Learning to Teach Through Collaborative Conversation: A Feminist Approach

As part of a longitudinal research project on learning to teach literacy and as a personal quest to make her work as a teacher educator more supportive, this researcher arranged an ongoing conversation for members of three cohorts of preservice and beginning elementary teachers. The conversation was prompted by an interest in beginning teachers’ critical responses to the personal support for learning to teach that they receive from their teacher education programs. From the social, collaborative, and nonevaluative conversations, personally and contextually relevant issues in learning to teach emerged, as did the processes of identifying and understanding them. The result was not only a clarification of important relational and political issues that seem prerequisite to issues of academic learning, but also the emergence of a feminist consciousness —in both teachers and researcher. The method of studying the group’s learning, then, became an example of feminist praxis: a willingness to risk and examine personal experiences as women and to be changed by the research process itself. The value of this conversational approach for learning to teach in urban settings becomes clear in the narrative.