Project RITE

     My research this spring was focused on using technology to support the development of collaborative inquiry among a small group of preservice early childhood teachers.  Preservice teachers are students who are enrolled in a teacher education program.  For this population of teachers it is especially difficult to develop inquiry.  Inquiry-oriented practice has become a cornerstone of many teacher education programs in the US. In the CFS Prek-3 teacher licensure program we strive to enable preservice teachers to move away from a transmission orientation toward a teaching stance characterized by an ability to question and discern seminal information about the teaching-learning process for on-going study.  The creation of contexts and conditions that support preservice teachers’ ability to focus on their practice deeply, through iterative cycles of reflection and analysis, is at the core of this pilot study.

     Following IRB approval, I recruited preservice teachers to participate in my study.  My aim was to pilot the use of video narratives with undergraduate students, extending my previous research with professional teachers.  I wondered whether these novice teachers’ experiences would be similar to those of the experienced teachers.  And, if not, how would they differ? Of the four students who agreed to participate, two completed video narratives, generated from analyses of their teaching practice with preschool-aged children.  Video narratives are digital documents that include written analyses of video tapes of teaching, with video tape clips embedded in the text.  The video narratives were developed across a series of work sessions supported by myself and a doctoral student who edited the preservice students’ tapes.

     The use of video tape in the education of teachers is not new, nor is the use of reflective writing.  What is new is the interplay of talk, text, and tape in a cycle of analysis in which the preservice teachers engaged in recurring reviews of their practice, as each edited her written analysis and video tapes.  During this process they changed words, made connections and constructed new understandings about her teaching practice. My role, and that of the information technology specialist (doctoral student), was to offer support to each preservice teacher.  I served as the scribe, typing the iterations of my students’ developing analyses, while their video tapes were edited.  The timing and rhythm of these work sessions were completely dictated by the preservice teachers.  They told us when to stop and start, when to rewind for a second look, what to type, when to change words in their texts, and when to edit out video tape.  The creation of a video narrative for each participant emerged from a series of four, one-hour individual work sessions for each student. 

     While the final video-narrative documents varied between the two students, there were similarities shared by them regarding the impact of the process on their thinking and practice. For Alex (all names are pseudonyms), she noted,

“Orignally, I looked at the clips and didn’t notice as much as I do now.  I didn’t realize how much I was actually helping Ava (aged 3).  Earlier, I used very broad statements to describe my actions and my understandings of the children’s work–they were not very detailed.  But now, I understand the interactions between Ava and me more because I have revisited the clips and picked them apart and analyzed them.  So, from this process of closely studying my teaching, I now know what to foucs on in tfuture lessons.”

     As the numbers of participants are quite small, preliminary findings are inconclusive.  I plan to continue the study in the fall with a larger number of preservice students, including the two who participated this spring.  Although this research was based on the experiences of only two students, it has raised a new question as I make plans to pursue the next phase.  In particular, “Does the micro-analysis of small amounts of video tape generate a similar degree of reflexive practice and resulting new knowledge about one’s teaching as the analysis of many hours of video tape?”  In other words, ”Does the intertextuality of text, talk and tape within a collaborative partnership propel the inquiry of novice teachers’ critical thinking even moreso than traditional  reviews of longer hours of video footage without the opportunity to couple talk and text with tape?” 

    In summary, it is my belief that this line of research holds possibilities for creating contexts and conditions for scaffolding the development of inquiry among both novice and experienced teachers.  In particular, these early steps have shown the potential for (a) the co-construction of shared knowledge as practice is made visible to learning partners, (b) the creation of potential learning spaces that enable teachers to see, and see again the relationship between their thinking and practice as they project toward future practice, and (c) the belief that the development of inquiry is dependent upon the interplay of languages of inquiry (i.e., text, discourse, and film) with no single language sufficient to convey the complex nature of the teaching-learning process.

Mary Jane Moran, Associate Professor

Department of Child and Family Studies 

This research project includes video taping preservice early childhood teachers as they teach preschool children in the UT Early Learning Center for Research and Practice (ELC)on White Avenue.  The preservice teachers are junior-level undergraduates who are majoring in early childhood education in the Department of Child and Family Studies.  The ELC is a laboratory school and is a place for students to practice teaching.  At White Avenue the children range in age from 3-6 years.  Although parents agree to have their children video taped and photographed when they enroll them, securing permission from the university IRB is especially challenging as children are clearly a vulnerable population. 

I developed a two-tiered procedure for parent consent and I believe this process was especially important as educators strive to protect the privacy of children while often being dependent upon image-based research.  Basically, parents were requested to consent to having their children included in video tapes that would be analyzed by me and my research team of students.  This analysis would remain located in my research lab and the tapes only viewed by us.  Once analyzed, clips of video tapes were selected to be included in what I call, video-narratives.  A video-narrative is a document created by a teacher that includes text and tape, with video clips embedded in text.  The text is dictated by the preservice teacher to me through iterative cycles of analyses of video tapes of her teaching.  Concurrently, her tapes are being edited by a technology specialist, following the directions of the preservice teacher.  When particular video clips end up in a video-narrative, a second parent consent form is sent to parents requesting permission to include video footage of their child(ren) in video-narratives.  This second level of consent, then, is typically requested of only a few of the total number of parents. who originally consented to allow their children to be video taped.  This higher level of consent is particularly important because the video-narratives will now be used in professional conference presentations, and possibly as part of an on-line journal article.

 In summary, it was challenging to write my IRB proposal to clearly describe the extra precautions necessary to protect the privacy of young children.  I believe this two-tiered parental consent protocol is a good answer to this need to assure we protect children’s privacy when conducting image-based research in school settings. 

Mary Jane Moran, Associate Professor, CFS