Making a Case for Using Visual Inquiry Discussion in Preparing Elementary Social Studies Teachers.

Abstract

This dissertation research examines a teacher educator’s instructional practices and preservice teachers’ learning in two elementary social studies methods courses. As self-study, it focuses on learning to teach preservice teachers how to select and use visual images to teacher history and social studies. The research uses the Grossman Framework for professional education in representing, decomposing and providing opportunities for preservice teachers to approximate practice while learning to enact an Inquiry with Visual Images Discussion (VID) in elementary field classrooms (Grossman, 2011; Grossman et al., 2009). Preservice teachers working in pairs from each course serve as case study examples to describe preservice teachers’ learning about image selection, content knowledge, lesson planning, rehearsal and enactment. Analysis of two years of instruction suggests the importance of preservice teachers understanding and applying criteria for effective image selection, in addition to increasing their content knowledge of the selected image and its context. This study also points to role that metacognition and rehearsal play in developing preservice teachers’ skillful practice. Preservice teachers benefitted through strategic opportunities to practice responding to children in increasingly authentic settings. The findings pointed to three factors critical in teaching others the Visual Inquiry Discussion strategy, and possibly other multi-faceted instructional practices: the importance of increasingly sophisticated opportunities to approximate practices, including rehearsal in the teacher education classroom, and the role of identifying detailed features of the instructional strategy This study details the ways the teacher educator represented, decomposed and provided opportunities to successively approximate the Visual Inquiry Discussion practice across two different classes in two years. The analysis of preservice teachers’ lesson plans and reflections on their experiences trying to engage children in Visual Inquiry Discussion revealed significant challenges preservice teachers faced. The study explains the modifications the teacher educator made to her practice and describes the improvements in preservice teachers’ performance. Overall, preservice teachers reported successes in enacting the VID in field classrooms with pupils. This dissertation research adds to the literature on the relationship between teacher educators’ instructional practices for preservice teachers’ learning to enact an inquiry lesson with visual images in the elementary social studies classroom.