be almost-beginning teachers,
able to handle all aspects of the classroom, and deliver fluid lessons. She also valued open
communication. Finally, Edwin identified as male, white, Irish American and Roman Catholic.
Edwin was a doctoral student studying multicultural special education and expected his STs to be
professional and independently execute all parts of their lessons.
Five STs (all female) served as secondary participants. Stephanie, who identified as Euro-
American, grew up in a suburban neighborhood that was mostly middle-income Euro-American.
She identified her college friends as a mixture of Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Euro-American
peoples. Anna self-identified as a bilingual, Hispanic/Latina female who grew up in an urban
neighborhood with a mostly lower-income, Hispanic population. Anna reported that she had no
exposure to Asian, Native American, or Euro-American communities until she attended college.
Clara also self-identified as a bilingual, Hispanic female, and reported growing up in a middle-
and lower-income rural neighborhood with a predominantly Hispanic population. Although she
attended college with ethnically diverse students, her circle of friends remained Hispanic. Lisa
identified as a Caucasian female, who grew up and continued to live in suburban communities of
mostly middle-income Euro-Americans. She also grew up, and continued to socialize, with
predominantly Euro-American friends while in college. Gabrielle identified as a Caucasian female,
who grew up in a suburban, mostly middle-income, Euro-American neighborhood. During high
school and college, she had a mixture of Asian American, African American, Hispanic, American
Indian and Euro-American friends.
Cultural Responsiveness for Pre-Service Special Educators Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
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Professional Development for Supervisors
Because CLRP and critical reflection were new components added to the supervision
process, two professional development sessions were held for participating supervisors to provide
the foundation for adoption of a culturally/linguistically responsive framework into the practice of
supervision. During the first orientation at the beginning of the semester, supervisors participated
in a half-day workshop, the purpose of which was threefold: (a) to review changes in supervisory
duties for the semester, (b) to provide a new framework for CLRP supervision, and (c) to introduce
a new observation guide. Training focused on the principles of CLRP and the CEC’s (2009)
knowledge and skill standards for multicultural competence in special education. The new
observation guide developed for this study provided a framework to focus observations on the
delivery of CLRP, an expectation of the Intercultural Communication and Collaboration course.
It contained statements of criteria that should be observed at each stage of a lesson (e.g., students’
current level of knowledge about topic is ascertained), as well as prompts that could be used during
the follow-up conference (e.g., is instruction linked to students’ background knowledge?). Prompts
included general questions for each lesson stage as well as questions to scaffold a sociocultural
perspective during debriefings.
During the mid-semester supervisor training, case studies of classroom teacher
observations were presented and supervisors were asked to actively apply the supervisory
observation guide to the cases. Following this session, the guide was reviewed and revised;
specifically, questions addressing deeper layers of culture were added (e.g., are materials reflective
of cultures/ethnicities/gender/religion/lived experiences of students in the classroom?). The
revised guide was used for the observations conducted during the Total Teach period when STs
assumed complete responsibility for their assigned classroom.
Data Sources
Audiotapes of the three final conferences between each supervisory-student teacher pair
constituted the primary data source for the findings reported in this article. In total, 14
conversations ranging between 4 and 15 minutes were recorded and uploaded to a secure server
during the Total Teach period. Lesson data files were created for each observation, consisting of
the ST’s lesson plan, the supervisor’s observation form, as well as the transcripts of the audio
recording. These files served to contextualize the supervision conference. For example, a section
of the required lesson plan entitled “Cultural and Linguistic Diversity Considerations” prompted
the students to actively consider how they would ensure CLRP in their instructional delivery and
provided insight into their intentions. Towards the end of the data collection phase, one semi-
structured interview was conducted with each supervisor to ask questions about their philosophy
about supervision, their expectations of student teachers, to obtain clarification of the transcripts,
and to elicit supervisors’ perceptions of the supervisory conference guide. All data were gathered
by the first author.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) B. Hassaram, P. M. Robertson, & S. B. García
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Data Analysis
Three types of analysis were used in the broader study (content analysis, and discourse
analysis [interactional sociolinguistics and pragmatics]). Due to space limitations, we focus here
on the content analysis of conversations about CLRP topics and the analysis of levels of reflection
(interactional sociolinguistics).
Analysis of content of post-observation conversations. Two rounds of content analysis
were conducted for each transcript: The first round of coding captured any topic that was initiated
by both primary and secondary participants (e.g. assessment). In the second round, a system of
external and internal coding (Graue & Walsh, 1988) was used. External codes from culturally
responsive education/special education frameworks in the literature were used to code CLRP
strategies and other topics under the CLRP construct. Internal codes were created to capture topics
not addressed by the external codes. For example, “repeated exposure to vocabulary terms” was
assigned the code ‘Linguistically Responsive Strategy (LRS) - pre-teaching vocabulary’ (when
vocabulary instruction occurred at the beginning of the lesson).
Analysis of the nature of the discourse. Discourse analysis was used to determine levels
of reflection engaged in by STs (Hatton & Smith, 1995). The analysis of speech acts (Austin, 1962)
uncovered which participants engaged in reflection (Hatton & Smith, 1995), how these topics
emerged in conversations, and the effect of supervisor and ST statements on each other.
Trustworthiness and Credibility
Four methods were used to ensure trustworthiness and credibility—triangulation, member
checking, declaring positionality, and audit trail. Multiple sources of data and multiple methods
were used to confirm emerging findings (Merriam, 2009); specifically, content and discourse
analysis were used to examine transcripts of supervisory conversations. Data from STs’ lesson
plans provided contextual information for topics that emerged in the supervisory conversations as
did details from the content analysis of supervisors’ semi-structured interviews. Triangulation of
transcripts, lesson plans, observation notes, and semi-structured interviews helped ensure the
validity of emergent themes. Member checking was used: (a) to provide clarity or more extensive
information about the content (e.g., during the semi-structured interviews, segments of post-
observation conference transcripts were presented to the participant supervisors); (b) to ensure
accuracy of details (supervisor profiles were created and reviewed by the supervisors); and (c) to
ascertain if the working hypotheses resonated with supervisors (feedback was elicited from them).
Although the first author was also employed as a supervisor during this process, she did not
supervise any STs. She maintained a professional relationship with all participants throughout the
research process. A reflexive journal was also used throughout the data analysis process in order
to limit any bias in the analysis and to provide an audit trail.
Cultural Responsiveness for Pre-Service Special Educators Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
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Findings
The content and discourse analysis of supervisor/ST pairs revealed that CLRP topics were
discussed, but the extent to which these conversations developed varied considerably. Speech acts
(Austin, 1962) that emerged from the analysis included generating ideas, asking questions (STs),
praising, informing, and evaluating (supervisors). Detailed descriptions of these conversations are
followed by the emerging themes they revealed. Due to space limitations, repetitions, affirmative
interjections by both STs and supervisors (e.g., that’s right, uh huh) have been eliminated from the
transcripts cited below.
Quality of Student Teacher Reflection
Discourse analysis using Hatton and Smith’s (1995) framework revealed three levels of
reflection (i.e., technical, descriptive and dialogic) in supervisor/ST conversations.
Descriptive reflection. When responding to Michelle’s open-ended questions or prompts,
Stephanie not only provided factual information (technical reflection) but also consistently
evaluated the impact of her instruction or behavior management strategy on students (descriptive
reflection). In the excerpt below, she describes her students making a cow puppet:
Stephanie: It was just a lot of…identifying the cow parts, and then gluing them on…I
had my model paper bag cow open, so they could see how it would work as a
puppet…That got them really excited, ‘cause they…saw me moving it, and they
were like “Oh cool!”
Michelle: (giggle). Yeah, that was one thing I really noticed, that you did a really nice
job on, was having that model there with the students.
Stephanie engaged in descriptive reflection when concluding that her model of the puppet served
to attract the students’ attention and interest. She seemed to know that having a model ready would
be effective, and through her reflection, concluded that it had the intended impact.
Near the end of her student teaching, Edwin asked Gabrielle to explain the beginning of
class. She described her annoyance with two students who were particularly “non-compliant.”
Gabrielle: His energy level was a little off the charts and he would be able to get down
from the trampoline and get that out and I’d be fine, but…he wasn’t even giving
me a chance to give him that opportunity, I mean, I was asking…him to stop moving
his body…just to be quiet for a minute, and that couldn’t happen so, at that point, I
gave him a strike, and I said three strikes you’re out and that was the end of
break…but we started out with our social rule and the social rule was based
upon…one of the student’s behavior this morning, about drawing things when
he…wasn’t supposed to be drawing like he’s supposed to draw a simple horse, but
he’s got this obsession with Neanderthals and so he drew a Neanderthal horse and
this…battle scene…and this has happened a lot, like this is not the first occasion.
And so I figured that would be a good social rule…because it was about following
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) B. Hassaram, P. M. Robertson, & S. B. García
11
directions when a teacher talks to us, why that’s important and so that’s what was
going on (giggle), with the high energy level.
Gabrielle explained why she decided to give a student a strike for his misbehavior, and then
evaluated the impact of how her decision to teach a social rule based on a behavior displayed by a
student that morning tied in to her lesson about following teachers’ directions. Throughout this
exchange, she justified her actions and decisions, also demonstrating descriptive reflection.
Dialogic reflection. Dialogic reflection was demonstrated when Missy noticed that Clara
did not provide students with opportunities to answer questions, as they had run out of time:
Missy: Why do you think that was, that you didn’t have a whole lot of time?
Clara: We were trying to…fit in that extra read aloud…and we wanted to get to do some
table work so…that’s why I kind of felt like let me get extra done and then go into
table work…and fit it all within the next…20 minutes…I probably should have
just…asked for the questions, and then just…drop the whole table…at the end…and
just let them have time for the questions, since we had said that we were going to
do that earlier.
As she reflected, Clara arrived at the realization that there had not been enough time for both
activities and concluded with a judgment about her own lesson (evaluating impact – negative).
In addition to reflecting on alternatives (dialogic reflection) when they realized that a
strategy they used did not have the intended outcome, STs also reflected on alternatives on
occasions when supervisors asked them what they might do differently. Lisa provided several
reasons for choosing to sit next to the student instead of across from him.
Edwin: Earlier I saw examples of power-distance kind of play out in your lessons even
just with it being one student…and, if you could walk me through what you thought
about that, what that looked like to you.
Lisa: When it’s just me and one student, I, I just find that I feel uncomfortable sitting
across the table, and I know that that it’s very much me versus you, it’s kind of a
face-off…That’s what it feels like so, I decided I wanted to sit next to him, plus we
were kind of sharing materials, it was a little less formal.
Edwin: Let’s use…a [Intercultural Communication and Collaboration] term, and
let’s…think about power distance…Do you remember what conceptually
that…talks about?
Lisa: Yeah!…The authority…a larger power distance would be…me sitting across the
table, being very…much the teacher and he’s very much the student. We have…our
roles…and be very formal, but…especially with this one student, like, I…don’t find
that I need to…do as much behavior…because his attention is pretty much on me,
‘cause I’m right there with him I feel like he’s more comfortable with me sitting
next to him.
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When asked about power distance, Lisa initially described her personal preference of
sitting next to the student. Although she is aware that an alternative exists (descriptive reflection),
she preferred to create an informal atmosphere. Later, though the topic of conversation had shifted
briefly, Edwin chose to return to power distance, asking Lisa to think about power distance
conceptually, and apply it to her lesson. First, Lisa stated her knowledge of the concept. She
thought aloud through the alternative option of sitting across from the student, creating a formal
teacher-student dynamic. She then stated reasons why she thought her choice was better. By
focusing the conversation on the concept of power distance, Edwin prompted Lisa to engage in
dialogic reflection by applying relevant theory to her analysis of her practice. Dialogic reflection
also seemed to come into play when STs reflected on themselves critically.
Critical reflection of self. Jacobs (2006) identified critical reflection as an essential
component of teaching for equity, and concluded that PSTs are typically able to reflect critically
about their own disposition and practices before they are able to reflect critically on the injustices
of school practices in relation to broader society. Each of these STs was able to be critical of their
instruction, and to identify alternative methodologies. Critical self-reflection seems to be a subset
of dialogic thinking; once aware of a negative impact of their instruction, STs explore alternative
ways to improve their teaching. In response to a prompt from Missy:
Clara: I feel bad, but I should have publicly put more [emphasis] on the positive
[behaviors] but I felt like there was a lot more, it was a lot of negative, but I probably
should have addressed those positive [behaviors] like I did with that one student.
Critical self-reflection is clearly evident in this reflection, with Clara recognizing that she
could improve her instruction by changing the nature of her reinforcement.
At their last conference, Michelle asked Anna what she would work on in the
future:
Anna: Well, I guess…just I can always get better at incorporating, and making
connections and using things that are valid for them…things that interest them. And
I think, being able to incorporate things that would be important for them…
In another lesson, Edwin noted that he had seen Lisa teach the suffix -s, but
wondered if she had taught the student the function of the suffix as a plural.
Lisa: I remember I did use the word plural because it was it was in the text, but I wasn’t
sure if he knew what I meant, so I kind of just said plural, and I was like…more
than one (giggle), kind of being like I’m not sure if you know that word, so I’m just
going to…give it to you. I should have probably asked him if he knew what it meant,
but…
In this example, Lisa recognized that her instruction might have been more effective if she had
clarified the student’s understanding of the concept of plural.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) B. Hassaram, P. M. Robertson, & S. B. García
13
Emerging Themes
Further analysis of dialogues revealed two emerging themes: (a) Failed Attempts, and (b)
Missed Opportunities. Failed Attempts are described as (seemingly) deliberate supervisor
attempts to adopt a CLRP framework, only to have the direction of the conversation thwarted by
the STs. Sometimes, supervisors initiated a conversation using a cultural lens or by addressing a
topic related to CLRP; however, STs did not continue the conversation in this trajectory. Missed
opportunities, on the other hand, are described as openings in conversations, where a supervisor
could have used a comment made by a ST to generate CLRP related topics, but failed to do so.
Failed Attempts. Two conversations are illustrative of failed attempts. In an attempt to
encourage Lisa to explore the topic from a cultural standpoint, Edwin brought up the term
machismo in reference to a Hispanic male student who refused assistance. In a later interview,
Edwin defined machismo as “culturally-informed pride in that which is masculine, and taking
pride in that which is masculine.” It was unclear whether Lisa understood this definition in the
context of their conversation and rather than continuing the discussion, Lisa changed topics.
In her conference with Clara, Missy re-introduced a topic previously discussed about a
young student who frequently took off her shoes at school. In that conversation, Clara had
explained that the expectation at home was to take shoes off at the front door.
Missy: When we had a little discussion about cultural awareness…you had mentioned a
particular student…taking off her shoes a lot. I’m wondering how that’s going?
Clara: She’s gotten a lot better. She actually did it earlier but it’s because she had
something in her shoe…she actually keeps them on and understands now that this
is school and you need to keep them on and stuff so that’s gotten a lot better.
Missy: Sure, and how did she come to that understanding? Was it conversation that
someone had with her?
Clara: I know I haven’t, and I don’t know if my CT. I don’t think we’ve had. I think she
just kind of started to see maybe, just being in the classroom. And we always
redirect her too: “you need to leave your shoes on when you’re in school;” like I’ll
redirect her in that way, but not a set conversation, but just that redirection
of…“leave your shoes on here in school” ‘cause every time she’d take it off, they
would make fun of [her].
Missy: Did you did you explain to her why? Or did anyone tell her why it’s important to
have her shoes on? The safety thing.
Clara: Now we’re relating that to staying safe. Why you need to stay safe. This is why
it’s important and stuff like that…
Missy began the discussion with a direct reference to cultural awareness. However, Clara
continued to raise the issue of behavior and the focus on CLRP was subverted. Eventually, Missy’s
focus also shifted to behavior, rather than maintaining the cultural lens she had been attempting to
utilize. It appears that both of them needed more scaffolding for them to engage in this
conversation from a sociocultural perspective. A culturally responsive teacher might explain to the
student that there are sometimes differences between home norms and school norms, in this case,
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14
shoes are taken off at the door at home, but worn in school. This would have validated the practices
of the home, yet provided the student with one of the repertoires of school practice (Seidl &
Pugach, 2009). Although Missy discovered that no one had addressed these issues with the student,
she did not suggest or recommend that Clara should initiate this conversation.
