Diversity-Oriented Mentoring of Student-Teachers
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | The diverse educational landscape represents a challenge for student-teachers, as dealing with learner diversity requires specific skills to be developed during pre-service teacher education, especially at their clinical placements, where the role of mentors in supporting reflective practice is also crucial. Our research, therefore, deals with the question of how mentors support student-teachers in developing their skills for working with diverse pupils. The paper is based on multi-sited ethnography at a university and lower-secondary schools in Czechia. Data corpus is composed of 80 video-recorded lessons of 8 student-teachers, 60 post-lesson reflections of student-teachers with their 6 mentors; 60 lesson preparations; 40 student-teachers reflective diaries; 8 interviews, and 55 lessons of university courses. Six researchers took fieldnotes from all activities; the notes were subsequently discussed in the team. The findings show how interactions between mentors and student-teachers during teaching and post-lesson reflections influence both student-teachers’ beliefs of how to deal with diversity and their classroom practices. We identified several ways student-teachers/mentors deal with diversity while teaching. Student-teachers’ “socialization” into different modes of dealing with diversity is influenced by the mentors’ teaching approach and mentoring style. The analysis showed explicit pieces of advice given by mentors, as well as implicit practice modelling. |
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