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Using queer and Afrofuturist frameworks, this Black feminist qualitative study explored queer Black pre-and in-service teachers' cultural and intersectional practices as they navigated traditional heteronormative educational spaces. This research study relied on counternarratives and storytelling and drew from Afrofuturism to understand the use of their lived experiences to counter monolithic queer narratives. The queer Black teachers in this study examined and negotiated how their Blackness and queerness showed up in teacher preparation programs (TPP) and K-12 classrooms. Moreover, they eventually refused to hide or censure their authentic selves. An analysis of the narratives and counternarratives showed that queer Black teachers drew from ancestral traditions to create queer Afrofuturist spaces in TPPs and educational places. Furthermore, due to their queer Black intersectional approaches, their classrooms, assignments, curriculum, and pedagogy disrupted normative teaching practices. Implications, recommendations, and future research are discussed.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction / Debbie K. Mercer / This phenomenological study explores the lived experiences of two elementary pre-service teachers in a Mid-western rural university in an attempt to heighten the quality and depth of those experiences as they pertain to pre-service teacher preparation prior to student teaching. The study analyzed the pre-service teachers’ descriptions of their lived experiences in elementary schools during internship experiences and how those experiences contributed to their personal growth as educators. Flick’s (2009) recommendations for phenomenological data analysis of personal journals and face-to-face interviews was used as a methodological framework for exploration of the two pre-service teachers’ lived experiences while Van Manen’s (1990) journal and interview methodologies were used for data collection. The findings were represented in thematic format and revealed transformational learning experiences for both participants. The six phenomenological themes captured the essences of teacher and student relationships and how classroom experiences contributed to personal learning opportunities for the pre-service teachers. Moreover, the findings of this study bolstered the necessity for pre-service teachers to reflect upon and evaluate interpersonal and intrapersonal lived experiences as they relate to the basic tenets of phenomenology in order to gain a fuller appreciation for how lived experiences of pre-service teachers, and their students, contribute to professional growth and improved decision-making skills. This study argues for a more attuned investigation of the basic tenets of phenomenology to increase student achievement through improved teacher and student relationships, and to enhance pre-service teachers’ personal and professional learning.

This dissertation entailed a qualitative case study on the confluence of technology and social studies in fostering a constructivist education. Through the examination of pre-service social studies teachers’ understanding of the online primary source resources (OPSR), three themes emerged. The first exposed the fragmented understanding of important pedagogical theories of constructivism and historical thinking among participants; the second suggested that OPSR was mostly valued by pre-service teachers for its provision of primary sources; and the third related to how pre-service teachers viewed the current state of technology and context as problematic for technology integration. Accordingly, four findings were revealed. First, the pre-service teachers in the study demonstrated a limited understanding of the application of foundational theories central to their field of study; second, there were instances of deeper appreciation of the potential of OPSR, indicating that pre-service teachers’ theoretical understanding is ix nascent and may deepen overtime; third, the full potential of technologies such as OPSR was not recognized; and fourth, the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of school and educational system conditions tended to negatively influence their views toward the integration of technology into their teaching practices. Implications indicate that first, foundational pedagogical theories are critical with regard to technology integration in education and as such teacher preparation programs must not assume what is taught is what is learned; second, instances of deeper understanding among pre-service teachers only appeared during the application of their theoretical understandings; third, context is critical in how OPSR would be used in classrooms and such contextual issues must not be ignored by teacher preparation programs; and fourth, teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (PCK/TPCK) is critical in the integration of technology in education. / text

This dissertation study examines the experiences of four Latina/o pre-service teachers (PSTs) as they learn about teaching mathematics for understanding (TM4U) and integrating a child's out-of-school mathematical knowledge and experiences during instruction. Studying the knowledge and experiences of Latina/o PSTs is necessary because PSTs from minoritized backgrounds have particular insights about teaching diverse students that can inform the learning experiences of other PSTs. This study investigates the prior experiences and beliefs about mathematics instruction the Latina/o PSTs (and those from minoritized backgrounds) bring as they begin their mathematics methods semester and how they leverage their experiences as they learn to teach mathematics to diverse students. Teaching mathematics for understanding is one way that teachers can support children's understanding of mathematics (Kilpatrick et al 2001). Teachers who integrate children's out-of-school mathematical knowledge and experiences in their practice draws upon multiple existing frameworks--the basic premise being that children come to school with mathematical knowledge and experiences that helps them learn mathematics in school (Gonzalez, Andrade, Civil, & Moll, 2001; Greer, Mukhopadhyay, Powell, & Nelson-Barber, 2009). My study looks at the experiences of Latina/o PSTs as they learn to help children leverage their out-of-school knowledge and experiences to understand mathematics. Data sources included four individual interviews, relevant methods assignments and audio transcripts from methods course discussions, and observational notes from the PSTs' field experience classrooms. The study found that PSTs leveraged their prior experiences as English Language Learners to support linguistically diverse children learn mathematics. Based on their prior experiences, some of the PSTs were more sensitive to the needs of marginalized children learning mathematics. The study found that the PSTs leveraged their experiences as diverse learners to think about the ways teachers could connect in-school mathematics to children's out-of-school mathematical knowledge and experiences. Yet the findings suggest that PSTs still need more experience articulating how exactly children's out-of-school experiences can help children understand mathematics. Implications of this study speak to how the beliefs and prior experiences of PSTs from minoritized backgrounds can inform how future teachers are prepared to teach mathematics to diverse students.