Missed Opportunities. Missed opportunities occurred when supervisors had an opening
to engage in a reflective conversation around culture, but did not. Michelle and Edwin each missed
opportunities with two STs that could have been conversations about CLRP. In all cases, STs
talked about a teaching strategy they claimed was culturally responsive and the supervisor accepted
this at face value, rather than exploring how these strategies were responsive to culture.
In the prior example of a failed attempt, Lisa mentioned a student who isolated himself
from a group of girls during math remediation by choosing to remain in the general education
classroom. Although Edwin brought up the concept of machismo, the conversation followed a
different track, and the student was not discussed further. However, it seemed that this student was
not receiving the special education services to which he was entitled. Edwin missed this
opportunity to engage Lisa in a conversation about the student’s rights to services.
In attempting to facilitate Gabrielle’s thinking about a topic external to the lesson he had
observed, Edwin began by commenting on a note she had written in her lesson self-evaluation for
the Intercultural Communication and Collaboration class. He noticed that she had expressed
concern about a student whose family are members of the Jehovah’s Witness denomination of
Christianity. Gabrielle wrote that the student’s family did not want him to establish friendships
with students who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses. When asked how she planned to address this,
Gabrielle responded that she had already taught a social skills lesson focused on the idea that
everyone can be friends, even if they have different opinions or beliefs.
Gabrielle: With him, if you directly talk about it…he is…die-hard Jehovah’s
Witness…he just talks about it you know, he wants to preach to his friends so that
his friends can be Jehovah’s Witnesses and they can be his real friend. So I’m
just…trying to…keep it open that we can have true friends with different
beliefs…without targeting…
Edwin: If I was in this situation, I was thinking maybe…even the difference between
like a friend, and being friendly…Or like a friend, an acquaintance…Or a friend
and a classmate…‘cause the thing about it is that kind of gray area that maybe not
be clear to a student with autism…also, looking at the message from home…a friend
is just a member of this community, and you’re not to have friends in the classroom
or something like that or some way to kinda challenge that a little bit, with a way
that also saves face, protects the integrity of the beliefs that they are getting from
home too.
Gabrielle: And it’s still reinforcing it. No…that would be a good talk, ‘cause next year
he’s going to middle school. Not next year, it’s like three months…and…just to
build up like people who are your friends, and they can be there for you, and then
people who are friendly to you, and acquaintances. I think that would be a good talk
to have, ‘cause I’m trying to think of everything I can to prepare him for this.
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15
Edwin clearly makes an effort to engage Gabrielle in a conversation about her concern. He
provides a solution she can use at school and also brings up the cultural concept of “saving face,
protecting the integrity of the beliefs they are getting from home.” However, he misses an
opportunity to converse with Gabrielle about ways to engage in cultural reciprocity (Kalyanpur &
Harry, 2012) with the parents of this student as well as the cooperating teacher. In schools, a typical
goal for students with autism would be to teach strategies that increase socialization with peers.
However, this would be difficult if the student’s belief system is a mediating factor that affects
with whom he can socialize. If the family and professionals were to discuss each other’s goals in
a safe and respectful way, there is a likelihood that common goals could be agreed upon.
Intersectionality of dialogic reflection with CLRP. Despite the failed attempts and
missed opportunities, there were two dialogues in which STs engaged in dialogic reflection while
simultaneously focusing on culturally and linguistically responsive practice.
For example, Gabrielle was explaining to Edwin the resources that students have at school
to calm themselves down when they are agitated. The professor of the Intercultural
Communication and Collaboration class had suggested that she help students identify resources at
home that they could use to achieve the same effect, so that the learning at school could be
generalized to their home settings. Edwin scaffolded Gabrielle’s learning by talking about this
topic using an equitable teaching lens. He explained that some students could probably afford to
buy a tool they were using at school for their homes, but that might not be possible for others.
Edwin: But then the students that aren’t able to afford that…what are they going to do
when they get home? How can we make that more in parallel, so it doesn’t put them
at an unfair, you know, situation?
Gabrielle: So a good thing to do probably for that would be, just to really identify what
that tool…how that tool, what that tool does, so if it’s the tension, if it’s the hugging
of it all, you know, wrap up in a blanket, we can suggest things. They can still have
those tools…if it’s the fidgets…even with, one of our students it’s the paper clips,
you know….and that’s his fidget toy, and he pretends that it’s (inaudible) and that
gets him through the day and he’ll pull it out during class and…you know, that’s
something that’s going to internalize though…’cause it used to be a big fidget toy
that he had with him . . .
Edwin: Is that right?
Gabrielle: And now it’s gone down to a small paper clip, so…we can think of other
ways to get the same effect but just with different tools which they can find around
their homes…Now I’m even thinking about tools they have at home, but…that they
can make themselves…to give that same effect…And with these tools, we’re really
teaching them self-advocacy too because they’re not going to work unless they’re
able to ask for ‘em. That’s a big thing with our students, like if we need a break, ask
for it. Stand up for yourself, say, “this is what I need to be successful.”
Gabrielle recognized that adapting instruction could go beyond school walls. Responding
to Edwin’s scaffolding about inequity, she generated an idea about students creating their own
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fidget tools so they could have parallel access to resources outside of school. She took up the
conversation through this lens, and thought about ways to minimize the inequity, by exploring an
alternative solution.
Discussion and Implications
The purpose of this study was to explore how supervisory conversations promoted ST critical
reflection about CLRP. The findings revealed that (a) student teachers were successful in engaging
in descriptive and dialogic reflection, and in critical self-reflection; (b) student teachers did not
engage in critical reflection about institutional practices and systemic bias in special education;
and (c) supervisors needed more experience and knowledge to engage STs in dialogue focused on
culturally and linguistically responsive special education.
Levels of Reflection Evident in Conversations
Prompted by supervisor inquiry, STs were able to identify best practices in culturally and
linguistically responsive pedagogy and generate ideas for incorporating CLRP to meet the needs
of their diverse learners. STs were also able to critically reflect on themselves as practitioners; this
aligns with a definition of critical reflection related to constructive self-criticism of one’s actions
with a view to improvement and transformation of one’s own practice (Bates et al., 2009; Cochran-
Smith et al., 2004; Larrivee, 2000).
The work in which students and supervisors are expected to engage should be a reflection
of the philosophy of the teacher education program in which they are involved. The special
education undergraduate program in which PSTs were enrolled shares characteristics that are
similar to those of an inquiry-oriented program described by Zeichner and Liston (1985), which
places “an explicit emphasis on encouraging students to reflect about the purpose and
consequences of their classroom practice and about the classroom, school and community contexts
in which they work” (p. 157). An emphasis on self-reflection and CLRP was infused throughout
the program, including a focus on case studies of two children from different sociocultural and
linguistic communities, during student teaching. Thus, by the time they are in their student teaching
semester, STs have been provided with many opportunities for reflection over a period of two
years, and at times with a particular focus on learners from CLD communities. However, the
emphasis is on self-reflection and the impact of their teaching practices rather than critical
reflection of pedagogy as a whole. The STs in this study applied self-reflection throughout their
student teaching practice, suggesting that they had successfully acquired this skill.
Failure to Engage in Critical Reflection About Institutional Practices
No ST demonstrated critical reflection about institutional practices and their implications
for society. This is consistent with the findings of other researchers who have studied PSTs and
teacher education programs (Hatton & Smith, 1995; Zeichner & Liston, 1985). In her review of
literature about supervision for equity, Jacobs (2006) concluded that PSTs would perhaps be able
to develop critical reflection of themselves first, before reflecting broadly about practices at
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) B. Hassaram, P. M. Robertson, & S. B. García
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schools and their implications on society. In order to cultivate this type of critical reflection,
however, PSTs need to demonstrate cultural self-awareness as related to teaching diverse others
(Abt-Perkins et al., 2000). Howard (2003) contends that PSTs may find it difficult to examine their
own biases, and thus guidance is needed from more experienced others. Although discussions and
simulations were presented in coursework to facilitate PSTs in acknowledging their biases, these
discussions were also conducted early in their teaching career, and perhaps need to be revisited or
addressed more frequently through classes and coursework.
Hatton and Smith (1995) recommended that students should also be exposed to the
literature of critical reflection to understand its nature. Hence, the absence of critical reflection in
this data set may indicate a curricular gap rather than students’ limited ability to reflect at this
level. Despite the focus on CLRP, the focus on critical reflection may not have been explicit
enough. Thus, it is suggested that pre-service teacher education programs should focus not only
on self-reflection as a view to improving practices, but on reflection of the special education system
as a whole, with a view to improving institutional and systemic bias.
The philosophy of a teacher education program is closely linked to the “beliefs and
assumptions about the nature and purposes of schooling, teaching, teachers, and their education
gives shape or form to specific forms of practice in teacher education” (Zeichner, 1983, p. 3).
Zeichner noted that, in the social reconstructionist tradition of teacher education, the objective of
teachers is to “work at changing their own practices because schools continue to reproduce a
society based on unjust class, race and gender relationships” (as cited in Hatton & Smith, 1995, p.
37). Perhaps a teacher education program that articulated the tenets of a social reconstructionist
tradition through its curriculum, field placements, and supervision would be more successful at
fostering a critical orientation in STs.
Supervisors’ Limited Experience and Knowledge About CLRP
These findings showed that supervisors were not adequately prepared to engage their STs
in dialogue in exploring the cultural dimensions of teaching and learning in depth and failed to
model critical reflection themselves focused on CLRP (Abt-Perkins et al., 2000). The results of
this study suggest however, that in some cases, STs may have had more knowledge about CLRP
than their supervisors. For example, Anna’s comments about centering curriculum on students’
interests are concepts (i.e., personalization, self-determination) she would been exposed to in her
curriculum. It is possible that her supervisor did not have exposure to these concepts, thus resulting
in the missed opportunity to further develop this discussion.
Supervisors began the semester in which this study took place with variable levels of
knowledge, skills, and experience with regard to supervision in general and to supervision for
CLRP. The supervisor who was himself enrolled in a PhD program focusing on multiculturalism
was the only supervisor who had dialogue that was sustained along a cultural trajectory. His
knowledge of concepts such as power distance and equitable resources seemed to allow him to
enter and refocus conversations along cultural lines. It is possible that in conversations
characterized by missed opportunities and failed attempts, a supervisor more knowledgeable about
cultural concepts might have been able to refocus or reframe the conversations with their STs. It
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is also interesting to note, however, that even someone with the level of knowledge that Edwin
had from his post-graduate coursework also missed some opportunities that presented themselves
during supervisory conferences. This suggests that knowledge about cultural and linguistic
responsiveness may not be sufficient and that skills in supervisory techniques are also necessary
for effective supervision.
All the supervisors in this study had some prior experience with supervising PSTs.
However, the training received for supervision was limited. Supervisors were selected based on
availability, interest and prior teaching experience. Prior to undertaking supervisory duties,
supervisors needed to complete a three-hour online training module provided by the university,
related to basic coaching techniques. As Zahorik (1988) noted, observation instruments do little to
reduce supervisor variability. Practically, each supervisor underwent the same training on how to
use the researcher-developed observation tool at the beginning and middle of the semester.
However, supervision of the supervisors was not provided. Perhaps ongoing professional
development of the supervisors vis-à-vis supervision skills, fostering critical reflection as well as
individualized coaching with using the observation tool and would be necessary to develop
supervisor capacity and efficacy aligned with the goals of the teacher education program.
Limitations
This study was exploratory and thus reflects the boundaries of such research. It is reflective
of a single preparation program supported by external funding and transferability is limited by the
duration, context, and number of participants. However, efforts have been made to provide rich
descriptive detail so that readers can evaluate the transferability to their own contexts.
While beyond the scope of this study, it would be helpful to thoroughly analyze the
undergraduate curriculum to determine the extent of the emphasis on the development of critical
reflection in the pre-service program. Further, supervisors were not provided ongoing professional
development in supervision techniques, which likely resulted in varied supervision skills among
the supervisors. Lastly, although efforts were undertaken to maintain a professional relationship
between the primary researcher and the participants, a previous social and professional relationship
did exist. This could have influenced participants to be either more or less forthcoming in their
responses or hesitant to be critical of the research.
Implications for Research and Practice
Future research is needed to confirm or broaden the current findings. The study could be
replicated with additional supervisor and ST participants over a longer period of time and could
be conducted in universities with various models of pre-service teacher preparation to investigate
the transferability of the results to different contexts. Research could also be carried out on the
scope and sequence of pre-service teacher education programs to investigate the extent to which
critical issues related to CLRP in special education are covered, and the extent to which the skills
required for critical reflection are developed in the curricula.
It would be useful to investigate the effects of more intensive supervisor training and its
impact on the conduct of supervision conferences. Such research could investigate the effects of
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) B. Hassaram, P. M. Robertson, & S. B. García
19
regular supervisor debriefing seminars in building supervisor capacity. Supervisors could be better
prepared to evaluate the CLRP responsiveness of PSTs lesson plans. Research could also be
conducted with the observation tool to determine ways to enhance its effectiveness and prompts
could be added to focus on critical reflection (e.g., including key words such as access, equity,
power and privilege.)
Another area worthy of study is to explore key components of professional development
that are typically accorded to university supervisors in special education programs. Perhaps the
use of established coaching techniques such as cognitive coaching (Costa & Garmston, 2002) or
educative mentoring (Feinman-Nemser, 2001) could be studied to investigate their effectiveness
on supervision for culturally responsive instruction and critical reflection.
The findings of this study also offer programmatic and practical implications. First, they
suggest that, programmatically, students may need more guidance in order to effectively apply
literature on critical issues such as equity and access for CLD populations in special education in
their field-based practice. In addition, they also need to be exposed to the literature on critical
reflection in its broader sense and more scaffolding to engage in critical reflection of schools and
society. In relation to this, students also need to be given more guidance and opportunities to
practice critical reflection in addition to critical self-reflection. The study suggests that supervisors
also need to have exposure to this literature.
The findings also suggested that supervisors should be knowledgeable about culturally
and linguistically responsive practices so that they can guide their mentees’ knowledge and
application in practice. Similarly, supervisors should be able to model critical reflection to the
STs, and scaffold the STs’ use of it. Clearly, supervisors needed additional training with the
observation tool in order to use it more effectively. Additionally, supervisors could be informed
about different levels of reflection and well as question types that may invite deeper thinking and
reflexivity. Along with the above, it would seem to be beneficial if supervisors were also
supervised, perhaps by university professors who are responsible for teaching these curricula to
the pre-service teachers.
In conclusion, consistent with other literature, supervisors failed to support their STs to
engage in critical reflection. However, the supervision process as designed for this study seemed
to hold promise, suggesting that both supervisors and STs may need more time and support to
develop the requisite skills.
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The Journal of Teaching and Learning
Vol. 12, No. 2 (December 2018), pp. 23–37.
http://dx.doi.org/10.22329/jtl.v12i2.4927
23
“It Would Be Better If You Can Hang Out With Different
People”: An Examination of Cross-National Interaction in
Postsecondary Classrooms
Christopher J. Johnstone
University of Minnesota
Diana Yefanova
University of Minnesota
Gayle Woodruff
University of Minnesota
Mary Lynn Montgomery
University of Minnesota
Barbara J. Kappler
University of Minnesota
Abstract
This study examines the motivations and experiences of international and
domestic students on three U.S. campuses related to cross-national interactions
within classroom settings. The study also examines the role of instructors in
facilitating such interactions through individual and group interviews. Findings
indicate that domestic students appreciate the global perspectives of
international students related to course content. International students, in turn,
appreciate the “real world” perspectives that domestic students provide about
the US (but do not necessarily find value in their content-related comments).
