Peace Corps fellows enter the urban classroom: Learning to teach by the authority of experience.

Abstract

This self-study by a beginning teacher educator focuses on the clinical supervision of three secondary science teachers in urban classrooms. The study is premised on the belief that reflective practitioners are researchers in the practice context and that teacher educators, no less than teachers themselves, need to engage in systematic, intentional self-reflection in order to improve their own practice. Both the author-supervisor and the teachers are part of an alternative certification and masters degree program custom-designed for returned Peace Corps Volunteers called The Peace Corps Fellows/USA Program. The dual worlds of the public-innercity-science classrooms and the large-midwestern-university-education classrooms constitute the context of the study and interface with three significant areas of educational research: science education, teacher development and urban education. The study is informed by multiple sources of data collected over an eighteen month period: 20 interviews, 5 focus-group sessions, over 60 classroom observations, portfolios, and journal entries. The results are reported in a series of critical vignettes, or short stories. This experimental format is in keeping with a phenomenological stance of describing events with attention to the details as a way of conveying a situation as accurately as possible. Such attention to the details is deemed absolutely essential for capturing the nuances of the atmosphere, the feeling of the reality of the present and the mood, i.e. Heidigger's Befindlichkeit. Findings of the study challenge the implicit assumption that overseas teaching experiences in the Peace Corps enhance return volunteer's first semester transition in U.S. urban teaching, document constraints imposed by the large bureaucratic high school against efforts of the teachers to establish science learning communities in their classrooms, and describe the conceptual change which took place in the three teachers' understandings of the nature of science and student-centered teaching. From these findings, the author makes the practical proposal that peer critiquing and collaboration such as focus groups may be an effective alternative or addition to one-on-one clinical supervision.