Main Navigation:

• ETC
  • Leadership
  • Collaborators

• eTeaching Program

• Project RITE
  • Projects by Year
  • Blogs
  • Recipients

• Project SET
  • Modules by Year
  • Modules by Category
  • Recipients
  • 
    
    
    

Project RITE

Utilizing the Communicative and Generative Qualities of Video-Narrative
in the Development of Early Childhood Preservice Teacher Inquiry

---

Mary Jane Moran

Associate Professor, Child & Family Studies, UT Knoxville

Overview

Current school reform efforts and recommendations to raise professional standards for teacher certification include the provision of teaching experiences that move teachers beyond a dependence on organized knowledge and the transmission of this knowledge toward new understandings developed through critical thinking and inquiry (NCATE, 2002). The process of becoming a responsive and effective teacher is one of continual inquiry and renewal (Ayers, 1995) and is particularly difficult for young, inexperienced student teachers (referred to here as preservice teachers). Among the dominant strategies for developing teacher inquiry in the U. S. include the use of reflective writing (Francis, 1995; Janesick, 2004), film or video tape (Goldman-Segal, 1998) and discourse (Moyles, Adams, & Musgrove, 2002; Whipp, 2003). These strategies are typically used separately with varying success. It is hypothesized that the coupling of these three might create a more robust mediational tool for helping preservice teachers learn discernment, judgment, and decision-making skills that are essential to the development of teacher inquiry.

A goal of this pilot study is to determine the influence of video-narratives on the ability of preservice teachers to critically observe their practice and through the interplay of critique and practice, begin to assign particular meaning to discreet images of teaching that they analyze. It is my expectation that over time, this process may be internalized so that their ability to adapt practice while "on the floor" will become more automatized and intentional. It is this ability to adjust practice, in the moment, based on the emerging needs and abilities of children that is the ultimate measure of the success of an inquiry-oriented approach to teaching. The production of video-narratives as a unique visual language of inquiry represents my belief that to educate young teachers as critical thinkers we must find ways to make visible, through the use of technological tools, their approximations toward teaching excellence.