Preservice Teachers’ Professional Development in a Community of Practice Summer Literacy Camp for Children At-Risk: A Sociocultural Perspective

Authors

Janet C. Richards, University of South FloridaFollow

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Children At-Risk, Community of Practice, Personal Interpersonal and Community Planes of Analysis, Sociocultural Theories, and Summer Literacy Camp

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Lorna Cole and Coleen Sams, doctoral students in the College of Education at the University of South Florida for their contributions to the reference section of this manuscript.

Publication Date

12-1-2006

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2006.1659

Recommended APA Citation

Richards, J. C. (2006). Preservice Teachers’ Professional Development in a Community of Practice Summer Literacy Camp for Children At-Risk: A Sociocultural Perspective. The Qualitative Report, 11(4), 771-794. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2006.1659