Changes in the discipline of english language arts teacher education have produced a much more expansive understanding of literacy and of what teachers of English language arts do. This volume addresses these changes by featuring innovation-both theoretical and applied-in the field itself. Changes in the field of English language arts teacher education suggest a need to also examine how teachers approach learning to teach in a field that has so quickly evolved. This book seeks to understand how a future teaching force will approach this changing landscape and how we, as English teacher educators, might effectively prepare them to do so.

The Advances in Research on Teaching series was established to provide state-of-the-art conceptualization and analysis of the processes involved in functioning as a classroom teacher. These include not only the behaviors of teachers that can be observed in the classroom, but also the planning, thinking, and decision making that occur before, during, and after interaction with students.

This book documents a radical shift in thinking from focusing on the school as the place where curriculum is made to realizing the ways children and families are engaged as curriculum makers in homes, in communities, and in the spaces in-between, outside of school. The narrative inquiry framing this book investigates the tensions experienced by teachers, children and families as they make curriculum attentive to lives. It draws on a research project involving multiperspectival narrative inquiries spanning four research sites and traces the tensions experienced by children, families and teachers in multiple curriculum making sites and some of the profound identity making and assessment making implications that become visible. Its attention to the relational in narrative inquiry is focused on tensions that shape lives and, as well, the unfolding of narrative inquiries. This informative book has a wide reaching audience of educational researchers, teacher educators, research methodologists, particularly those interested in narrative inquiry, curriculum scholars, graduate students, university faculty, teachers, administrators and parents alike.

Current accreditation practices require that teacher education institutions in the United States not only create programs that enact research-based best practices but that they also document their existence and efficacy in preparing teachers. "Tensions in Teacher Preparation: Accountability, Assessment, and Accreditation" addresses the challenges of meeting national accreditation requirements, including designing assessment instruments and making data-driven decisions. The process of establishing and implementing accountability creates tensions in faculty and institutions. Faculty must give up valued content and instructional styles in order to align course objectives and assessment instruments across the program. Institutions with multiple licensure programs must make adjustments in order to share data collection instruments and processes that will support data-driven decisions. The paradigm shifts required by the emphasis on accountability can be both frustrating and productive. This book explores and shares tensions created as teacher education programs experience changes because of accountability requirements related to the accreditation process.

The authors explore how individuals identity and personal practical knowledge are being formed, shifted or interrupted through moments in teacher education which the authors have carefully and thoughtfully constructed. The particularity of the stories, expressed in this collection, provide us with multiple perspectives and multiple entry points into making deeper sense of the complexity of curriculum-making in teacher education. As the stories of experience resonate with our own or as they stand apart from them, they provoke us to re-imagine teacher education, and to retell and relive our own stories of teacher education with new possibility. Narrative inquiry offers teacher educators a way to move the telling of stories of curriculum- making in teacher education forward, to delve more deeply into stories in order to make sense of experience and to attend more closely to a curriculum of life that is educative for the self and others in teacher education.

This book is the representation of a narrative inquiry conducted with five ninth grade boys that were identified as displaying multiple literacies, looking specifically at how these boys storied their literate identities. After the stories were collected, the author conducted several negotiation sessions with the boys and their parents at the school, as well as in their homes. These negotiations facilitated a methodological concept that the book terms distillation: an interim step for determining which narratives in an inquiry are emblematic. Several lenses for conceptualizing the stories of these boys were made evident during the research. An analysis of the collected stories revealed that the boys' stories moved beyond current conceptions of either identity or literacy alone and instead offered a way of defining literate identity as simultaneously being and doing literacy. In light of this definition, the boys' stories revealed plotlines that together described literate identity as a form of capital. The question of how the boys story themselves, the original research question, is ultimately answered using a meta-narrative, or archetype, where a hero distributes a boon, or gift to his society. The implications for this research include a need to examine classroom space in order to facilitate the deployment of literate identity capital, as well as space for living out the meta-narratives that these boys are composing.

This book documents a radical shift in thinking from focusing on the school as the place where curriculum is made to realizing the ways children and families are engaged as curriculum makers in homes, in communities, and in the spaces in-between, outside of school. The narrative inquiry framing this book investigates the tensions experienced by teachers, children and families as they make curriculum attentive to lives. It draws on a research project involving multiperspectival narrative inquiries spanning four research sites and traces the tensions experienced by children, families and teachers in multiple curriculum making sites and some of the profound identity making and assessment making implications that become visible. Its attention to the relational in narrative inquiry is focused on tensions that shape lives and, as well, the unfolding of narrative inquiries. This informative book has a wide reaching audience of educational researchers, teacher educators, research methodologists, particularly those interested in narrative inquiry, curriculum scholars, graduate students, university faculty, teachers, administrators and parents alike.

Current accreditation practices require that teacher education institutions in the United States not only create programs that enact research-based best practices but that they also document their existence and efficacy in preparing teachers. "Tensions in Teacher Preparation: Accountability, Assessment, and Accreditation" addresses the challenges of meeting national accreditation requirements, including designing assessment instruments and making data-driven decisions. The process of establishing and implementing accountability creates tensions in faculty and institutions. Faculty must give up valued content and instructional styles in order to align course objectives and assessment instruments across the program. Institutions with multiple licensure programs must make adjustments in order to share data collection instruments and processes that will support data-driven decisions. The paradigm shifts required by the emphasis on accountability can be both frustrating and productive. This book explores and shares tensions created as teacher education programs experience changes because of accountability requirements related to the accreditation process.

This volume is designed to accomplish three primary purposes: (1) illustrate a variety of qualitative methods that researchers have used to study teaching and teacher education; (2) assess the affordances and constraints of these methods and the ways that they focus and shape explorations of teaching; and (3) illuminate representative questions and findings associated with each method described.

The book is organized around three issues that impact research in qualitative paradigms: perspective, methodology, and representation. The first section, "Perspective: Whom Should I Ask?," explores what can be learned by assessing teaching from different perspectives (teachers, teacher educators, students, parents), emphasizing that the perspective of the respondent influences what we can learn and shapes both our questions and our potential findings. The second section "Methodology: How Do I Look?," addresses some of the qualitative research strategies that have been used to study teaching, including historical accounts, photos, drawings, and video. The third section, "Representation: How Do I Show What I Saw?," explores the affordances and constraints of narratives, practical arguments, video ethnography, portfolios, and theater as methods for representing research findings.

Qualitative research paradigms typically do not make claims based in the kinds of foundational criteria for generating knowledge that establish bases for generalizability. The book addresses this dilemma by providing findings, insights, and claims from qualitative research that appear to be useful in settings beyond those that generated the data, and thus inform our thinking about teaching and teachereducation. In addition, its explorations of the affordances and constraints of qualitative research methods provide insightful and occasionally controversial contributions to our thinking about research on teaching and teacher education.