Each day, foreign language teachers are faced with issues that render the control of the K-12 classroom challenging, at best, and virtually impossible at worst. Even preservice foreign language teachers, those going through a teacher education program towards K-12 licensure, understand that no content can be taught or learned if there is mayhem in the classroom environment. Effective classroom management practices are often what consume these teachers' time and energy, even before the first page of the textbook is turned. However, it would be an error to over-generalize foreign language teachers' challenges with classroom management in an effort to introduce possible solutions without first considering the uniqueness of this particular teaching and learning environment. It was the researcher's contention that the foreign language classroom is unlike any other, and thus thrusts its teachers, both preservice and in-service, into management situations that are rare or non-existent in the classrooms of other subject areas. The purpose of this longitudinal study, therefore, was to describe five foreign language teachers' experiences with classroom management and to identify the distinct issues they have faced, both during their student teaching semester and currently as in-service teachers. The data gathered from the five subjects' weekly reflective journals and teaching philosophies, their observations of other classrooms, responses to a questionnaire, interviews, and observational field notes were analyzed qualitatively using a case study approach. The study confirmed that these foreign language teachers often contended with issues that were exclusive to their teaching field. Target language usage, the systemic lack of respect for the study of foreign language, and the inclusion of students who were heritage speakers of the language being taught were among the issues most commonly cited by these five teachers, and were shown to have a significant impact on student behavior, motivation, and attitude. Many teacher education programs already offer courses that explicitly present appropriate classroom management strategies. However, data from this study suggest that a further breakdown of how foreign language classroom management may differ from other subject areas may ultimately enable foreign language teacher educators to better prepare and better support both their preservice and in-service teachers.

The purpose of this mixed-method study was to investigate digital native preservice teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs regarding their technology experiences and skills at the beginning and at the end of their field placement semester. Digital natives, as defined by Prensky (2001), are students born after 1980 who have been raised with digital media and spend a great deal of time engaging with digital devices. Factors that could impact changes in these participants’ technology integration self-efficacy beliefs were also analyzed. This study used pre- and post-surveys, face-to-face interviews with a portion of the respondents, and a document review of course materials and lesson plans. Twenty-one preservice students, enrolled in the second to last semester of a teacher preparation program, at a small mid Atlantic university during the fall, 2011 semester participated. The quantitative portion involved the online administration of the Technology Integration Survey at the beginning and at the conclusion of the field placement experience. For the qualitative portion, nine participants were purposefully selected for interviews in an effort to more fully understand participants’ experiences and how these experiences impacted their self-efficacy beliefs about technology integration during the semester. In order to triangulate the data, results of the quantitative phase of the study were then compared with the results from the qualitative phase of the study. The findings of this mixed-method study suggested that digital native preservice teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs to integrate technology into their teaching improved slightly over the course of the semester. In addition, a strong relationship was found between participants’ Post-Test Technology Skills scores and Post-Test Self-Efficacy scores, indicating that an increase in technology skills corresponded with an increase in self-efficacy (r = .684, p = 0.001). Qualitative results pointed to mentor support, time, and access to technology during their field placement experiences as factors for integrating technology into their instruction. Additionally, results indicated that participants had access to and spent a considerable amount of time on computers every day. They were proficient with basic technologies but reported lower proficiency with more difficult technologies. Yet, results also suggested that, while this group of digital native preservice teachers has grown up in the digital age, their practice and, more importantly, their fundamental understanding of integrating technology into their instructional practices was limited.