The implications of this study are that cross-national interactions have different
meanings for different stakeholders (i.e., some perceive to benefit academically
while others perceive to benefit culturally). The implications of this study relate
to how instructors structure student interactions and what might be reasonable
outcomes for students in international groups in postsecondary classrooms.
Cross-National Interaction in Postsecondary Classrooms Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
24
Introduction
Internationalization of higher education has become a nearly ubiquitous term in postsecondary
institutions. Knight (2015) has set out guideposts for the process by periodically updating her
definition of the process. Most recently, in 2015, Knight noted that “internationalization, at the
national, sector, and institutional levels is defined as the process of integrating an international,
intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions, or delivery of postsecondary
education” (p. 2). Knight’s (2015) umbrella definition allows for systems and institutions to design
their own pathway in the internationalization process. As noted by Childress (2009), this pathway
is often in response to the impacts of globalization, which institutions cannot control. Jones,
Coelen, Beelen, and de Wit (2016), however, also note that internationalization approaches and
strategies are strongly rooted in local political agendas and resource availability.
In general, internationalization of higher education is a broad and encompassing concept
that, at the local level, has many strategies aimed at the enterprises of administration, partnerships,
research, and students. In this study we chose to focus on a subset of the internationalization
strategy present in many universities—enrolment of international students. Such enrolment is part
of a broader student mobility agenda, operationalized as the outward international flow of domestic
students in study abroad and the inward flow of international students to study at U.S. campuses
(American Council on Education, 2016). In this study we focus specifically on the classroom
environment and interactions of international and domestic students in the postsecondary
classroom.
Study Context and Rationale
Although this qualitative study did not posit specific hypotheses, our theoretical perspective draws
upon decades of work related to strategies of facilitating positive outcomes of intercultural contacts
in the learning environments. The study focus leads to the brief review of the concept of
internationalization at home (IaH) that highlights spreading the benefits of higher education
internationalization to a much wider segment of students than those who study abroad, especially
domestic students with limited opportunities to travel abroad (Crowther et al., 2000). The initial
emphasis in the IaH model was divided among three principal components: (a) diversity as a
resource; (b) an internationalized curriculum; and (c) a culturally sensitive pedagogy. For the
purpose of this study we focus on the first and the third components of this conceptual model.
Within the U.S. context, where our study was conducted, international students are
identified as an important contributor to diversity on campuses (Zhao, Kuh, & Carini, 2005).
College classrooms may be the best place on campus to leverage the diversity of views and
experiences that international students may bring (Shapiro, Farrelly, & Tomaš, 2014) and where
positive benefits of engaging with international diversity in the classroom may be realized for all
students.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) Johnstone, Yefanova, Woodruff, Montgomery, & Kappler
25
Outcomes of Cross-National Interactions
Over the past several decades, scholars have identified cross-cultural learning
environments as spaces of opportunity for cognitive development (Bruning, Schraw, & Ronning,
1999), moral reasoning (Grayson, 2008), intercultural competence (Arkoudis, Baik, Marginson, &
Cassidy, 2012), and international attitudes (Parsons, 2010). Our study focuses directly on intra-
classroom cross-national interactions (CNI) that occur as part of the everyday curricular offerings
and serve as formal learning environments where students can interact in diverse educational
contexts.
Interactions with diverse perspectives and identities in college classrooms have been shown
to be significant factors correlated with student learning and outcomes, intercultural competence
development (Bowman, 2010; Deardorff, 2006; Denson & Chang, 2009; Hurtado, 2001; Lee,
Poch, Shaw, & Williams 2012), and academic engagement (Zhao & Douglass, 2012). A study in
US and Australian universities (Parsons, 2010) indicated that social contact with international
students (as one of the components of an internationalized curriculum) significantly predicted
higher scores on most scales associated with desired outcomes of curriculum internationalization
(i.e., international attitudes and perceptions; cross-cultural skills, and international behaviours). It
is not always clear, however, what opportunities for student interaction were offered in the
classroom, and what the role of faculty and instructors was in leveraging international diversity.
The Role of Academic Staff in Facilitating CNI
Facilitating interactions among students from different national backgrounds can be a
challenging process for instructors (see Matsuda, Saenkhum, & Accardi, 2013), as it relates to
pedagogic practices. One common concern is that, if such interactions are not facilitated by
instructors in the classroom, domestic students may fail to benefit from contact with other cultures
and thus fail to benefit from campus diversity, as the mere presence of international students, even
in large numbers, is insufficient in itself to promote intercultural interactions with cultural "others"
(Andrade & Evans, 2009; Leask, 2009) and to result in mutually beneficial cross-cultural
understanding.
Internationalization scholars have identified a gap in literature that relates directly to
classroom interactions of international and host country national students. Leask and Carroll
(2011) noted that institutional agents often assumed there would be automatic cultural benefits as
a result of increased international student enrolment, but noted that there was rarely an institutional
process for facilitating outcomes. Instead, research has tended to focus on concerns by instructors
about how to respond to culturally and linguistically diverse students (Matsuda et al., 2013), often
viewing students’ needs from the deficit perspective. Such research has not addressed how the
facilitation of cross-national interaction in classrooms may accomplish institutional or
instructional goals (Green, 2012; Jones & Killick, 2013; Leki, 2006; Zamel & Spack, 2004), nor
the conditions under which such outcomes may be attainable.
The need to facilitate intercultural interactions to achieve expected outcomes international
diversity can bring to the classroom was predicted by Allport (1954), whose contact hypothesis
suggests that the individuals need to have common purpose or shared work, and equal status for
Cross-National Interaction in Postsecondary Classrooms Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
26
meaningful infraction to occur across cultural lines. Such interactions require deeper engagement
with the cultural “other” and his/her perspectives (Cruickshank, Chen, & Warren, 2012) as well as
how alternative perspectives and peers’ cultural backgrounds relate to concrete tasks and goals in
shared work (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). As applied to the learning environment in college
classrooms, there has also been increasing focus in the literature on understanding how faculty
members and instructors may engage international diversity in the classroom to enhance cultural
learning for all students in the classroom (Leask, 2009; Zhao & Douglass, 2012). Several authors
also note the need for instructor facilitation to ensure and support in-class cross-cultural
interactions because undergraduate students tend to work with other students from a similar culture
and linguistic background, experience anxiety during such interactions (Dunne, 2009), and rarely
seek out diverse interactions without being prompted by the instructor (Arkoudis et al., 2010).
Rationale for Study
The rationale for our study is twofold. First, as internationalization and, specifically, the
components of IaH, continue to be a common practice in U.S. higher education institutions, data
points at various levels of institutional activity (e.g., administration, teaching and learning, student
life) will help to inform the broader agenda of IaH. In this study, we focus our efforts specifically
on international student interactions within postsecondary classrooms. Additionally, our study
seeks to better understand the outcomes of cross-national interactions in postsecondary classrooms
as experienced by students from the United States, international students within U.S.
postsecondary classrooms and the academic staff who are simultaneously responsible for
facilitating classroom activities (Tange & Jensen, 2012).
Our questions are framed in the broad conceptual framework of internationalization of
higher education and the role that international students play (or do not play) in this process.
Understanding this process further will depend on answering our two research questions:
1. What are the perceived outcomes experienced by domestic and international students
who participate in cross-national interactions in postsecondary classrooms?
2. What do students and faculty perceive to be the most effective ways that instructors
facilitate cross-national interactions?
Methods
Participants
Data reported in this study draws upon a larger dataset based on the multi-year study on
contributions of international students to campus internationalization that was conducted on three
campuses of a public university system in the Midwest region of the United States. Our sample
featured self-selected students and invited instructors from an urban research-intensive campus, a
rural liberal arts-focused campus, and a rural comprehensive undergraduate campus within this
university system. Our aim was to better understand a wide variety of classroom settings, so we
also selected both students from multiple academic fields.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) Johnstone, Yefanova, Woodruff, Montgomery, & Kappler
27
In total, we engaged 121 students, both international (IS) and domestic (DS). For the
purposes of our research, we defined international students as those who are holding a student visa.
Although we continue to be very interested in outcomes and experiences of students who are
immigrants to the U.S., our focus on this study was on international students who have finite
student visas because they are frequently a formal component of campus internationalization plans.
Table 1 provides an overview of the interview sample. Our sample reflects an effort to over-sample
international students: this population comprises approximately 10% of the total institutional
population, but approximately 30% of the students interviewed were international students. Our
over-sampling was aimed at understanding a wide variety of international student perspectives.
The students were self-selected as we invited volunteers to participate in the study.
In addition to students, we sought to better understand teaching-learning dimensions from
those who were leading the process. We solicited volunteers from a purposive sample of instructors
based on their interest in and support of campus internationalization initiatives and/or existing
contacts within the departments. In total, we included 47 teaching faculty on three campuses. On
the flagship campus of the university we interviewed 26 faculty members from three disciplines,
while interviewing six faculty members from the university’s liberal arts undergraduate campus,
and a third from the comprehensive undergraduate-focused institution in the university system.
Table 1
Study Participants
Undergraduate Students Graduate Students Faculty
International (visa) 30 20
Domestic (citizen or resident) 50 21
Faculty 47
Total 80 41 47
Procedures
In order to engage as many students as possible, and to examine common themes among
students, we interviewed students in focus groups to gain in-depth insights on concepts we were
examining and allow participants to build upon or refute each other’s response in small groups
(Krueger & Casey, 2000). To this end, we grouped our participants into focus groups in the
following four categories: (a) international undergraduate students; (b) domestic undergraduate
students; (c) international graduate students; and (d) domestic graduate students. Each focus group
interview size ranged from two to eight participants; interviews lasted between 60-90 minutes and
were audio recorded. Interview questions centered on student and experiences with CNI. The
research team had no direct contact with participating students in classroom context.
Our faculty interviews were of mixed format (i.e., face-to-face and via teleconference and
telephone) and largely depended on the availability of faculty. Wherever possible, we conducted
Cross-National Interaction in Postsecondary Classrooms Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
28
focus groups using the same procedures as utilized in student interviews. In total we conducted
nine focus groups (31 participants) and 16 individual interviews.
Analysis
Overall, data analysis was divided into three stages. First, we individually read through
participant responses relevant to our research questions. In phase two, we analyzed student and
faculty responses by independently coding transcripts using NVivo and writing memos on what
types of CNI opportunities students described and what were the perceived outcomes of these
interactions. During the third stage, data analysts discussed codes, checking for inter-coder
agreement (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Finally, the analysis team compiled the initial and the
emergent codes to reach the consensus on each one, then assigned them to particular sentences or
paragraphs that corresponded with codes (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Findings
Two main findings emerged from this study. Our first main finding was one that was unexpected,
does not yet seem to have a strong foundation in literature, and was somewhat contradictory within
the study itself. Domestic students self-reported that their learning about academic content
improved as a result of interactions with international students. Although CNI is often framed as
an opportunity for students to improve their intercultural skill as a result of course-based dialogue
(Bowman 2010; Denson & Chang, 2009; Soria & Troisi, 2013), a theme emerged among domestic
students in the study regarding content learning. Both undergraduate and graduate domestic
student participants reported having developed multiple perspectives on course content and
indicated that international student presence enriched in-class learning and academic engagement
when opportunities to share knowledge and perspectives across cultures were provided. One
student noted:
In my group project we had German and South Korean students in the group, and hearing
and understanding from their perspective how the same kind of psych topics were discussed
in their countries and how research over there is handled... that I wouldn’t have otherwise
learned from the class…So learning more about that is, I think a great opportunity.
(Domestic Undergraduate Student A)
At the graduate level, where our sample consisted of students in professional schools,
student responses also indicated that they considered CNI an important tool in preparing for future
careers by virtue of learning more about different national contexts.
Just getting an insider perspective on everything that's happening in China [is important].
Because, obviously, I can read about it in The Economist or whatever, but it's not like
actually hearing from a real-life anecdote of how you actually get business done and make
transactions happen. (Domestic Graduate Student A)
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) Johnstone, Yefanova, Woodruff, Montgomery, & Kappler
29
We have students from Korea, from China, Taiwan, Japan, and Austria, Spain, Europe, so
it’s quite diverse and in the past…I was able to closely collaborate with them in projects,
either in class or outside of class as research assistants...we ask questions about their
different cultural experiences and perspectives. Like, we exchange [perspectives].
(International Graduate Student D)
Domestic students arguably had an internationalized experience as a result of small group
work with international students. This theme, however, was not present in international student
perspectives. It is unknown why international students did not feel they received an academic
bump from domestic students, but there are likely three explanations. First, learning perspectives
from U.S. students may not be novel or surprising to international students. Rather, these students
are immersed in U.S. academic culture and may have grown accustomed to U.S. students sharing
perspectives. It is also possible that international students do not value CNI as a learning strategy
as much as domestic students. Although not all students in this study were educated in Confucian
traditions and learning styles, demographics within the university campuses where the research
took place indicate that the vast majority of students on U.S. campuses are either from China or
South Korea. The Confucian effect is unknown. Some students expressed trepidation with working
in groups and spoke of insecurity in their own language, which may have influenced perspectives
on CNI.
For international and domestic students alike, cultural understanding was also a perceived
benefit of CNI. How the students understood and perceived the cultural outcomes of CNI,
however, differed between domestic and international students. Domestic students’ responses
aligned with the theoretical propositions of cultural intelligence theory as those US students who
reported benefits from CNI appeared to be developing the drive for cultural intelligence outlined
by Ang, Van Dyne, and Koh (2006). For U.S. students, positive perceptions of CNI occurred when
the domestic students initiated the desire to learn more. Students perceived benefits when they
were willing to move into more in-depth conversations about each their group mates’ culture. For
example, some students noted the benefits of addressing the underlying process of reflecting on
their own culture and examining their own preconceived cultural notions and stereotypes of
cultural difference.
One main thing that I learned is that a lot of people think that if someone doesn't have that
great of English, they're not intelligent, which is not the case at all. And I think that's a lot
of times why people get pushed to the side, because they struggle with English. But really,
it's probably their second language, or third, or fourth ... Just because they struggle with
English doesn't mean their insight isn't valuable. (Domestic Undergraduate Student B)
Certainly, you find a lot of similarities between each other, but you also find that the
differences that we share are useful, especially to work together and use those differences,
different skills, different abilities, different mindsets. And that helps a collaborative effort
work. (Domestic Undergraduate Student C)
Cross-National Interaction in Postsecondary Classrooms Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
30
The drive to engage interculturally, however, manifested itself differently in international
students. In this case, international students spoke of opportunity to gain emic perspectives about
life in the U.S. For one student, this provided an opportunity to challenge her existing beliefs and
value systems about Americans’ cultures, opinions, approaches to academic work and what is
“really going on in America” (International Undergraduate Student). In this example, students
were seeking out conversations as a way of understanding the culture beyond what was represented
to them in media, classroom content, and university messaging. During this process, international
students appeared to be enlisting U.S. students as cultural interpreters (Katan, 2014), as one student
shared:
There are some cultural issues behind [grammar]—like it’s grammatically correct, but
when Americans hear it, it’s just not… appropriate. Or they will take it in a different way
than what you intended to. So there’s some cultural ways of thinking, or you need
knowledge behind it, too. And I have American peers who sometimes help me confirm
[ideas], or double check, you know, sometimes I let them go through it, if it’s important
for me or they have time and they are willing to help me with that. (International Graduate
Student D)
What is likely the most relevant, and likely the most intuitive finding in this section, is that
students experience group work benefits differently. For U.S. students, who may have less
experience in the countries of origin of their international classmates, these classmates represent
an opportunity to view content within new contexts. Domestic students also expressed a sense of
discovery and new culture learning that occurred in these groups. International students on the
other hand, are already immersed in the U.S. environment. They are surrounded by academic
content, teaching styles, and peers from the U.S. who are more often than not the majority in
classes. For international students, culture learning manifested itself in more strategic thinking.
U.S. students were seen as a resource to help understand the intricacies of U.S. culture. The
implications of these findings are expanded upon in the Discussion section below.
