The Growth of Minority Supervisors: Supervision of Pre-service Teachers’ Field Experiences

Abstract

AbstractThe anthropologists are outsiders to the culture who were studying in traditional ethnography. I understand this since I identify as both an insider and an outsider when I instruct, supervise, and advise my American students. I am an “insider” in the teacher education program but an “outsider” of American school culture. I am originally from China, but I am immersing myself in my doctoral studies in the American education system. I instruct teaching methods classes and have served as a supervisor for students’ field experiences for around ten years. As a minority educator, I am faced with multiple challenges, especially supervising student teachers. The purpose of this chapter will explore the challenges of the minority supervisors’ growth and those influences on pre-service teachers. The research used the video-cued multivocal ethnographic method. I conducted focus-group interviews with university supervisors and the instructors of a teaching methods course. I presented video clips from students’ field teaching experience to the interviewees and discussed how videos impact teaching and teacher preparation notions. Additional data comes from my own experience. The chapter expands on Foucault and Bourdieu’s work to better understand how power flows in the field experience and how power changes supervisors’ and pre-service teachers’ habitus and behaviors. It also draws from Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) theoretical lens to investigate how different actors, such as the university, local schools, mentor teachers, supervisors, and pre-service teachers, change their action transforms the field experience.