This study explored the transformation of a teacher’s math identity. The researcher used narrative inquiry to live alongside the participant (Clandinin, 2013) as she experienced teaching in a pedagogically courageous way to make math meaningful to her students. Along the way the participant experienced cognitive dissonance but through intense collaborative professional reflection she persevered and evolved. The study addressed the questions: What factors influence a teacher’s motivation to grow and to make math meaningful to their students? What factors influence a teacher to commit to lifelong learning in math? Four themes emerged through the observations, journals, and reflective conversations including sharing of interim texts and the final narrative. The importance of the relationship with the researcher/coach, the trust that the participant had in the coach, the process, and herself, her desire for balance in her teaching life, and her improved sense efficacy led to her transformed math identity. / February 2017

Culturally responsive education has been an actual topic in teacher education for decades, but most teachers still finish their education without appropriate knowledge and skills for teaching in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Providing quality education to diverse learners remains a challenge, particularly in the fields of mathematics and sciences. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to describe intervention programs preparing in-service and pre-service math and science teachers for teaching in culturally diverse classrooms, and the outcomes of such programs. A search for scholarly journals evaluating such intervention programs has been carried out in several databases, resulting in nine articles included in the analysis. Intervention programs described in these articles covered several important aspects of culturally relevant education and had a limited success in developing cultural responsiveness of teachers. The construct of culturally relevant education is complex and multi-layered, and thus hard to measure without simplifying it to measurable constructs. Limitations of the study and implications for the future research and practice are discussed.

Teacher stories were once relegated to informal gatherings but more recently this aspect of teacher development is being carefully studied in more formalized settings because it is believed to be an important part of teacher development. New ways are being sought to use various aspects of storytelling to help pre-service teachers develop important teaching skills through reflection on experience, dialogue journals, case studies and autobiography. Despite these efforts at the university level, it is especially difficult for pre-service teachers to integrate and apply theories from their methods courses to actual classroom practice. Less effort has been focused on storytelling processes that may occur outside these formal approaches. This study, therefore, looked at how pre-service teachers used stories told in an informal setting to process aspects of learning to teach. This study revealed that pre-service teachers engage in story telling for reasons and in ways that are different from teacher educator intents. Using interviews and private dialogues, patterns of when, how and why six pre-service teachers used oral stories emerged that illuminate challenges to using personal and appropriated stories in coursework. The findings of this study include how oral storytelling is used by pre-service teachers to process emotion and demonstrate specific identities and personal characteristics.

This study takes a particular look at mathematics teacher education communities of practice (CoPs) in order to provide rich descriptions of the CoPs and make claims about its relation/in relation to teacher preparation and particularly the preparation of preservice teachers for teaching mathematics in multilingual classrooms. The three dimensions of communities of practice proposed by Wenger (mutual engagement, shared repertoire and joint enterprise) were used in conjunction with Mortimer and Scott’s notion of meaning making as a dialogic process as a theoretical lens to gain an entry into the nature of communities of practice in pre-service mathematics teacher education classrooms. Data was collected through pre-observation interviews of 12 teacher educators at four Universities in one Province in South Africa in Phase One of the study. A methodological approach based on Wenger’s CoP theory and Mortimer and Scott’s dialogic process was developed and used to analyse classroom observation videos of four of these teacher educators’ classroom communities of practice in two universities in Phase Two of the study. Using the privileged practices in the CoPs as points of departure and how these practices shaped and were shaped by other dynamics in the CoPs, the findings emerging from the study indicate that within the multiply layers of teacher education, there is an overarching emphasis given to the acquisition of mathematical content. Nevertheless, the communicative approaches and patterns of discourse used by the different teacher educators opened up different possibilities as far as preparing preservice teachers for teaching (in multilingual classrooms) is concerned. Wenger’s community of practice theory has found applications in different spheres of life and in different organisational and educational settings. Its use to understand and describe mathematics pre-service classrooms is, however, still largely unexplored. A theoretical contribution that this study makes lies in the extension of Wenger’s CoP theory to include dialogic processes. A methodological contribution lies in the development of an organisational language (based on Wenger’s three dimensions of CoP) to characterise pre-service teacher education classrooms.