Discussion
Our study aimed to better understand the inner workings of cross-national interaction (CNI) in
postsecondary education classrooms in the U.S. We located this study in the broader
internationalization of higher education literature. In this literature, there appears to be both great
hope in the role that international students can play in supporting diversity and internationalization
on campus (Zhao et al., 2005) and recognition that faculty often feel unprepared to manage such
diversity in their classroom (Matsuda et al., 2013). Our study set out to identify the potential
contributions of international students on US campuses by investigating a micro-level space of
engagement – classroom group work.
Our pursuit was somewhat open-ended. Our literature review indicated that we might
encounter reports of intercultural competence development (Arkoudis et al., 2012) or students
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) Johnstone, Yefanova, Woodruff, Montgomery, & Kappler
31
reporting more internationalized attitudes as a result of cross-national contact (Parsons, 2010).
What we found was that results of CNI were nuanced, differed by student population group, and
were highly dependent on faculty facilitation. We also learned that not all students enjoy CNI (a
topic for further exploration in another study).
Course Content Learning, Resource-Seeking and CNI
Although themes were at times inconsistent, our first major finding was that domestic
students (those who were studying in their own country, in their first language, and in many cases
their home community) viewed international students as global content guides. In this case,
domestic students were appreciative of the perspectives of international students about the content
at hand. Through conversations in groups, domestic students felt they benefited from the unique
and new perspectives that international students could share about the course content. We should
note that domestic student comments about issues like friendship, global understanding, enhanced
worldviews, etc. were rare. Rather, domestic students saw international students as a resource from
which to gain new knowledge.
Similarly, international students saw domestic students as resources. International students
were studying in an environment that was far from home, potentially in unfamiliar pedagogical
environments, and were managing day to day life in a system that was potentially new to them.
Further, international students were largely outnumbered by domestic students in discussion
groups. Despite all the navigational capital that international students had gained through their
time on campus, they claimed they were missing the true story of the United States. This true story
was likely a story not presented in official university documents, media, and other outlets. Within
groups, international students saw domestic students as cultural interpreters who could provide
them with the everyday experience perspective of the United States. Figure 1 (below) is a graphic
representation of our findings.
Figure 1. Outcomes of CNI.
Domestic students act as cultural interpreters for international students.
International students act as global content advisors for domestic students.
Instructors facilitate process through strategic grouping, communications coaching, and structured activities.
Cross-National Interaction in Postsecondary Classrooms Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
32
The Role of Academic Staff in Promoting CNI
As noted above, both international and domestic students in the study reported some benefit
from CNI (although students valued different aspects and arguably received differential benefits).
Because of this, we sought to understand what the role of instructors was in supporting CNI that
was valuable to students. Students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels noted that external
structure on group activities is important for supporting CNI. For domestic students, there was a
desire to have equal voice in conversations, but a recognition that some students were more verbal
than others.
One thing is that in group work…is that…[international student] just sort of feel
overwhelmed by the native English speakers who are just… bombarding the group with
their verbiage. So that's certainly one challenge, how to make sure that people…are getting
their opinions heard, their insights acknowledged. (Domestic Graduate Student B)
[We need to] increase social interaction…because I can’t tell you how many times, like, I
just feel like we kind of shut each other out, and it’s not … on purpose… I think we do
have a lot in common socially, but for whatever reason, we don’t give ourselves the
opportunity to interact enough, and I think that’s where things fall apart when we’re in the
classroom. (Domestic Undergraduate Student D)
International students echoed the challenges that existed in groups, noting that domestic
students minimize the efforts and contributions of international students. One student commented
on assumptions about language and the stigmatization that sometimes occurs for students who
speak English as a second language.
When you're an international student they just assume that you don't know the language,
so there's a patronizing thing that is there that is like, "Oh, it's not your first language, it's
not your language." And they don't see the work that has been done because some of them
may not be fluent in speaking it, but they would be very good at writing it ... I think it
mainly makes you not that happy to be in the class and it's kind of a stressful thing if it's an
ongoing thing. (International Graduate Student C)
The assumption or the stereotype that the international students may not be writing as well
as their counter American fellows… the first ever project that we had to do together and
write a 25 page long single- spaced paper, we were eight people in the group, only two
international students… We ended up writing the paper, two of us. So, I guess the
stereotype that they thought, “Oh, you know, we’re gonna do group work, and meet with
them, and you know, it’s probably going to be, they can do the research but we should do
the writing,” It happened the other way around. (International Graduate Student B)
The challenges experienced by both domestic and international students in group settings
appeared to be minimized when faculty provided structure or support to group work. Students
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) Johnstone, Yefanova, Woodruff, Montgomery, & Kappler
33
recognized that it was sometimes difficult for them to work through the challenges of group
assignments, and that a scaffolded or supported group structure eased challenges in the group.
[Professors] are really aware of the fact that like international students and the language
barrier, and they notice that sometimes we usually sit in a bunch of group [sic] with, like,
Chinese students together in class with 200 people...they’ll sometimes bring that up too
and they’ll be like, “You know what, it would be better if you can hang out with different
people.” (International Undergraduate Student E)
Faculty triangulated student findings regarding structuring group activities for maximal
interaction, and were able to provide more insights into their instructional intentions than were
immediately visible to students. Faculty reported that a first an easy strategy often used was
grouping to ensure cross-national communication. Instructors who perceived CNI to be effective
in their classrooms drew upon linguistic and cultural diversity in the classroom to enhance
cognitive engagement through peer feedback and assessment (Arkoudis et al, 2010). This finding
seemed to be especially relevant for graduate students.
I put students in groups quite often … When I have just a few international students in
there, I never make them be the only international student in a group. I always make sure
there’s at least two. I actually had a speech class once where I only had five Americans and
ten international [students], and I made the Americans split up, and they were nervous. And
I thought it was good for them to experience that. (Lecturer, Humanities)
In addition to purposeful assignment of students into cross-national teams, those who were
most supportive of CNI viewed international students as resources to help all students engage with
content knowledge and facilitate deeper learning. Some of their approaches were: utilizing
multiple cultural perspectives on content as a teaching and learning resource; shaping projects
around countries international students in their classroom came from; and emphasizing the
importance of drawing on international student cultural experiences without tokenizing
international students.
I’ve seen students have their assumptions questioned from all different sides. Sort of the
assumption that, I don’t know, marriage should be based on love. And then you have
someone saying, ‘Well, not in my country.’ And then everyone says, ‘Whoa! Different!’
And you can see the sort of light bulbs going off, and this is really helpful for [the subject
matter learning]. And I think for our field, this is critical. (Faculty Member, Humanities)
Faculty who perceived group work to be an effective element in their classes next modeled
behaviors for students after the grouping process. These instructors described setting a
communicative tone and purpose for CNI in order to support engagement between students.
Cross-National Interaction in Postsecondary Classrooms Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
34
But I do also try to model skills for them to work through group challenges…for instance
if there’s a group member who’s not pulling their weight, or if there’s a group member
whose communication skills seem to be posing a problem for the others…well, what could
you do about that? What kinds of steps could you take either to make it easier for her to
communicate with you or vice-versa? And so, really building this sort of group problem
solving skill set. (Faculty Member, Technical Communication)
The findings illustrate the importance of an intentionally structured classroom environment with
opportunities for interaction, reflection, and instructor support, given that not all student
respondents viewed the classroom as a comfortable or appropriate space to engage in purposeful
cross-national interactions beyond required group work (some preferred co-curricular
environments such as student organizations and clubs). In fact, without structured support and
reflection in the classroom, exposure to diversity can lead to reinforcement of negative stereotypes
on cultural others (Pettigrew, 2008). However, instructors may wish to leverage the findings of
this study to create opportunities for students to discuss specific class content by placing it into
international contexts or may specifically ask for reflections on content based on students’
everyday experiences.
Conclusion: Making Sense of CNI
This study provided data that suggests that when domestic and international students enter into
group work environments, there is a degree of reciprocal exchange that exists. The reciprocity,
however, is not a direct exchange, as domestic and international students both give and receive
differently. The finding in and of itself provides nuance and perhaps a new analytic frame for
internationalization research. Our literature review discussed outcomes of the presence of
international students on US campuses from both institutional and individual frames. Our data
suggest, however, that a third unit of analysis may be needed for studies such as ours. We suggest
that further research may be conducted at the level of the interaction itself.
The themes that emerged from our study indicate that student engagement in groups creates
a degree of exchange between participants. These exchanges can either empowering or thorny.
Zhang and Epley (2009) note that within every reciprocal exchange, there is a process of give and
take. The authors suggest that challenges emerge when individuals calculate their giving to be
more than their receiving and note that this may be inevitable because humans exist in an egotistic
frame. Intercultural communication theories (Leask & Carroll, 2011) and cultural intelligence
theories (Earley & Ang, 2003) suggest that egocentric ethnocentrism can be reduced through the
development of cultural skill and competence, which may explain why the students who felt they
benefited had appreciation of cultural dimensions (internationalized content and cultural
informants). These findings indicate that international students can indeed contribute to campus
internationalization and can be assets in group learning environments, but perhaps in ways not yet
identified in the literature. Our findings also challenge deficit-oriented perspectives sometimes
found in the literature, suggesting that international students are seen as a learning resource by
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) Johnstone, Yefanova, Woodruff, Montgomery, & Kappler
35
their domestic classmates. Likewise, domestic students were seen as a resource by international
students.
Finally, our findings also indicated that instructors play a central role in facilitating CNI
and helping students overcome associated challenges (e.g., via providing structure or support to
group work). However, we are going “beyond the present condition of ‘good’ lecturers and
‘deviant’ learners” (Tange & Jensen, 2012, p. 191), as those instructors supportive of CNI viewed
international and domestic students as resources to help each other engage with content knowledge
and facilitate deeper learning.
This micro-study of CNI across three campuses provided qualitative evidence of how
learning takes place in groups and what instructors might do to support the process. The interaction
of the three key actors in CNI (i.e., domestic students, international students, and instructors)
indicates that if any one of the parties was missing, the specific outcomes described in this article
may disappear. To this end, further investigation of CNI as a strategy for classroom and campus-
based internationalization is warranted. At the same time, the findings that emerged from this study
indicate that there are limitations to CNI and, like any pedagogical approach, there are benefits
and drawbacks to its use. Thoughtful structuring of CNI opportunities, however, may contribute
to campus internationalization strategy by providing students with broad perspectives nested in
finite, short-lived classroom-based discussion.
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The Journal of Teaching and Learning
Vol. 12, No. 2 (December 2018), pp. 38–53.
http://dx.doi.org/10.22329/jtl.v12i2.5526
38
Emergent Professional Learning Communities in Higher Education:
Integrating Faculty Development, Educational Innovation, and
Organizational Change at a Canadian College
Julie A. Mooney
University of Saskatchewan
Abstract
Centres for teaching and learning at postsecondary educational institutions in
Canada seek to serve the professional development needs of faculty members
throughout the college or university. Recognizing the limits of conventional
frameworks for faculty development, such as one-time workshops, pedagogical
conferences, and lunchtime discussion sessions, this interpretive inquiry
explores learning communities as an additional framework for serving faculty
development and cross-institutional professional development needs. The study
asks: what does it mean for faculty, educational developers, support staff, and
administrators to participate in a learning community at a college in Canada?
Data collected through individual inquiry conversations (semi-structured
interviews) and research memos were used to develop narrative descriptions
representing the participants’ respective experiences of a learning community in
a large, urban college context in Canada. These narrative descriptions offer
portraits of the meaning that learning community members made of their own
experience, revealing that the learning communities served not only as sites for
professional development, but also formed microcultures within the institution,
which, over time, influenced educational (academic) and organizational
(administrative) change, both in policy and in practice.
Introduction
This article presents and discusses the results of an interpretive inquiry into emergent professional
learning communities (PLCs) at a large, urban, Canadian college, and the influences they had at
that institution on faculty development, educational innovation, and organizational change. For the
purpose of this study, the term learning community refers to a group of people, affiliated with a
postsecondary educational institution, as employees or students, who share a common interest and
undertake to inquire about it together (Cox, 2004; Goodsell Love, 2012; Macpherson, 2007; Senge,
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) J. A. Mooney
39
2006; Wenger, 1998;). The use of learning communities in education is not new, but it is not widely
applied to faculty development programming, which tends towards brief, one-time sessions that
aim to intervene on a particular teaching or curricular skill or strategy (Beach, Sorcinelli, Austin,
& Rivard, 2016).
Significance of the Study
Faculty development units, like most academic services within higher education, are increasingly
under pressure from senior leadership to show evidence of the effectiveness and impact of their
programming (Beach, Sorcinelli, Austin, & Rivard, 2016; Condon, Iverson, Manduca, Rutz, &
Willett, 2016; Schroeder, 2011). The effectiveness and impact of faculty development services are
often measured in quantitative terms. In the Canadian higher education sector, faculty learning
communities (FLCs), which meet regularly for a full academic year, ranked low on a scale of
signature approaches to faculty development (Beach et al., 2016). Only 17% of Canadian
respondents ranked FLCs in their top three approaches, while less time-consuming approaches,
such as hands-on workshops and individual consultations rated high (Beach et al., 2016). The
current study sought to better understand the quality of professional learning afforded by learning
communities, and to gain greater insight into this form of faculty development. This interpretive
inquiry revealed understandings of faculty development from wider, institutional, and integrative
perspectives.
Problem Statement and Research Question
Centres for teaching and learning in postsecondary educational institutions in Canada seek to serve
the professional development needs of faculty members throughout the college or university.
Recognizing the limitations of conventional frameworks for faculty development, such as one-
time workshops, pedagogical conferences, and lunchtime discussion sessions, this interpretive
inquiry explored learning communities (LCs), as an additional and integrative framework for
serving faculty development and cross-institutional professional development needs. The study
asked: What does it mean for faculty, educational developers, support staff, and administrators to
participate in a learning community at a college in Canada?
Inspiration for the Study
In 2009, while working as an educational developer in a centre for teaching and learning,
colleagues and I had the opportunity to hear George Kuh speak about high impact educational
practices (Kuh, 2009). Shortly thereafter, we started thinking about and discussing how learning
communities – one of Kuh’s (2009) high impact practices for students – could apply to faculty
professional learning. A disciplinary background in Peace Studies had provided me with
theoretical and practical understandings about community-building. As I designed and developed
various faculty development programs and sessions, I made efforts to cultivate community as a
Emergent Professional Learning Communities Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
40
core component of these programs (Mooney, 2014). Simultaneously, faculty members at the same
institution were engaged in similar community-building efforts. Over the course of a few years,
several such communities formed at the college, both through formal faculty development
programming and as emergent learning communities.
Initially, I thought about these emergent communities as faculty learning communities,
because they had been initiated by faculty members. However, as I pursued the research discussed
in this article, these communities revealed themselves to me as inclusive of colleagues from
various professional roles, and in some cases, inclusive of students as well. As my study progressed
through semi-structured interviews with participants from these communities, my thinking about
these groupings of colleagues changed. They were not simply sites of faculty development in the
conventional professional development programming sense of the phrase; they were emergent
professional learning communities (PLCs) that had been built from the ground up by individuals
who sought out colleagues with whom to learn collaboratively about their shared curiosity or
conundrum.
