GATEways to Teacher Education

A journal of the Georgia Association of Teacher Educators do you incorporate authentic learning within your own courses?”

This study took place at Auburn University at Montgomery where all researchers were employed and teaching, at the time. The six researchers, who also served as participants, were selected based on two criteria: service in the same department and background in childhood education. While each served in very different roles, including early childhood education faculty, foundations of education faculty, reading faculty, intern supervisors/coordinators, and/or director of the “Early Learning Center” on campus, we each shared similarities in teaching experience.

In order to answer the question posed by this study, first, an informal conversation took place. Then, via email, each author provided a vignette that outlined a context and strategy used to promote authentic learning.

After data was collected, the principal author hand-coded each vignette using open coding, then compared the codes in search of commonalities and differences (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Yin, 2016). Following the initial analysis process, themes were created, and connections were made to the literature.

Voices from the Classroom: ACollection of Vignettes

Drawing upon their classroom instruction and supervision experience of pre-service teachers, the authors offered the following practical vignettes and experiences detailing how each brings authenticity to their course content.

Why do our classrooms emphasize book knowledge? More specifically, why is there a wall between what we learn in our classroom and what we have already learned at home and in our neighborhood? Why is it not possible for our children to learn about the diverse, cultural experiences that each child brings into the classroom? As an educator of 17 years, I have come to realize that real children with real lives and diverse life experiences occupy our classrooms across the United States. To heal the difference felt between the real world of each child and school knowledge, I believe that each child’s life story, imagination, and unspoken dream need to be the centerpiece of what is learned in educational spaces. We must celebrate every child who enters our respective classroom; we must champion children’s unabridged ideas that naturally emerge from classroom discourse. In my third year as an elementary school teacher, a child uttered, “Mr. Dueñas, why do you so often say, you believe in us? You do not even know where we live or what we do when we are not at school.” That child’s poignant question made me realize that children accord greater credence to what I say when I have come to know, understand, and authentically value their true selves. When I became an elementary school teacher in 2004, I came across Christensen and Karp’s (2003) publication: Rethinking School Reform: Views from the Classroom. Late at night or early in the morning, I reflected on each page of this publication and found a passage that to this day has guided my classroom pedagogy: “Ateacher cannot build a community of learners unless the voices and lives of the students are an integral part of the curriculum” (p. 61). Each successive year as an educator has given me the privilege to learn from my students’ questions, ideas, and hopes for a better world. Morris Massey (1976) once said, “What you are is where you were when.”