Open AccessPreservice Teachers’ Professional Development in a Community of Practice Summer Literacy Camp for Children At-Risk: A Sociocultural Perspective
Author(s) -
Janet C. Richards
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the qualitative report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.335
H-Index - 35
ISSN - 2160-3715
DOI - 10.46743/2160-3715/2006.1659
Subject(s) - sociocultural perspective , sociocultural evolution , literacy , psychology , perspective (graphical) , professional development , interpersonal communication , professional learning community , pedagogy , faculty development , mathematics education , learning community , sociology , social psychology , anthropology , artificial intelligence , computer science
This inquiry applied an innovative sociocultural framework to examine transformations in preservice teachers’ professional development as they worked with children at-risk in a summer literacy camp. The camp incorporated a community of practice model in which teams of master’s and doctoral students mentored small groups of preservice teachers. The study examined preservice teachers ’ learning following Rogoff’s (1995, 1997) notions of the personal, interpersonal, and community planes of analysis. The research also employed a postmodernist crystallization imagery to capture multiple perspectives on the preservice teachers’ growth. The study assigns importance to the contextual dimensions in which learning takes place, and emphasizes that learning is nourished by interactions with others.