Conceptual Framework
While the concept of learning as a community first appeared in colleges and universities in the
1920s, learning communities started to prove effective and to take root in higher education in the
1990s (Brownell & Swaner, 2009; Meiklejohn, 1932). Much of the literature on learning
communities in higher education contexts has focused on student or student-faculty learning
communities (Kuh, 2009; Brownell & Swaner, 2009; Price, 2005; Garrison & Anderson, 2003;
Lenning & Ebbers, 1999; Gabelnick et al., 1990). This study took a broader look at the whole
institution, through the lens of Senge’s (2006) learning organization concept. While not entirely
excluding student participation, this study focused primarily on the participation of faculty,
educational developers, staff, and administrators in learning communities. Lenning and Ebbers
(1999) highlight that applications of the learning community model have grown beyond the
classroom context:
Learning communities can be philosophically related to Deweyan principles – that
education is most successful as a social process and is deeply rooted in our understanding
of community and democracy. As we understand learning communities today, they evolved
out of cooperative and collaborative learning movements that emphasized social
interaction and active learning. Learning communities were almost always discussed in
relation to the classroom. But what was once a pedagogical tool is now being used to
transform all sorts of campus features, including classrooms, retention programs, distance
learning, residential environments, and many other structures. (p. 11)
Professors at postsecondary institutions in Canada are selected to teach based on their
subject matter expertise; seldom are they required to have prior credentials in the scholarship of
teaching and learning (Heinrich, 2014; Mooney, 2015). Their professional development as
educators is therefore of instrumental importance to the quality of learning opportunities they offer
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) J. A. Mooney
41
students (Mooney, 2015). In Canada, postsecondary centres for teaching and learning have been
established by senior administrations with the explicit mandate to serve faculty development needs
(Mooney, 2015). Teaching and learning service units often experience low participation rates in
their faculty development programming (Heinrich, 2014; Mooney, 2015), which typically include
such offerings as new faculty orientation, course design and assessment workshops, pedagogical
discussion series, and one-one-one consultations. Despite the quality, variety, and number of
services offered by educational developers, for some centres for teaching and learning, outreach
to faculty to support their development as teachers remains challenging (Mooney, 2015).
Faculty development programs that are designed as one-time sessions do not necessarily
create conditions for deep professional learning. As an educational developer who has grappled
with these challenges, I ask myself: (a) what could teaching and learning services in postsecondary
education do to create conditions for sustained learning over time that is rooted in professional
practice? and (b) are the teachers who do not participate in teaching and learning development
opportunities finding other outlets for ongoing professional development as educators? These
questions are central to my conceptual framework, a tentative theory for the phenomenon under
investigation (Maxwell, 2005).
According to a pilot study conducted in Canada in 2014-2015, some faculty members
appear to be going elsewhere to find and create their own opportunities for ongoing professional
learning, independent of opportunities offered by centres for teaching and learning (Mooney,
2015). Some are connecting with colleagues from across or beyond their institution in what appear
to be learning communities focused on a common need, a special project, or a shared area of
interest (Mooney, 2015). These groups of collaborative, self-directed, self-starters are the types of
learning communities at the centre of the study discussed in this article.
In this inquiry, I investigated the phenomena of five learning communities within a
Canadian college that, at the time of data collection, were generally viewed, by administrators,
faculty, educational developers, and support staff at the college, as successful initiatives because
of either their longevity, their number of active or affiliated members, the impact they were having
on student learning, and/or their influence on the learning culture of the institution. Of course, they
did not start out that way. In their respective emergences, they formed organically and tentatively,
forging their paths and collective identities over time. Select members of these learning
communities were invited to share their respective experiences of a learning community (LC), how
they had made meaning of their experiences in it, and how their participation in the LC had
informed their professional practice.
Methodology
This study used an interpretive inquiry methodology. “In some scholarly communities, interpretive
approaches have become explicitly associated with a postmodernist perspective” (Thorne, 2016,
p. 223). This study asserted the subjectivity of the participants’ accounts and of the researcher’s
interpretations. As a methodology, interpretive inquiry emphasizes the situated individual, uses
relatively small sample sizes, and requires that the particular meanings reported by participants be
Emergent Professional Learning Communities Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
42
set within their contexts (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2011). Findings are not meant to be
generalized but may offer insights that are relevant in other contexts (Butler-Kisber, 2010). These
methodological qualities were upheld in this study.
Research Ethics
This study was reviewed and approved by the research ethics boards at my parent institution and
at the college that served as the site for this study. Consent forms were administered and signed
by informed and voluntary participants prior to data collection. Subsequently, a transparent,
communicative practice (in conversation and in writing) for ensuring ongoing consent was used
throughout this study. With each step in the process, participants were informed of their rights to
withdraw and of the process for withdrawal of participation. This study received no funding.
Methods of Inquiry
This study was conducted at a large, urban, publicly-funded college in Canada. A purposive sample
of colleagues who had recently participated in an LC was selected. Ten research participants
represented five learning communities and four employment classifications: faculty members,
support staff, educational developers, and administrators. In order to protect individual and
institutional identity in this study, the learning communities were given pseudonyms, namely: (a)
Sciences, Arts, & Culture Collaborating (SACC); (b), Faculty Writing Community (FWC); (c)
Indigenizing Education Community (IEC); (d) Integrating Pedagogy and Classroom Design
(IPaCD); and (e) Universal Design for Learning Community (UDLC). Similarly, each participant
was assigned a code (e.g., A1 represented Administrator 1).
As seen in Figure 1, in this interpretive inquiry process, data was collected through
individual inquiry conversations (semi-structured interviews) and research memos in order to
develop narrative vignettes representing the participants’ respective experiences of an LC. A set
of guiding questions was developed for the inquiry conversations, which were audio-recorded and
transcribed. Transcripts were stripped of the researcher’s voice, sub-headings were added, and
acronyms were expanded. These revised transcripts were sent to their respective research
participant for member checking (Carlson, 2010).
The participant-approved texts were reviewed, annotated, and coded for units of meaning,
identified as themes. A total of 27 themes were grouped into five categories: (a) the nature of an
LC; (b) LC motivations and goals; (c) participant motivations for joining an LC; (d) unintended
outcomes; and (e) constraints and opportunities. The themes were repeated across many
transcripts, demonstrating saturation in the data (Beitin, 2012). Using the language of the research
participants, and referring to the research memos, the author crafted narrative vignettes for each
theme. The narrative vignettes were then distilled into statements of phenomena, which became
the thematic findings of the study.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) J. A. Mooney
43
Figure 1: The interpretive inquiry process of data collection, processing, and analysis
methods used in the study.
Thematic Findings
In this section, a selection of the thematic findings is presented, with some accompanying narrative
vignettes, in order to draw a portrait of the LCs in this study. This portrait will be distilled further
in subsequent sections in which the major findings, the author’s interpretations, and the policy and
practice implications arising from these findings are discussed.
The thematic findings, written in the author’s own words and based on the narrative
vignettes, address succinctly the overarching research question posed in this study: What does it
mean for faculty, educational developers, support staff, and administrators to participate in a
learning community at a college in Canada? Concurrently, the narrative vignettes respond to the
research question in more detail and in the words of the research participants. The thematic
findings are organized using the 27 themes that emerged from the data, grouped into five categories
(for a comprehensive list of these five categories and 27 themes, see Appendix A.) The selection
of thematic findings statements and narrative vignettes that follows relate specifically to the
context of the Canadian college at the centre of this inquiry. Although the thematic findings
statements are written in terms of learning communities, they must not be read as generalizations
about all learning communities.
Category 1: The Nature of a Learning Community
Collaboration and co-design. Learning community members work together, and in so
doing create new knowledge that could not have been created by any one individual member on
their own.
Emergent Professional Learning Communities Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
44
Degrees of participation. Varying degrees of participation are critical to sustaining a
learning community, as participants in the core, periphery, and penumbra help the learning
community to achieve its many goals (see Figure 2).
Peer mentoring. Learning community members learn from each other and support one
another in mutual, give-and-take relationships.
Interdisciplinarity. The interdisciplinarity of learning communities responds to the
complexities of contemporary societal challenges. Effective interdisciplinary learning
communities need one or more translators to draw connections between disciplines, as well as the
willingness of all participants to learn to think extra-disciplinarily¬—outside the norms and
paradigms of their own fields of expertise.
Figure 2. Degrees of participation in an LC with a large, diverse membership.
Productive and goal-oriented. In their early stages of development, learning communities
are product- and goal-oriented because members are looking for practical results and may feel they
need to prove themselves worthy recipients of support and funding. More established learning
communities that have made significant contributions and earned a level of legitimacy or
recognition tend to shift to a more process-oriented approach. These phenomena are not seen in
opposition, but some learning communities tend more towards productivity and others tend
towards a process-orientation.
Shared values. Learning communities allow shared values to emerge among their
participants. Once normative, shared values are identifying features of a learning community.
Without being directive or prescriptive, the shared values signal to new members what the learning
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) J. A. Mooney
45
community cares about and how it functions. The finest of their collective work comes from a
learning community that shares foundational values.
Research or evidence-based. Learning communities are sites of inquiry where researchers
and practitioners learn from one another to improve practice and to ground research in a particular
context.
Organic emergent process. The establishment of learning communities is hard to engineer
or direct. Successful learning communities recognize a gap and respond to it at a time when the
broader community is ready for that kind of change. Learning communities bring together a core
group of people who create a safe space for exploration and peer-to-peer learning. They use non-
linear, organic processes to emerge as a cohesive community.
Narrative Vignette 1
We know that successful learning communities have something to do with recognizing gaps
and harnessing needed expertise to respond to the gaps. It’s also about finding the right
time when the broader community is ready or open to potential change. It involves a core
group of people, who believe in the goals and intentions of the emergent learning
community. And there needs to be a safe space, that is not overly structured, to allow for
creative ideas to surface, for people to follow a tangent and see where it leads, and for
people to be influenced by each other. The emergent nature of successful learning
communities means their members have to be able to live with ambiguity and uncertainty,
at least some of the time. (Educational Developer and Faculty Member)
Sub-culture or microculture. Learning communities are a point of connection for
colleagues within a large institution. Connections formed in learning communities foster a greater
sense of connection to and pride in the institution. Over time, learning communities within a large
institution become microcultures (Mårtensson, Roxå, and Stensaker, 2014; Roxå and Mårtensson,
2015). Several learning communities within a large institution become a network of microcultures
that influences the operational culture and the culture of innovation within the institution (Roxå
and Mårtensson, 2009) and forges a path for new learning communities and microcultures to
develop.
Narrative Vignette 2
We always need to consider the system that is creating the right conditions – multiple
parallel factors, such as the philosophical and financial support of the senior leadership,
and simultaneously the interest and willingness of colleagues to inquire together, – for the
success of our learning communities. Without any of these right elements within the system,
we may not get the same kind of result. If our system was void of other learning
communities that had their own nexuses, we probably wouldn’t have the kind of impact
that each community has on its own, or now can have. Our communities are drawing on
microcultures of people who are willing to engage in something that is bigger than
themselves. If there were just one learning community in the institution, it would not
constitute a phenomenon, and it would likely have little impact compared to the impact all
Emergent Professional Learning Communities Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
46
these learning communities are now having on the way we operate and innovate at the
college. (Faculty Member)
Category 2: Learning Community Motivation/Goal
Improving practices. Learning communities attract people who are interested in and
committed to improving teaching practices, in order to improve student learning.
Narrative Vignette 3
We see that a small, well-developed, engaged community within the college can enrich the
college, and create safer, more inclusive, more engaging, effective, or exciting learning
experiences for students, which then starts to influence our organizational culture. […]
Small groups of colleagues have found each other around a shared interest, frustration,
conundrum, or vision and they’ve gone about pursuing it together. Along the way, they’ve
needed to do some learning, in order to achieve their goals. (Administrator)
Category 3: Participant Motivations for Joining Learning Community
Belonging, trusted colleagues, group identity. Learning communities create mutually
supportive environments in which members share professional highs and lows. Strong collegial
connections between learning community members lead to more effective professional learning
and development. Learning communities develop a cohesive group identity through common
language and group norms that emerge over time. Learning communities are a site for deeper
connection and a sense of belonging for professionals within a large educational institution.
Narrative Vignette 4
My participation in a learning community has really changed how I feel about working at
the college. I feel more connected and grounded here. There was a time when I questioned
if this college was the right place for me. Now that I’m involved in the learning community,
I feel a great sense of pride being a part of this college. I know I’m where I belong. I wear
my college sweatshirt with pride and I let my students know that. It’s important for all of
us to get involved and to feel connected. (Faculty Member)
Category 4: Unintended Outcomes
Professional development. Although not an initial intention when joining their learning
communities, in hindsight, members recognize their learning community experience served as a
site for professional growth and development. Learning community participation inspires further
professional development pursuits.
New professional identity. Learning community members bring different identities,
perspectives, and practices into their learning community, and, in relationship, influence each
other. Some develop new professional identities, becoming boundary-crossers.
Gain self-confidence. Support staff report gains in self-confidence as a result of
participation in a learning community with faculty members and/or administrators. Learning
communities that include faculty, support staff, educational developers, and administrators are
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) J. A. Mooney
47
breaking down the walls between these employment classifications to build authentic collegial
relationships across differences in expertise and role.
Narrative Vignette 5
I used to find it a little intimidating talking to the Academic Dean or a Professor. That
always made me nervous because my level of education is not what theirs is. I've always
shied away from formal discussions with people in those positions. As we all got to know
each other in the learning community, I came to see that we are just people working on a
project together. I feel genuinely respected by the faculty leaders. I would have been much
more uncomfortable speaking up earlier on; I think I've benefited from participating in the
learning community meetings and being encouraged to contribute my ideas. The learning
community has definitely helped me develop my self-confidence. It’s an important aspect
of the learning community because we’re breaking down the walls between us. (Support
Staff)
Category 5: Constraints and Opportunities
Champions of the work of learning communities. Because the innovative projects of
learning communities push the boundaries and norms of the institution, they need senior leaders
to champion their work in word and deed, through policy, advocacy, practices, and funding.
Narrative Vignette 6
For learning communities to succeed, they need to be initiated from the bottom, they have
to have financial support from the top, and also a clear statement from senior management
saying they believe learning communities are important, and then, eventually, the influence
of the learning communities will move to the middle ranks. It’s got to be both bottom-up
and top-down. (Faculty Member and Educational Developer)
Financial support for learning communities. Learning communities are functioning on
year-to-year funding from a variety of sources including faculty release time from the college,
student success project funding, research grant funds, and project funds from external sources. To
be able to implement multi-year and increasingly complex programs, learning communities need
sustained operational funding.
Connect learning communities to strategic plan. To secure sustained operational
funding, learning communities are working to include the goals and vision of their projects in the
next iteration of the institutional strategic plan.
Discussion of Major Findings
The learning communities in this study emerged as inclusive gatherings of colleagues from across
employment classifications and roles. These diverse colleagues with shared curiosities initiated
the learning communities, which served as sites for professional development for faculty, support
staff, educational developers, and administrators. The data in this interpretive inquiry showed that
Emergent Professional Learning Communities Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
48
once a critical mass of learning communities was established, they organically formed what some
research participants—and Roxä & Märtensson (2015)—refer to as microcultures within the
institution. According to participants in this study, these microcultures then influenced educational
and organizational policies and practices. The diverse experiences shared in the inquiry
conversations of this study led the researcher to understand this collection or network of learning
communities as a complex rhizomatic cluster of connected, non-hierarchical roots and stems
(Lather, 1993) that sprouted throughout the college, transforming the institutional culture from a
primary focus on credential-granting toward a learning organization (Cox, 2001; Senge, 2006).
This study found that the rhizome of learning communities (a) supported faculty and professional
development, (b) promoted educational innovations, and (c) effected organizational change.
Faculty and professional development. Although it was not their main goal, high quality
professional learning was achieved when colleagues in the learning communities were wrapped
up in a complex project that required they learn or build new knowledge together. This LC model
thus resulted in faculty and professional development as a by-product of passionate, project-based,
peer engagement.
Narrative Vignette 7
Sometimes in the learning community meetings we would engage in pretty vigorous
debates, from very different disciplinary perspectives. It took some thinking and re-
thinking, but eventually I started to see that my own perspective was limited; then I found
I was opening myself to a broader view of our role as educators. It helped that when we
got into these oppositional discussions we found ways of laughing at our own narrow
thinking. (Educational Developer)
Recognizing the diverse faculty development needs within the academy, the results of this
study have reinforced the importance of supporting faculty-driven and staff-driven learning
communities as significant sites for professional learning across roles, disciplines, and
departments. Faculty development units may wish to explore how they can participate in and
support the emergence of learning communities within their institutions. While faculty learning
communities, which are exclusive to faculty members, are a fruitful format for faculty
development (Tovar, Jukier, Ferris, & Cardoso, 2015; Cox, 2004), engaging in and supporting the
emergence of professional learning communities opens opportunities for educational developers
and faculty development service units to participate in cross-institutional, integrative approaches
to faculty development.