Esta pesquisa está inserida no campo das investigações sobre a formação inicial de professores e assume que a docência é uma profissão. Como tal, envolve um corpo de saberes específicos. Além disso, fundamenta-se na necessidade de se superar o modelo da racionalidade técnica na formação docente, em direção ao modelo da prática reflexiva, centrado na investigação do próprio trabalho em sala de aula. Com base nesses pressupostos, seu foco de estudo é o estágio supervisionado caracterizado, neste trabalho, por um desenvolvimento coletivo, tutorado por uma professora da escola básica e centrado numa pesquisa-ação. Considerando-se essas características, a investigação visava analisar as possíveis contribuições dessa modalidade de estágio para a elaboração dos saberes profissionais dos licenciandos de um curso de Ciências Biológicas. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida na Escola de Aplicação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo, sendo que a pesquisadora era simultaneamente professora dessa escola e tutora do estágio. O grupo de estagiários era formado por seis licenciandos, que trabalharam com alunos do primeiro ano do Ensino Médio. Além da atuação nas aulas, os estagiários se reuniam semanalmente com a tutora, por um período de duas horas, no qual planejavam, analisavam e replanejavam coletivamente as ações pedagógicas que eram implementadas junto aos alunos. Dentre as metodologias possíveis, optou-se pelo estudo de caso. Os dados foram obtidos através de: observações da pesquisadora, registradas em seu caderno de campo; correspondência eletrônica trocada entre a tutora e os estagiários; diversos documentos escritos, tais como relatórios de estágio, questionários de avaliação, textos de auto-avaliação; gravações em vídeo das reuniões e entrevistas semi-estruturadas gravadas em áudio. A análise dos dados foi feita em duas etapas. Na primeira, analisou-se um módulo de aulas a fim de se descrever um conjunto de ciclos reflexivos da pesquisa-ação e de se evidenciar os contextos nos quais os saberes dos estagiários eram manifestados e transformados. A segunda visava à identificação de elaborações de saberes ao longo de todo o processo.Os resultados obtidos revelaram transformações nos saberes mais atrelados ao contexto da sala de aula, isto é, nos saberes: pedagógicos do conteúdo, práticos e pedagógicos gerais (sobre aprendizagem, ensino, ações pedagógicas, avaliação, gestão de classe, alunos e conceitos biológicos). Saberes curriculares e saberes sobre os fins educacionais, que englobam reflexões sobre o papel social da escola e do professor de Biologia, não foram muito favorecidos por essa proposta. A análise desses resultados mostrou como o principal limite do estágio a predominância dos enfoques técnico e prático na pesquisa-ação realizada. O enfoque emancipatório esteve pouco presente no processo. A despeito desse limite, foi possível identificar importantes contribuições do processo vivenciado para a formação dos futuros professores, como a elaboração de saberes essenciais à docência e melhorias no desenvolvimento pessoal. Assim sendo, conclui-se que os estágios tutorados e centrados na pesquisa-ação se constituem num caminho promissor a ser considerado e explorado na busca da tão necessária melhoria da formação docente. / This study belongs to the field of investigating the preservice teacher education. It assumes that teaching is a profession, and, as such, it involves a body of specific knowledge. It also includes the idea of the need to overcome the model of technical reasoning in teacher training in order to assume the model of reflective practice, centered on investigating the own work which is occurring in the classroom. Based on these presuppositions, the study focuses on the supervised training period, which has the features of being collective, tutored by a teacher of basic education and centered on action research. Taking into account these features, it aimed to investigate how it can contribute to forming the professional knowledge of the preservice teachers for a degree in a course of Biological Science. The study was developed in the Escola de Aplicação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo, and the researcher was simultaneously a teacher of this school and a tutor of the training period. The group of student teachers was formed of six teacher candidates, who worked with pupils of the first year of High School. As well as giving lessons, they met the tutor weekly, for a period of two hours, during which they planned, analyzed and replanned together the pedagogical actions which were implemented with the pupils. Among possible methodologies, we opted for the case study. The data were obtained by means of: observations of the researcher, recorded in her field notebook; electronic mail exchanged between the tutor and the student teachers; different written documents, such as reports of a training period, questionnaires of evaluation, texts of self-evaluation; video recordings of the meetings and semi-structured interviews recorded on a tape recorder. The data was analyzed in two stages. In the first one, a module of lessons was analyzed in order to describe a set of reflective cycles of the action research and so as to show clearly the contexts in which the knowledge of the student teachers was displayed and transformed. The second one aimed at identifying how the knowledge was composed throughout all the process. The results obtained revealed transformations in the knowledge more linked to the context of the classroom, i.e. the pedagogical content knowledge, the practical knowledge and the general pedagogical knowledge (about learning, teaching, pedagogical actions, evaluation, class management, pupils and biological concepts). Knowledge of the curriculum and about educational objectives, which encompass reflections about the social role of the school and the teacher of Biology, were not looked at very much in this study. The analysis of these results showed that the main limit of the training period was the predominance of technical and practical focus points in the action research executed. The emancipatory focus was hardly present in the process. In spite of this limit, it was possible to identify improvements, in both the personal and the professional development of the students teachers, associated with the tutoring and the action research. Based on these results, the conclusion is that training periods which are tutored and centered on action research is a promising line to be considered and explored in the search for the much-needed improvement in training teachers.

