Teaching and Learning Simultaneously

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a collaboration process between a teacher education program and a university ESL program that attempts to increase teacher candidates' exposure to ELLs with “third space” as a theoretical framework. In third spaces, boundaries of teacher and student get blurred, and new ways of thinking about teaching and learning emerge. In the collaboration project that this chapter describes, the two teacher candidates regularly volunteered in the university ESL classes and taught mini-lessons to the ELLs while taking a class about ELL teaching. The qualitative analysis of the participants indicates that in the collaboration project, a university-based class and a field-based class were in sync by providing the participants with opportunities to immediately implement what they learned in a traditional class with the ELLs. In this boundary blurriness, the ELLs became from abstract to concrete in the participants' mind, and the participants became reflective practitioners.