Educational innovation. Learning communities in this study were powerful sites for
pushing the college in new educational directions, influencing decisions about the allocation of
special project resources and faculty release time funds, and gradually shifting the college culture.
The findings demonstrated that once educators are informed and knowledgeable about scholarly
teaching and high impact pedagogical practices, they feel morally and socially compelled to
implement these practices in support of student learning.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) J. A. Mooney
49
Narrative Vignette 8
It wasn’t as if everyone was starting from zero. One of the things we learned in the
community is that we were already practising some of these scholarly teaching approaches
without realizing it. By exploring these pedagogies in the learning community, we were
deepening our existing practices, acquiring the language to identify what we were doing,
and gaining understanding about the benefits of these approaches for student learning.
(Faculty Member)
Narrative Vignette 9
College should not just be about passing students through courses and issuing diplomas.
Both students and faculty in our learning community are pushing the learning boundaries;
they're not stagnant at all. They're all thinking and learning all the time. I understand
where the attitude comes from, when people treat us like a whimsical pet project, especially
when resources are tight. People don’t want money to be wasted. But we see this as money
being invested into transforming education. And we’re in it for the long haul. (Support
Staff and Faculty Member)
Based on findings from this study, participation in an emergent professional learning
community (PLC) is an effective way for colleagues to develop proficiency and expertise in
scholarly teaching and high impact pedagogies. Emergent PLCs are indeed sites for educational
innovation; that is, emergent PLCs enable the development of new, locally-relevant, scholarly
teaching practices in support of improved student learning experiences. Institutions of higher
education can reasonably expect transformational results from investing in and supporting
emergent PLCs as one avenue towards educational innovation. Benefits beyond educational
innovation, such as cross-institutional collaboration, increased employee sense of belonging, and
increased pride in the institution can also be expected.
Operational Change.
Narrative Vignette 10
I think the college is being challenged to see what kind of institutional change is possible.
I think the inspiration for that discussion to even take place is coming from all the learning
communities. We’ve reached a critical mass of learning communities at the college that
are now speaking loudly enough that the college is noticing what a positive impact learning
communities are having on student learning. Our learning communities are gradually
influencing a shift in the institution and its culture. (Faculty Member)
Narrative Vignette 11
It’s only recently, looking at the network of learning communities that has emerged at the
college, that we are starting to make sense of it all by calling each group a learning
community. Previously, we did not have the kind of paradigmatic structure of the learning
communities to say, “Oh, that’s how we do things.” We started it on a small scale in many
different places, throughout the whole institution. When we look back now, we see at a
Emergent Professional Learning Communities Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
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certain point, there were enough initiatives organizing themselves either consciously or
unconsciously as learning communities, that they shifted the culture of the institution. Now
we’re thinking about innovative initiatives within the framework of learning communities.
(Administrator and Faculty Member)
Through the relationships of trust and the significant conversations (see Narrative
Vignettes 10 and 11; Roxå and Mårtensson, 2009) that occurred in the emergent PLCs in this
study, the educational focus, organizational structures, and culture of the college started to shift.
When they saw the beneficial effects that learning communities were having at the college in terms
of faculty and professional development and educational innovations in support of improved
student learning, senior administrators were inspired to consider re-organizing the college using a
learning communities model. However, this initiative raised a conundrum: How can the college
institutionalize learning communities in order to better support and sustain their functioning
without compromising the strength of the grassroots, self-organizing nature of learning
communities?
For learning communities to emerge and thrive, support from senior administrators is
needed—most especially support for implementing relevant college-wide organizational changes.
The most important changes needed are increased flexibility and responsiveness from operational
systems (e.g., physical space), scheduling, information technology, hiring policies, and funding
cycles. To support the emergence of PLCs, coordination and alignment of service units with
educational (pedagogical) innovation, long-term, sustained financial support, and strategic plans
and policies that recognize and institutionalize emergent PLCs are critical organizational changes.
Flexible, responsive organizational systems will facilitate the development and continuing success
of learning communities.
Conclusion
Learning communities in this study served as sites for professional development, formed
microcultures within the institution, and through a rhizomatic cluster of non-hierarchical
microcultures influenced improvements to educational and organizational policies and practices.
As Cox (2017) reports on the organizational and cultural change agents that emerge from faculty
learning communities, in this interpretive inquiry the rhizome of learning communities
transformed the institutional culture from one focused primarily on credential-granting toward a
genuine learning organization.
Integration of educational development practices within faculty- and staff-initiated
professional learning communities significantly benefits the institution by effectively responding
to the professional development needs of all actors. This cross-institutional, integrative approach,
using a project-based emergent professional learning communities model, opens new pathways for
thinking about and designing faculty development programming. If faculty development aims to
support and celebrate a culture of scholarly teaching and learning across the institution, perhaps
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) J. A. Mooney
51
the one-time teaching strategies workshop and the singular one-on-one consultation approaches to
faculty development are insufficient.
Through this study, I have been compelled to reflect on the influence that a groundswell of
emergent PLCs and their corresponding microcultures can have within an institution. I am drawn
towards faculty development practice that espouses an integrative philosophy. This study has
revealed and reinforced that when colleagues who share a scholarly and/or practitioner curiosity
or challenge come together across roles, disciplines, and divisions, the quality of professional peer-
to-peer learning that occurs has profound and sustained effects on individual professional practices
(Roxå and Mårtensson, 2009). When several of these groups of colleagues emerge within a
postsecondary institution, they have the potential and power to transform the institution’s
professional development, educational, and organizational cultures.
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Appendix A: Thematic Findings by Category
Category Theme
1. The nature of a learning
community
1. Collaboration and co-design
2. Degrees of participation
3. Peer mentoring and exchange or give and take
4. Diversity of participation
5. Interdisciplinary
6. Productive and goal-oriented
7. Share similar values
8. Research or evidence-based
9. Organic emergent process
10. Self-selected participants
11. Sub-culture or microculture
2. Learning community motivations
and goals
12. Improving practices
13. Improving student experience, complementing
classroom learning, or learning as fun
14. Create and provide resources or connection to
information and networks
15. Institutional cultural change
16. Educational change
17. Systems change
18. Phase founding leaders out of key leadership
3. Participant motivations for joining
learning community
19. Interest in topic or process
20. Belonging, having trusted colleagues, or sense of
group identity
4. Unintended outcomes 21. Professional development
22. New professional identity
23. Gain self-confidence
5. Constraints and opportunities 24. Champions of the work of learning communities
25. Financial support to learning communities
26. Teachers as independent or autonomous
27. Connect learning communities to strategic plan
The Journal of Teaching and Learning
Vol. 12, No. 2 (December 2018), pp. 54–69
http://dx.doi.org/10.22329/jtl.v12i2.5105
54
The Effects of Holistic Diagnostic Feedback Intervention on
Improving Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills
Dr. Edith H. van der Boom
University of Toronto
Dr. Eunice Eunhee Jang
University of Toronto
Abstract
The present study examined ways in which young readers respond to customized
diagnostic feedback interventions. Individualized feedback and intervention
support were provided to six junior elementary students whose profiles were
developed based on multiple data sources which considered students’ interests,
learning preferences, and reading readiness levels. A multiple case study
approach was applied to examine how each of the students uniquely responded
to the diagnostic feedback intervention. The study findings show that providing
students with individualized feedback that is skill-based and provides strategies
to target chosen areas gives them a far greater understanding of their strengths
and weaknesses and how to best target these areas over simply providing an
achievement level. Assessment which informs students’ current skills of reading
comprehension can support students’ learning. Intervention that moves between
teacher and student allows for the adjustment of students’ cognitive and
metacognitive processes. Providing students with skills and strategies through
feedback allows them to increase their self-regulation and motivation to learn.
Introduction
The purpose of the present study was to investigate junior elementary school students’ reading
skill profiles through cognitive diagnostic assessment and further to examine the potential of
diagnostic feedback intervention for struggling readers. We focused on junior elementary school
students because it is during this pivotal period that students have moved from learning to read to
reading to learn (Best, Floyd, & McNamara, 2008; Jitendra, Burgess, & Gajria, 2011). More
importantly, academic achievement gaps among students begin to grow during this period whereas
their level of literacy engagement tends to decline (Eccles, 1993; Pressley, 2002). There is an
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) E. H. van der Boom & E. E. Jang
55
increasing need to identify students who struggle with reading comprehension skills and provide
them with a more targeted intervention.
Understanding individual students’ strengths and weaknesses in reading comprehension
skills requires detailed diagnostic information beyond interpretations based on aggregated total
test scores. Cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) aims to fill this gap by combining the cognitive
psychology of learning with advanced statistical scoring methods to provide dependable diagnostic
skill profiles (Embretson, 1998; Jang, 2005, 2007; Leighton & Gierl, 2007a, 2007b; Nichols, 1994;
Pellegrino & Chudowsky, 2003). Research shows that when students are given feedback, they
become motivated (Black & Wiliam, 1998); however, little research offers insight into how
students with different profiles respond to diagnostic feedback intervention.
The present study was the second phase of large-scale research project. The first phase of
this study looked at how cognitive diagnosis modeling could be used to characterize the literacy
skill mastery profiles of over 120,000 Grade 6 students in Ontario public schools (Jang, Dunlop,
Wagner, Kim, & Gu, 2013). The purpose of the second phase was to examine ways in which
students respond to diagnostic feedback generated from their reading skills profiles and further the
extent to which their psychological attributes (e.g., goal orientation, perceived ability) mediate
their responses to the feedback (see Jang, Dunlop, Park, & van der Boom, 2015). The present paper
pays attention to six struggling readers who received seven diagnostic feedback intervention
sessions over eight weeks. Specifically, by taking a multiple case study approach, this paper is
intended to provide thick descriptions about how individual struggling readers uniquely respond
to diagnostic feedback intervention. The present study was guided by the following research
questions:
1. How does diagnostic feedback inform students in setting and monitoring learning
goals?
2. How does intervention bring about changes in ways in which students’ approach
learning tasks?
3. How does the use of diagnostic feedback together with intervention direct students to
self-assess their own reading ability?
Literature Review
Reading Struggles in Junior Elementary School Years
Successful academic performance relies heavily on a student’s ability to not only decode
but to be able to comprehend what they are reading (Eason & Cutting, 2009). As students progress
to higher grades in school, some students face challenges in comprehending increasingly complex
academic text with abstract vocabulary (Cirino et al., 2013). Reading comprehension is a
multifaceted undertaking that requires one to use many different cognitive processes that are both
automatic and strategic (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004). For example, readers may operate
multiple cognitive skills, such as finding the main idea, identifying important supporting details,
making predictions, drawing inferences, and summarizing information (Jitendra et al., 2011).
Improving Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
56
Since students who struggle with reading comprehension may or may not have difficulty with all
of these skills, it is important to understand what kind of challenges they experience and what kind
of support they need (van den Broek, White, Kendeou, & Carlson, 2009). Besides the ability to
decode words, reading requires the continuous monitoring of comprehension of increasingly
complex academic text, and self-regulation of reading strategies to meet the reading goals set out
(Alexander & Jetton, 2000).
Effective reading comprehension for young adolescents also requires the development of
the metacognitive ability to monitor and self-regulate their comprehension processes (Pazzaglia,
De Beni, & Cacciò, 1999). The monitoring of reading comprehension is essential for the reader to
be able to both plan and evaluate the information that is available to them such that they can make
sense of what they are reading (Kolić-Vehovec & Bajšanski, 2006). Young readers tend to have
difficulty self-identifying inconsistencies in their text comprehension (Kolić-Vehovec &
Bajšanski, 2006) and yet regardless, less proficient young readers tend to overestimate their
reading ability (Anderson & Beal, 1995; Jang et al., 2016; Zabrucky & Ratner, 1986). During
adolescence years the correlation between students perceived use of reading strategies and their
actual comprehension increases (Kolić-Vehovec & Bajšanski, 2006).
Goal Orientation
Along with students’ metacognitive ability to self-regulate their own reading
comprehension processes, their orientations to learning and reading influence how they approach
reading text. According to Dweck’s (1986) goal orientation theory, learners with a mastery goal
orientation tend to enjoy tasks that are challenging and strive to enhance their knowledge and skills
with a focus on understanding. These learners are interested in improving their own knowledge
and skills and tend to compare their achievement with their own prior achievement. They are open
to constructive feedback that helps them make gains in their learning. When reading tasks fail to
challenge mastery-oriented readers, these students may lose interest in the tasks. On the other hand,
learners with a performance-prove goal orientation focus on how they demonstrate their ability
compared to others. They like to demonstrate their competence to others and tend to use others to
compare themselves to. These performance-prove readers can be academically as successful as
mastery-oriented students; however, when tasks have high stakes and are too challenging, they
may not persist as well as expected. Meanwhile, learners with a performance-avoid orientation
avoid learning tasks due to their concern about failure. These students tend to mask their emotional
anxiety and frustration resulting from reading difficult text with boredom and disengagement.
Students of each orientation may share equal ability, but they show significant differences in
response to challenging reading tasks and diagnostic interventions. Effective diagnostic
interventions require a deep understanding of individual students’ orientations to reading as well
as their cognitive and metacognitive capabilities.
Diagnostic Feedback-Mediated Interventions
Feedback is described by Winne and Butler (1994) as “information with which a learner
can confirm, add to, and overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) E. H. van der Boom & E. E. Jang
57
information is domain knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or
cognitive tactics and strategies” (p. 5740). Previous research on feedback has been predominantly
focused on feedback type and feedback delivery mode (Jang, 2014). Further, feedback also tended
to be treated as a fixed stimulus to which learners respond uniformly (Ferris, 2003). Evaluative
feedback in the form of a mark, comment, or object (e.g., ‘good,’ ‘perfect,’ stickers, smiley face)
is still commonly found in students’ workbooks despite their detrimental effects on the
development of students’ intrinsic motivation (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Chappuis & Stiggins,
2002). The purpose of feedback needs to focus on having students become more committed,
responsible and effective learners by engaging in metacognitive strategies that support self-
regulated learning such as goal setting, monitoring, and reflection (Afflerbach, 2016; Black &
Jones, 2006).
Dialogue between teacher and student needs to include “questioning, answering, adjusting,
listening, demonstrating, observing, imitating, criticizing—all are chained together so that one
intervention or response can trigger or build on another” (Schön, 1987, p. 114). Feedback that
offers scaffolding through mediated interventions provides a student with the answers of the how
or why of learning (Clark, 2012). This notion of mediation, which is well recognized by dynamic
assessment (Kozulin & Garb, 2004; Lantolf & Poehner, 2004), stresses the importance of
interactions between an assessor and a learner. Wang (2011) notes that “with consolidated teaching
activities and assessment, learners can achieve better learning by interacting with teachers. During
dynamic assessment, teachers can help learners improve learning effectiveness by providing them
with support” (p. 1063).
Dynamically-mediated assessment through diagnostic feedback may well serve the needs
of struggling readers, as its main feature is the emergence of cognitive functions through
collaborative interaction (Kozulin & Garb, 2004; Lantolf & Poehner, 2004). Teachers can help
learners improve learning effectiveness by providing them with support (Wang, 2011). Student-
teacher reading conferences are shown to elicit more authentic student responses, address student
needs better, and provide deeper conversation about what has been read (Porath, 2014).
Furthermore, Kletxien and Bednar (1990) report that oral feedback in dynamic assessment can
benefit struggling readers as it helps them become more confident and responsible for their own
learning. Zimmerman (2000) identifies three phases of self-regulated learning (SRL): the first is
the planning phase in which learners analyze tasks, set goals, and plan behaviors; the second phase
is the performance phase in which learners control and monitor their behaviors, emotions, and
motivation; and the third phase is the evaluation phase in which learners self-reflect based on
feedback, which can further support students to use self-regulatory strategies to internalize external
feedback (Bandura, 1986; Black & Wiliam, 2009; Irving, 2007). Diagnostic feedback delivered
through mediated interventions may help learners focus their efforts on goal-driven learning
(Ames, 1992). To our knowledge, there is little research on how young readers struggling with
reading comprehension respond to diagnostic feedback mediated through interventions. The
present study was intended to fill in this gap by seeking rich accounts of young readers’ responses
to diagnostic feedback.