O estágio supervisionado na formação inicial de professores é o momento no qual os licenciandos são inseridos, como professor, em seu ambiente profissional. Para se compreender o lugar do estágio na formação docente é necessário investigar como os saberes docentes dos licenciandos são elaborados durante essa formação. A pesquisa aqui apresentada possui como tema central a produção de saberes docentes por licenciandos em física durante o estágio supervisionado investigativo em sua formação inicial. Um estágio que envolve uma dimensão de ensino, caracterizada pelas atividades de regência dos licenciandos, e uma dimensão pesquisa, que envolve os licenciandos em um processo de pesquisa sobre a sua própria prática. Utilizamos a conceituação de saber como constructo de pesquisa e a centralidade dos saberes experienciais na prática profissional docente, tal como propostos por Tardif (2008), a fim de compreendermos a elaboração e a validação de saberes docentes pelos licenciandos durante o estágio supervisionado investigativo. Utilizamos também o Conhecimento Pedagógico do Conteúdo (PCK), como esquema teórico de análise com o intuito de caracterizar as interações existentes entre os saberes docentes relacionados às atividades de regência desenvolvidas pelos licenciandos. O pesquisador, como supervisor de estágio, orientou, durante um semestre, dois licenciandos de uma universidade pública de São Paulo no desenvolvimento de seus estágios. A análise dos dados envolveu dois recortes: um primeiro longitudinal, a partir das gravações das reuniões de supervisão entre os licenciandos e o pesquisador, além de uma apresentação final de estágio e uma entrevista final individual, que propiciou uma linha cronológica da elaboração e validação dos saberes docentes conforme o desenvolvimento do estágio supervisionado investigativo; e um segundo recorte transversal, com base em cinco unidades temáticas de análise, originárias da primeira etapa de análise, que nos permitiu esmiuçar a elaboração e validação dos saberes docentes desenvolvidos pelos licenciandos durante o estágio supervisionado investigativo. A partir desses dois recortes analisados de forma mais descritiva, foi possível delinear um melhor entendimento da relação teoria e prática e da centralidade dos saberes experienciais no decorrer do estágio supervisionado investigativo. A percepção da centralidade dos saberes experienciais e do movimento do PCK na atividade de regência dos licenciandos no desenvolvimento do estágio supervisionado investigativo nos possibilitaram refletir sobre a formação inicial de professores e propor redirecionamentos que podem contribuir para uma formação teórico-prática mais efetiva. / The supervised practicum in initial teacher education is the moment in which the pre-service teachers are inserted, as a teacher, into their professional environment. To understand the place of internship in teacher education is necessary to investigate how the teachers knowledge pre-service teachers are prepared during the training. This research focus on the development of teachers knowledge by pre-service teachers during a investigate supervised practicum occurred in their initial teacher education. A investigate supervised practicum comprehends both the teaching dimension, the latter having as its main characteristic the teaching activities carried out by the pre-service teachers, and the research dimension, which takes into account a process whereby pre-service teachers examine their own pedagogical practices. The concept of knowing as a research construct and the centrality of experiential knowledge in teachers professional practice are considered, as proposed by Tardif (2008), so as to understand the development and validation of teachers knowledge by pre-service teachers throughout the investigate supervised practicum. Moreover, the so-called Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) was also applied as a theoretical framework of analysis in order to describe the interactions prevailing in the teachers knowledge related to the practicum accomplished by the pre-service teachers. The researcher, as the practicum supervisor, guided and assisted two pre-service teachers of a public university of São Paulo over one semester in the development of their practicum. The analysis of the data involved two perspectives: firstly, a longitudinal one, which regarded the recorded supervision meetings between the pre-service teachers and the researcher, as well as a practicum final presentation, and an individual final interview, which provided a timeline of the of the development and validation of teachers knowledge as the supervised pre-service teachers practicum progressed; and secondly, a transversal perspective, based on five thematic units of analysis, originating in the first stage of analysis, which allowed us to look deeper the development and validation the teachers knowledge by pre-service teachers during the supervised practicum. From these two perspectives examined in more descriptive way, it was possible to devise a better understanding of the theory-practice relationship and the centrality of experiential knowledge in the accomplishment of the investigate supervised pre-service teachers practicum. The perception of the centrality of experiential knowledge and the movement of PCK in the teaching activities of pre-service teachers in the development of investigative supervised practium, allowed us to reflect on the initial teacher education and propose redirects that can contribute to a more effective theory-practice relationship.