Esta pesquisa está inserida no campo das investigações sobre a formação inicial de professores e assume que a docência é uma profissão. Como tal, envolve um corpo de saberes específicos. Além disso, fundamenta-se na necessidade de se superar o modelo da racionalidade técnica na formação docente, em direção ao modelo da prática reflexiva, centrado na investigação do próprio trabalho em sala de aula. Com base nesses pressupostos, seu foco de estudo é o estágio supervisionado caracterizado, neste trabalho, por um desenvolvimento coletivo, tutorado por uma professora da escola básica e centrado numa pesquisa-ação. Considerando-se essas características, a investigação visava analisar as possíveis contribuições dessa modalidade de estágio para a elaboração dos saberes profissionais dos licenciandos de um curso de Ciências Biológicas. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida na Escola de Aplicação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo, sendo que a pesquisadora era simultaneamente professora dessa escola e tutora do estágio. O grupo de estagiários era formado por seis licenciandos, que trabalharam com alunos do primeiro ano do Ensino Médio. Além da atuação nas aulas, os estagiários se reuniam semanalmente com a tutora, por um período de duas horas, no qual planejavam, analisavam e replanejavam coletivamente as ações pedagógicas que eram implementadas junto aos alunos. Dentre as metodologias possíveis, optou-se pelo estudo de caso. Os dados foram obtidos através de: observações da pesquisadora, registradas em seu caderno de campo; correspondência eletrônica trocada entre a tutora e os estagiários; diversos documentos escritos, tais como relatórios de estágio, questionários de avaliação, textos de auto-avaliação; gravações em vídeo das reuniões e entrevistas semi-estruturadas gravadas em áudio. A análise dos dados foi feita em duas etapas. Na primeira, analisou-se um módulo de aulas a fim de se descrever um conjunto de ciclos reflexivos da pesquisa-ação e de se evidenciar os contextos nos quais os saberes dos estagiários eram manifestados e transformados. A segunda visava à identificação de elaborações de saberes ao longo de todo o processo.Os resultados obtidos revelaram transformações nos saberes mais atrelados ao contexto da sala de aula, isto é, nos saberes: pedagógicos do conteúdo, práticos e pedagógicos gerais (sobre aprendizagem, ensino, ações pedagógicas, avaliação, gestão de classe, alunos e conceitos biológicos). Saberes curriculares e saberes sobre os fins educacionais, que englobam reflexões sobre o papel social da escola e do professor de Biologia, não foram muito favorecidos por essa proposta. A análise desses resultados mostrou como o principal limite do estágio a predominância dos enfoques técnico e prático na pesquisa-ação realizada. O enfoque emancipatório esteve pouco presente no processo. A despeito desse limite, foi possível identificar importantes contribuições do processo vivenciado para a formação dos futuros professores, como a elaboração de saberes essenciais à docência e melhorias no desenvolvimento pessoal. Assim sendo, conclui-se que os estágios tutorados e centrados na pesquisa-ação se constituem num caminho promissor a ser considerado e explorado na busca da tão necessária melhoria da formação docente. / This study belongs to the field of investigating the preservice teacher education. It assumes that teaching is a profession, and, as such, it involves a body of specific knowledge. It also includes the idea of the need to overcome the model of technical reasoning in teacher training in order to assume the model of reflective practice, centered on investigating the own work which is occurring in the classroom. Based on these presuppositions, the study focuses on the supervised training period, which has the features of being collective, tutored by a teacher of basic education and centered on action research. Taking into account these features, it aimed to investigate how it can contribute to forming the professional knowledge of the preservice teachers for a degree in a course of Biological Science. The study was developed in the Escola de Aplicação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo, and the researcher was simultaneously a teacher of this school and a tutor of the training period. The group of student teachers was formed of six teacher candidates, who worked with pupils of the first year of High School. As well as giving lessons, they met the tutor weekly, for a period of two hours, during which they planned, analyzed and replanned together the pedagogical actions which were implemented with the pupils. Among possible methodologies, we opted for the case study. The data were obtained by means of: observations of the researcher, recorded in her field notebook; electronic mail exchanged between the tutor and the student teachers; different written documents, such as reports of a training period, questionnaires of evaluation, texts of self-evaluation; video recordings of the meetings and semi-structured interviews recorded on a tape recorder. The data was analyzed in two stages. In the first one, a module of lessons was analyzed in order to describe a set of reflective cycles of the action research and so as to show clearly the contexts in which the knowledge of the student teachers was displayed and transformed. The second one aimed at identifying how the knowledge was composed throughout all the process. The results obtained revealed transformations in the knowledge more linked to the context of the classroom, i.e. the pedagogical content knowledge, the practical knowledge and the general pedagogical knowledge (about learning, teaching, pedagogical actions, evaluation, class management, pupils and biological concepts). Knowledge of the curriculum and about educational objectives, which encompass reflections about the social role of the school and the teacher of Biology, were not looked at very much in this study. The analysis of these results showed that the main limit of the training period was the predominance of technical and practical focus points in the action research executed. The emancipatory focus was hardly present in the process. In spite of this limit, it was possible to identify improvements, in both the personal and the professional development of the students teachers, associated with the tutoring and the action research. Based on these results, the conclusion is that training periods which are tutored and centered on action research is a promising line to be considered and explored in the search for the much-needed improvement in training teachers.

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