Improving Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
58
Method
Measures
Reading achievement assessment. The reading achievement assessment included 32
multiple-choice reading questions based on five separate passages. The measure had been used in
a larger-scale study (Jang, Dunlop, Wagner, Kim, & Gu, 2013) that profiled over 120,000 Grade
6 students in Ontario schools. The following six literacy skills were identified and used to develop
diagnostic feedback student reports: (a) comprehending the details of the text, (b) understanding
the purpose of the text, (c) making predictions, (d) using English grammar properly, (e) using
vocabulary properly, and (f) summarizing. Reading skill profiles were developed based on the
conjunctive Reparameterized Unified Model (Jang, 2005; Roussos et al., 2007) which was retro-
fit to the Ontario provincial literacy assessment data in Phase 1. Forty-four students, including six
intervention participants, received holistic diagnostic reading profile reports.
Diagnostic reading profile report. A report was created for each individual student. As
shown in Figure 1, the mastery status of each skill was presented using a bar graph for each of the
six literacy skills assessed. There was no numerical score in the students’ reports. A walking man
figure was used to indicate the level of skill mastery determined through the application of CDA,
and a smiling face figure was used to indicate the student’s self-assessment of the same skill. The
blue portion of the bars indicated how much of the Grade 6 curriculum the student had learned.
The red portion of the bar indicated how much Grade 6 curriculum they still needed to learn. Below
each graph, students were given a list of things they would be able to do if they had fully mastered
this skill. Students were given the opportunity to provide a written reflection of what they thought
about this information. The report also included information about students’ goal orientations as
well as a learning contract that prompted them to plan for future learning.
Self-assessment questionnaire. The self-assessment questionnaire asked students to self-
assess the mastery of six reading skills measured in the reading achievement assessment. The
questionnaire was comprised of 12 items (2 items per skill) with a 5-point Likert scale (1=not at
all true, 5=very true). The questionnaire was administered twice, before and after the intervention.
Goal orientation questionnaire. A goal orientation questionnaire was constructed based
on three factors: performance-prove, performance-avoid, and mastery (Dweck, 1986; Midgley et
al., 2000). Our goal orientation (GO) questionnaire surveyed students’ orientations as well as their
perceptions about their parents’ and teacher’s goal orientations. We modified subscales from
Midgley et al.’s (2000) Pattern of Adaptive Learning Scales (PALS) so that the GO items were
appropriate for young children. The questionnaire had a total of 29 items measuring students’ own
goal orientations and their perceived parents’ and teachers’ goal orientations.
Data Collection
Forty-four students in the second phase of the study completed all the measures listed
above. They also received diagnostic reading profile reports. The students’ reading skill profiles
were constructed based on the application of a cognitive diagnostic model to provincial reading
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) E. H. van der Boom & E. E. Jang
59
I can make connections when I read text
In general, with the mastery of this skill students are able to:
• Predict what will happen next based on the evidence in a story
• Relate what they read to other stories, authors, or events
• Connect what they read to their own experience
• Draw appropriate conclusions after they read
What do you think of your achievement of this skill? Please share your thoughts by writing
them below.
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
Figure 1: A sample section from the reading skill mastery report.
assessment data. Each individual student’s reading skill profile contained the posterior probability
of mastery (PPM) for each of the six skills. We also created students’ perceived ability profiles
from their responses to the self-assessment questionnaire. Discrepancy scores were calculated by
subtracting the perceived skill mastery score from its PPM estimate. The profiles also included
students’ goal orientation profiles based on their responses to the goal orientation questionnaire.
Factor scores associated with mastery, performance-prove and performance-avoid orientations
from the application of exploratory factor analysis to a larger data set that included an additional
group of Grade 6 students (n=92). Based on composite profiles that included skill mastery,
perceived ability, and goal orientations, we recruited six students whose profiles showed weak
skill mastery levels, performance orientations, and tendency to overestimate own ability.
Study Participants
Six students were selected from the group of 44 students who participated in phase two of
the study based on the results of the literacy assessment, self-assessed ability level, and mastery
skill profile. As shown in Table 1, students selected for intervention tended to not master any of
Improving Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
60
the six skills, overestimated their skill proficiency, and had a mastery and performance-prove goal
orientation. Pseudonyms have been used to represent each student.
Table 1
Students’ Pre-Intervention Profiles
Student Skill mastery Estimation of skill
proficiencies
Goal orientation
Erik no skills mastered overestimated mastery
Ken no skills mastered overestimated performance-
prove
Raymond no skills mastered overestimated performance-prove
and mastery
Rose no skills mastered overestimated mastery
Seth mastered implicit
understanding
overestimated performance-prove
Stewart mastered explicit
understanding, implicit
understanding, making
inferences, and grammar
underestimated mastery and
performance-avoid
These students were withdrawn from class for approximately half an hour for a total of
seven sessions. The researcher for these sessions had 28 years of experience teaching in both the
regular classroom and in special education settings. Each session provided an opportunity for
students to consider their learning profile, set learning goals, choose and practice reading strategies
meant to help them meet their goals, and then reflect on their learning. Throughout the sessions,
mediation was provided for students to work on specific reading skills they identified as goals,
monitor their progress by revisiting their goals, and self-assess their reading skills. We created a
pool of graded reading passages and a set of reading comprehension questions associated with
each passage for the intervention. Each student chose a passage of interest and worked on the text
and the associated questions over two sessions. All sessions were audio-taped and later transcribed
for further analysis.
Data Analysis
A multiple case study approach was applied to examine how each of the students uniquely
responded to the diagnostic feedback intervention. Qualitative data analysis was done by reading
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) E. H. van der Boom & E. E. Jang
61
through the transcribed audio recordings of each session. Each transcript was analyzed, and
common themes were identified. Specifically, research questions were considered for each
participant and results shared through narratives of individual students’ unique responses to the
intervention.
Results
How Does Diagnostic Feedback Inform Students in Setting and Monitoring Learning Goals?
The connections that the students made with the diagnostic reports proved to be essential
in this study. The reports provided individualized information about each students’ strengths and
areas of need such that the students set appropriate goals that they could successfully achieve.
Although the reading reports given to students focused on achievement of skills and not marks,
some students focused on the marks rather than the skills. For example, when given the diagnostic
report, Erik commented that he was surprised by his marks in explicit understanding, implicit
understanding, inferencing, and grammar. He expressed that they did not reflect his ability.
However, his low achievement in vocabulary and summarizing were not surprising to him as he
confirmed that he struggled with these skills. Other students focused on the next steps in their
learning as they focused on the skills they needed to improve. Rose for example, often commented
how she appreciated the feedback in the report as it helped her know what to focus on in the
upcoming year.
Overall, the responses given by students about their reports were ones of surprise. For the
most part, students were surprised at how poorly they had done in their achievement of each skill.
Specifying skills that are needed for reading comprehension made them more aware of what to
focus on when setting learning goals for themselves. In response to the diagnostic report, students
were also asked to comment on their goal orientation and what skills they wanted to work on in
the upcoming weeks. All students were in agreement with their goal orientation as stated in their
reports. They acknowledged that they enjoyed learning. When asked which skills they wanted to
work on in the next few weeks, all students identified summarizing, vocabulary, and/or grammar.
Students found success in meeting their goals and they gained confidence in their abilities.
During the final intervention session, students were asked if setting goals based on their
report was helpful. Their responses indicated that they used the goals to improve their skills and
thereby achieve the goals they set out for themselves. For example, Erik shared, “ummm, well I
used those goals to achieve it, and…umm…I was working through it and I got better at them.”
Rose expressed her growth in the area of grammar and using paragraphs:
Well, when I said proper grammar and now I am like you know, learning better even though
we are not doing grammar at the moment in our classes but when we have to do
assignments so I am looking over my work for grammar. Umm, well also now when I am
doing assignments, I know when to put paragraphs. When subject changes you need to put
a new paragraph.
Improving Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
62
Ken said that seeing his goals during the school day helped him stay focused on working towards
them. He shared that he kept his goals at the front of his binder where he would see them
throughout the day. This visual encouraged him to work towards the goals he had set out for
himself. Seth expressed that creating goals for himself helped him become a better learner. He
shared, “I wrote the goals that I want to work on and I became better in what I want to do. They
were helpful.” Seth also talked about asking his mom to help him meet his goals when he was
working at home: “and then like when I after that I go home like I try to put goals in about what I
understand in class and then like my mom could help me do action plans.”
After completing the literacy assessment, it was the feedback, through the use of the
reading skill profiles, that provided learners with positive aspects and areas of improvement in
their understanding of performance. The reading skill profiles generated from cognitive diagnostic
modeling served as feedback to provide learners with information that helped them reflect on their
learning in order to create learning goals and take action to meet those goals.
How Does Intervention Bring About Changes in Ways in Which Students’ Approach Learning
Tasks?
The study results showed differing degrees of growth among all the students who
participated. Overall, students expressed more confidence in the tasks at hand as they implemented
learning strategies that they had found effective. Students became more aware of how their efforts
positively led to their learning outcomes. Seth, who had a performance goal orientation commented
that the intervention sessions helped him listen more carefully in class: “I didn’t like quite like
listen a lot in class but now I do so most of the time.” When asked if he was worried about getting
the right answer during intervention sessions, he showed mastery goal orientation tendencies when
he commented that he would have learned from the process of looking for the correct answer. Ken
showed signs of moving from a performance goal orientation to a mastery goal orientation during
intervention sessions but continued to work with the performance goal orientation in his classroom.
He worried about getting the correct answer but noticed during the intervention sessions that that
was not the focus of the sessions. When asked if he was concerned about getting answers correct
in class he responded, “I kind of do because it kind of counts for my mark and they could maybe
hold me back another year…so I try to, I try to do it, I try really hard to get the right answers.”
During the intervention sessions Ken felt that he could focus on learning and not worry about
getting good marks.
The intervention brought about some changes in how students approach learning tasks. At
the end of the intervention sessions there were signs of a mastery goal orientation from some of
the students. Stewart shared: “because I know that I am just learning, it’s okay to make mistakes.”
However, there were also signs of students who continued to focus on a performance orientation.
For example, Erik shared: “I want to get a good mark.” Rose’s remarks showed that it was
confidence that helped her move from a performance orientation to a mastery orientation.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) E. H. van der Boom & E. E. Jang
63
Researcher: When we did the questions and read those stories together were you ever worried
about getting the wrong answer?
Rose: Yeah. (giggle)
Researcher: Tell me about that.
Rose: I didn’t know, like if there was a right or wrong answer, and I like maybe wanted to get good
mark. Yeah.
Researcher: Okay, so you were concerned about the mark. And did you continue to worry about
getting the answers right or wrong as we worked together?
Rose: No.
Researcher: Okay, what changed?
Rose: Umm, I got better and better and I felt more confident.
Overall, the findings in this study showed that students with a performance-prove goal
orientation became more confident in their skills and became more mastery goal-orientated in this
study. Students with a mastery goal orientation, sustained their orientation throughout the
intervention sessions. The students who had mastery goal orientations commented that they got
better at the skills they were working on and were more confident as learners.
How Does the Use of Diagnostic Feedback Together with Intervention Direct Students to Self-
Regulate Their Own Reading Ability?
As part of our cognitive feedback interventions, students were encouraged to think about
their own engagement and effort during learning sessions. Students were reminded to use learning
strategies (e.g., rereading sections of the passage, clarifying what the question was asking, etc.)
throughout the sessions. Providing students with a regular opportunity to practice reflecting on
their own learning encouraged them to better understand their own strengths and areas of need and
ideally lead them to become better learners.
The study results further indicate the improvement of students’ self-regulating ability. The
students commented that they were reading the questions more carefully. For example, Stewart
shared that he was using the strategies he was taught to read more carefully.
Researcher: Do you think you are a better learner now than you were when we first started working
together?
Stewart: Mmm, yeah, I think I am.
Researcher: Why? How so?
Stewart: Well because I have been using…umm, like some of the strategies. I have been…umm,
I have been reading the ans…the questions more carefully.
Erik also commented that he was able to understand passages easier because he was reading more
carefully.
Some students found it helpful to work together in a small group and described the
experience as fun. They felt it was useful to hear others’ perspectives during the session. For
example, Raymond shared: “if I work with a lot of people it would be also good for me to get more
Improving Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
64
ideas how…uh other people think beside me.” Seth felt that it moved things along faster and more
interesting.
Towards the end of the intervention sessions, students were asked to redo the self-
assessment questionnaire that they had filled out during the initial assessment period. Their scores
showed that they had changed their view of themselves as learners over the 6 months that had
passed since they first filled out this questionnaire. This can be understood as evidence of their
attention to their own ability with more care. The intervention sessions helped students to better
self-regulate their literacy skills in terms of both their strengths and areas of weakness. Students’
self-assessment scores prior to the intervention session and after the intervention session differed
for each student. For example, Erik showed greater variance showing that he was putting more
thought into assessing his skills (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Erik’s self-assessment of skills before and after intervention sessions.
Ken and Raymond were more accurate with their scores, as they felt comfortable giving
themselves lower scores in areas that they continued to struggle with and higher scores in areas
that they felt they had made progress in. Stewart rated himself as “not having thought about it” for
his inferencing skills in the pre-assessment. In the post-assessment, he scored himself in each
category and gained significantly more confidence in his vocabulary skills. Seth and Rose showed
more confidence in a number of skill areas, but saw that inferencing was more challenging still.
These study results illustrate that reading skill profiles provided specific guidance to learners for
further improvement and facilitated students’ self-regulation skills as it prompted them to create
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
4.5
Grammar Summary Implicit Explicit Inference Vocabulary
Ra
tin
g
Skills
Erik Before Erik After
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) E. H. van der Boom & E. E. Jang
65
learning goals that were focused on correcting conceptual errors and cognitive gaps. In this way,
learners were not simply responding to external feedback, but that they could filter the external
feedback given through the perceptions of their own abilities and learning orientations. Students
became more independent in their focus of the goals they set for themselves and the learning
strategies they were taught and were encouraged to use.
Discussion
Research on assessment claims that the information gathered from students’ assessment
performance can do more than just demonstrate student learning for accountability; it can actually
assist students improve their learning (Nichols, Meyers, & Burling, 2009). The main goal of
traditional education tests, however, is to compare an individual’s general ability to that of others
in the same normative group (Brown & Hudson, 2002). These types of tests lack the diagnostic
information that is necessary to inform students of both strengths and areas for improvement within
a specific academic area (Nichols, 1994). For assessment to be formative, it must produce evidence
of a gap between one’s actual and desired level of performance and should suggest steps needed
to close that gap (Wiliam & Black, 1996). There is a need to attend to struggling readers’ cognitive
and metacognitive strategy use. The purpose of this study was to examine how students respond
to mediated interventions when given diagnostic feedback.
Research has shown that diagnostic feedback has the potential to be more effective when
it gives students information about the progress they have made towards the goals they have set
for themselves (Jang & Wagner, 2014). “Diagnostic feedback provides learners with information
that can help them reflect on their learning in order to take remedial action” (Jang & Wagner, 2014,
p. 2). When students work towards goals that are both personally challenging and meaningful, they
are motivated be self-regulated learners (Butler & Winne, 1995; Hattie & Timperley, 2007). This
study provided students with an opportunity to set goals based on the diagnostic feedback they
received, apply effective learning strategies, and make gains in both their learning and skills as a
learner.
Diagnostic feedback was designed to support teaching and learning on a continuous basis
through student researcher collaboration. Students were encouraged to think about and monitor
their own learning as a means to improve their reading skills. When students were provided with
diagnostic feedback, they were better equipped to regulate metacognition, which in turn helped
them persist in learning tasks (Zimmerman, 2000; Black & Wiliam, 2009). Stiggins (2002) states
that “students come to understand what it means to be in charge of their own learning—to monitor
their own success and make decisions that bring greater success. This is the foundation of lifelong
learning” (p. 764).
In the present study, students were provided with diagnostic feedback that directs students’
attention to their reading skill mastery levels as well as goal orientations. Subsequent interventions
focused on supporting students’ ability to plan, monitor, and self-reflect on their learning through
one-to-one interactions. The present study results indicate that students can benefit from
interventions targeting not only literacy knowledge and skills but also metacognition and self-
Improving Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2)
66
regulation (Harrison, Bunford, Evans, & Owens, 2013). Systematic diagnostic assessment can
provide detailed profiles of individual students’ strengths and weaknesses, which needs to be
subsequently used to provide customized interventions for students who struggle not only with
reading abilities but also who lack metacognitive and self-regulating abilities. Such diagnostic
profiles can guide teachers to offer individualized instructional strategies with different scaffolding
approaches (Stanford, Crowe, & Flice, 2010).
Conclusion
The importance of assessment that informs not only the teacher but also the learner is significant
to student engagement and learning (Black & Wiliam, 2009, 2011; Wiliam, 2011; Stiggins, 2007).
Based on the diagnostic intervention provided in this study, implications and recommendations
are proposed. It was found that diagnostic feedback intervention can be beneficial for students who
struggle with reading comprehension. While current assessment practice tends to measure a
student’s overall reading ability, it does not provide specific information about the skills needed
for reading comprehension. This information is not helpful from a pedagogical stand point.
Providing students with individualized feedback that is skill-based and provides strategies to target
chosen areas gives students a far greater understanding of their strengths and areas of need and
how to best target these areas.
Assessment should cognitively engage students. By giving students the opportunity to
implement learning strategies through individualized feedback and intervention, students can
experience increased self-regulation and motivation to learn. Assessment also needs to provide a
clear understanding of a student’s current skills and then adapt the intervention to best support
student’s learning progress. Assessment needs to constantly negotiate the intensity of intervention
while factoring in metacognitive traits to guide students in becoming self-regulated learners.
Finally, intervention must be dynamic, adjusting to student’s cognitive and metacognitive
processes. It should not be static but rather move between teacher and student and continuously
negotiate the scaffolding strategies needed to support student’s learning.
The paper reports a study that involved a small number of students. Further, the length of
intervention (20 minutes per session with a total of seven sessions) may not have been sufficient
for all students to achieve their desired levels of achievement. Although the length of intervention
is relatively short, however, this 20-minute intervention is similar to what teachers would spend to
work with a small group of students or an individual student on specific skills. Although changes
in their learning were observed in this study, more intervention sessions would have made the
results of this study more significant. Lastly, post-intervention assessments (immediate and
delayed assessments) would have provided empirical evidence for evaluating the effects of the
intervention on students’ target skills and other psychological traits. We call for more research that
involves a larger group of students whose profiles represent unique challenges and tracks their
growth over time longitudinally.
In order to better understand the effect of diagnostic feedback, it is important to recognize
how students interact with it. The way students think about learning and their part in it through
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) E. H. van der Boom & E. E. Jang
67
goal orientation and SRL are factors that play a part in understanding how they process diagnostic
feedback. However, as shown in this study, the use of diagnostic feedback in intervention benefits
all. Empowering students through intervention encourages them to take ownership of their own
learning and work towards goals that will carry them forward in life.
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the
Insight Program (No. 486987). Paper presented in April 2016 to the conference of Canadian Society for the
Studies of Education (CSSE) in Calgary, AB, Canada.
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The Journal of Teaching and Learning
Vol. 12, No. 2 (December 2018), pp. 70–73.
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Book Review:
Transforming Conversations: Feminism and Education in
Canada since 1970
by Dawn Wallin and Janice Wallace (Eds.)
Montreal, Quebec, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018, 281 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7735-5357-6 (paperback)
Reviewed by:
Jillian Authier, OCT
Greater Essex County District School Board
Feminism has a lengthy and complex past in Canada. The work of first and second wave feminism
can be attributed to many of the gains Canadian women have made politically, socially,
professionally, and economically in the last century. Today, feminism continues to evolve. In an
era when the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, openly declares himself a feminist (Wallin
& Wallace, 2018), the term is both commonplace, and yet, still divisive. Feminism today often
includes the lens of intersectionality and the ways in which race, gender, class, sexual-orientation,
able-ness and ethnicity need to be considered when discussing the experiences of all women.
In the book, Transforming Conversations: Feminism and Education in Canada since 1970,
Dawn Wallin and Janice Wallace co-edit a collection of essays to look at the role feminism has
played, and continues to play, in Canadian education. Wallin and Wallace themselves are both
well-versed in the lived experiences of feminism and academia. Wallace is professor emerita at
the Faculty of Education in the University of Alberta and Janice Wallace is a professor and an
associate dean in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan. Together, they take
on the daunting task of trying to answer what they identify as their core question of the book:
“What effect, if any, has feminism had on Canadian education since the Royal Commission on the
Status of Women, and to what end?” (Wallin & Wallace, 2018, p.10). Wallin and Wallace also
state that their hope for this book is that it allows readers to look back on how feminism has helped
shape our education system as it exists now, while prompting conversations about the ways
feminism can shape future avenues in education.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) – December 2018 Authier
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Wallin and Wallace are upfront in stating the near impossibility of addressing all areas of
feminism and all feminist theories in one book. Indeed, the introduction spends a great deal of time
outlining what the book is not and recognizing the potential shortcomings in not being able to
include all voices from all feminist theories. They state, “we recognize that it is impossible to
present a fully encompassing text on the influence of feminism in Canadian education. Rather, we
view this book as an invitation to a critical conversation that continues” (Wallin & Wallace, 2018,
p. 10). Remarkably, Wallin and Wallace are able to curate a collection of essays that include
perspectives from women who have been doing the work for decades at various levels of the
education system. They weave these narratives into a book that is both honest and poignant about
feminism’s impact on Canadian education.
Transforming Conversations: Feminism and Education in Canada since 1970 is broken
down into three parts. Each part contains a collection of essays from other feminist scholars and
activists that speak to various ways feminism has impacted and influenced their lives and the field
of education. Part One, entitled “Discourses of Teaching: Speaking Up,” examines the historical
impact feminism had in the classrooms and lives of feminist educators in the elementary and
secondary school systems. Part Two, “Discourses of Leadership: Speaking Out,” examines how
feminists in academia have impacted the post-secondary academic environment through their
work, values, and research. Part Three, “Disrupting Discourses: Speaking Back to Feminism,”
investigates postmodern, postcolonial feminism, the role of intersectional feminism to address
issues faced by all women, not just white, middle-class, heterosexual women who largely benefited
from first and second wave feminism. The essays that Wallace and Wallin have collected in this
book represent the experiences of eight women, in addition to themselves. Included in some of the
essays is the use of oral interviews, which lend voice to the experiences of additional women who
have worked in education and the struggles they have faced in searching for equality while
navigating patriarchal systems, including education. Several authors use autoethnographic
accounts throughout their essays, which helps the reader connect to the personal and professional
experiences of the author.
The essays in this book provide clear examples to demonstrate that feminism has indeed
impacted education in Canada since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which is the
guiding question of this book. For example, Rose Fine-Meyer (2018) highlights in her essay,
“Pedagogical Change to Curriculum in Toronto Schools” how teachers altered and supplemented
curriculum to include more feminist perspectives and women’s experiences and the impact this
had overtime on the curriculum. As well, in Jean Hewitt’s (2018) essay, “Feminist Influence on
Ontario Schools” she concludes by stating that, “The impact of feminism on practices and policies
within the Ontario school system from 1960 to 1985 was substantial” (p.83). Wallin and Wallace
find a balance in the essays they present to provide the reader with an understanding that despite
the gains made through feminism, educational systems in Canada have also struggled to embrace
these changes.
In conclusion, Wallin and Wallace are successfully able to assemble a collection of essays
that provide insight into their core question about the effect that feminism has had on Canadian
education since the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. Readers will come to
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72
understand the varying, and sometimes nuanced ways, that feminism has impacted Canadian
education, while also recognizing the continued work that needs to be done. Further, the authors’
invitation for readers to view this book as a stepping stone to continue the critical conversations
about feminism in education is well received. In particular, readers may find themselves reflecting
on how feminism has impacted and benefited their education, or how feminism has failed to
include their voice and experience in education thus far.
References
Fine-Meyer, R. (2018). Pedagogical change to curriculum in Toronto schools. In D. Wallin & J. Wallace,
(Eds.), Transforming Conversations: Feminism and Education in Canada since 1970 (pp. 42-70).
Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Hewitt, J. (2018). Feminist influence on Ontario schools. In D. Wallin & J. Wallace, (Eds.), Transforming
Conversations: Feminism and Education in Canada since 1970 (pp. 71-90). Montreal, QC: McGill-
Queen’s University Press.
Wallin, D., & Wallace, J. (Eds.). (2018). Transforming conversations: Feminism and education in
Canada since 1970. Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
The Journal of Teaching and Learning
Vol. 12, No. 2 (December 2018), pp. 74–77.
https://jtl.uwindsor.ca
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Book Review:
Making Men, Making History:
Canadian Masculinities across Time and Place
by Peter Gossage and Robert Rutherdale (Eds.)
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: UBC Press, 2018, 454 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7748-3563-3 (hardcover)
Reviewed by:
Alethea Cassano
University of Windsor
Making Men, Making History: Canadian Masculinities across Time and Place situates the study
of masculinities within the Canadian cultural context. Through a carefully-selected collection of
essays, Gossage and Rutherdale open a vista onto the Canadian landscape. This vista is made all
the richer by its range, as the collection draws on a divergence of both time and place in order to
address gendered constructs. Beyond these temporal and geographical glimpses, the anthology is
divided into six sections: expertise and authority, masculine spaces, performing masculinities,
boys to men, men in motion, and faces of fatherhood. What may on first glance seem an arbitrary
structuring, the collection takes on the tones of a symphonic arrangement, enticing the reader to
listen for those notes that strike a relevant chord within one’s own understanding of gender within
Canada. Ultimately, of course, it invites researchers to sound those chords that are the most
intriguing and relevant to their own research. The anthology offers an orchestration of complex
and far-ranging variations on the theme of manhood, and it is in this variety and richness that one
finds a book which lends a compelling contribution to the field of masculinities.
The high-interest content of this volume renders it just as relevant and accessible to the
casual reader as to the historian or scholar. This anthology can easily be imagined as a core text in
a course offered within gender studies, Canadian history, or more specifically, the history of
masculinities. Masculinities is in itself a relatively recent category of historical research and the
attempt to plant its seeds on Canadian soil has, through this anthology, been both fruitful, and one
would imagine, quite sustainable. From the middle-class men of the Edmonton packinghouses
(1947-1966), to the dynamics of the gay bars of Montreal, the book leads the reader through a
Book Review: Making Men, Making History Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) – December 2018
74
historical portal to the past. Whether it is examining the eco-masculinity of the Canadian seal hunt,
or the lives of the blue-collar boys who grew up on the periphery of Motown, or even the eternally
boyish masculine ideal embodied by our national hero, Terry Fox, this anthology binds these men
together into an eclectic and complicated brotherhood. In so doing, it weaves an intricate and multi-
tonal tapestry of masculinity as diverse and sometimes fraught as the history, culture and landscape
of Canada itself.
The book begins with an introduction which acknowledges that while the conversation
surrounding Canadian manhood and masculinity is not new, this anthology seeks to offer
directions for further study by providing a thematic framework to the conversation. The volume
stops just shy of explicating these themes, and the summaries before each section tend towards the
descriptive rather than providing an exegesis. In the afterword, drawing heavily on musical
metaphors, the editors thoughtfully reflect on the “harmonic variations” of the themes that each
section elicits. The editors also trace some of the seminal critics’ contributions to the study of
masculinities, such as Raewyn Connell’s (by way of Gramsci) hegemonic masculinity, John
Tosh’s contributions on the Victorian family and masculinity, and Robert Griswold’s work on the
history of fatherhood.
Further to this, each essay itself provides a portal into each time and place. Such glimpses,
while interesting in and of themselves, simultaneously underscore the complexity of gender
studies. For instance, Chapter 3, entitled, The Spiritual Aspect: Gordon A. Friesen and the
Mechanization of the Modern Hospital addresses the undertaking of re-structuring and de-
centralizing the working space of the nurse so that she (and it was most often she in the days of
Friesen’s hospital-planning firm, 1954-1976) can spend more time with the patient. While on the
one hand, this attempt to elevate the nurse’s status may be seen as liberating, the Friesen concept
of the nurse as the “low man on the totem pole” (Theodore, 2018, p. 73) belies the complexity
involved within the realm of masculinities discourse. By way of contrast, Chapter 10, Sea
Shepherds, Eco-Warriors, and Impresarios: Performing Eco-masculinity in the Canadian Seal
Hunt of the Late Twentieth Century demonstrates a softer, gentler alternative to the traditional
masculinity of the warrior. Robert Hunter’s activism invokes “an eclectic spiritualism,” as he
becomes the “mystic, the guru, (indeed), the shaman of the group” (Keough, 2018, p. 220).
Sometimes contradictory, and often unexpected variations on the theme of masculinity are offered
in this anthology. The result is often incongruous, sometimes paradoxical, and always quite
revealing to read.
The notion of men making history, while relatively commonplace and unremarkable in its
own right, is imbued with new meaning through this volume. Making Men, Making History:
Canadian Masculinities across Time and Place deconstructs the very mosaic of the Canadian
identity through the narratives of men. With accounts as varied as Skwxwú7mesh Lacrosse and
the performance of indigenous nationhood to the gender politics of the draft dodgers during the
Vietnam War, to the outlaw motorcycle clubs in Post-war Ontario, this compilation leaves the
reader to imagine vast channels yet to be navigated. Gossage and Rutherdale take us on a journey
through time and place, and yet, as we return to the here and now, we are left to wonder: what
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) – December 2018 Cassano
75
next? There is ample space here for the reader, for the critic, and for the curious to forge ahead in
any one of many different directions.
References
Keough, W. G. (2018). Sea Shepherds, Eco-Warrioers, and Impresarios: Performing Eco-maculinity in the
Canadian Seal Hunt of the Late Twentieth Century. In P. Gossage & R. Rutherdale (Eds.), Making men,
making history: Canadian masculinities across time and place (pp. 218-237). Vancouver, BC: UBC
Press.
Theodore, D. (2018). The Spiritual Aspect: Gordon A. Friesen and the Mechanization of the Modern
Hospital. In P. Gossage & R. Rutherdale (Eds.), Making men, making history: Canadian masculinities
across time and place (pp. 64-84). Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.
Journal of Teaching and Learning 12(2) – December 2018
76
ISSN: 1911-8279 (online)
The Journal of Teaching and Learning (JTL) acknowledges the land we operate on as part of the traditional territories of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. There are few places on earth where others have not walked before us or called it home. The JTL is an international, peer-reviewed journal. The journal seeks manuscripts that provide a critical examination of historical and contemporary educational contexts. The journal publishes original research that contributes to theoretical and applied questions in teaching and learning. These may include: issues related to indigenous education, gender, class, race, ethnicity and diversity, educational policy, teacher education, educational leadership, and theories of teaching and learning. The journal also welcomes critical and exploratory essays that focus on current educational issues. The JTL is published twice a year. Submissions to the JTL are anonymously peer-reviewed.
Editor:
Editorial Assistant:
Book Review Editor:
Kara Smith
Brandon Sabourin
Kara Smith
Advisory Board:
Christopher Grieg, University of Windsor Terry Sefton, University of Windsor Janice Waldron, University of Windsor
Editorial Board: Jonathan Bayley, University of Windsor Patricia Daniel, University of Wolverhampton, UK Benedicta Egbo, University of Windsor Larry Glassford, University of Windsor Tim Goddard, University of Prince Edward Island Asha Gupta, Punjab University, India Susan M. Holloway, University of Windsor Roseanne Menna, University of Windsor Siegbert Schmidt, University of Cologne, Germany Miles Turnbull, University of Prince Edward Island
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