Video Research in Disciplinary Literacies: Volume 6

To share activities to support preservice secondary mathematics teachers’ (PSMTs) participation questioning discourse, which consists of (a) modeling and engaging students in mathematical discourse and activity, and (b) supporting and assessing students’ development of conceptual understanding.

PSMTs typically struggle to develop fluency in participation questioning discourse, despite having it modeled for them by expert teachers in mathematics education courses. Using Gee’s Discourse Theory to conceptualize this problem, we developed the iterative model of See it, Try it and Reflect on it (STaR) to create learning activities in a methods course that engage PSMTs in viewing and reflecting on videotaped mathematics lessons.

PSMTs increased their fluency in participation questioning discourse through viewing and reflecting on videotaped lessons using the STaR iterative model.

The STaR model is a promising framework that can be used to design learning activities to help preservice and inservice teachers acquire fluency in discipline-specific pedagogical Discourses.

To demonstrate how teacher candidate narratives in response to videos depicting science and literacy instruction can be used to both teach and evaluate beginning teachers’ emerging conceptions of disciplinary literacy.

Teacher candidates viewed and responded to videos depicting exemplary practice in science education and then videos of their own practice. Qualitative discourse analysis was used to investigate the science teacher candidates’ interpretations of problems of practice, their views of scientific literacy and understandings of their students.

The teacher candidates displayed distaste for textbooks, reinforced by negative experiences with textbooks in school settings, and yet they viewed textbooks as essential for effectively teaching knowledge about science. At the same time, each viewed the natural world as the ideal “text” for teaching knowledge about science, at times compensating for the weaknesses of textbooks and at other times entirely replacing textbooks as the source of knowledge about science. We consider what this means for preparing teachers for effective subject matter and literacy practice.

Video reflections like these demonstrate that what teacher candidates understand about video representations of others’ and their own teaching are far from literal and are interpreted through the educational and background lenses of the teacher candidates’ themselves. We suggest that a great deal more work needs to be done to better understand how to use video reflection to best develop teacher candidates’ conceptions of subject matter and literacy practice.

To explain how digital video editing can help foster reflective pedagogical thinking for pre-service teachers (PSTs).

PST education has emphasized reflective thinking, particularly through the use of video as a means to view teaching vignettes. As the process of editing videos involves recursive viewings and numerous multimodal choices in representing the raw footage, this chapter outlines two disciplinary PST courses (English and science) where they used digital video editing to create narratives of and reflect on their teaching lesson.

PSTs who edited their teaching promoted reflexive thinking about their content learning, provided a means to critique their teaching context, pedagogy, and assessment, and served to shift their attention from PST as learner to student as learner.

Using digital video allows teachers, through the recursive process of editing their footage, to emphasize reflection on content area learning, planned and enacted pedagogy, and context-based and learner-centered approaches to teaching.

This chapter calls attention to how creating a digital story, which focused on teaching and learning spaces for writing, served as a mediational tool to support preservice teachers’ reflective practice and understanding of writing and the writing process.

Data from over 50 students were parsed using Kember, McKay, Sinclair and Wong’s (2008) approach to determine levels of reflection. From the students whose work fell into the reflection-to-critical reflection range, we selected three students from different disciplines and adopted a case study approach for analyzing and discussing their work. Students’ informal and formal reflections and learning artifacts, as well as researcher field notes, contributed to a rich understanding of each case.

Review of students’ digital stories and related artifacts (i.e., storyboards, scripts, and reflections), as well as other course-related work, revealed that digital storytelling facilitated students’ developing understanding in three dimensions: writing, pedagogy, and reflective practice.

The findings suggest that digital storytelling can engage students in multimodal iterative practices analogous to the writing process that cultivates reflective thinking. Activities that scaffold such iteration and cross-literate practices can foster reflective thinking about inspired pedagogy within and beyond the classroom.

To examine the ways in which video supported an interdisciplinary literacy intervention for struggling high school students in re-engaging youth in school and developing academic literacy.

This chapter draws on an ongoing qualitative case study of the two classrooms that comprise the high school literacy intervention, presenting strong inductive themes as to the central goals of the program and the role of video in facilitating those goals.

Video was a crucial resource in a type of “spiral curriculum” (Bruner, 1996) that explored a relevant and engaging year-long theme by moving students from informal reflection and discussion to formal academic writing.

Video can be a crucial resource for helping teachers rethink what texts and topics “count” in the literacy classroom. For students positioned as “at risk,” this move can help a literacy classroom to reframe students’ academic identities and find relevant contexts for developing academic literacy.

The purpose of this chapter is to identify the pedagogical approaches that foster critical reflection using video among the pre-service teachers during tutorials.

The research is situated in a school-based teaching programme in which pairs of pre-service teachers taught small groups of primary aged children over a period of seven weeks. Volunteer pre-service teachers videotaped their lessons and selected video excerpts to share with their peers in the tutorial. The educator guided the pre-service teachers’ reflection using the video. A case study drawing on interviews with pre-service teachers and audio recordings of tutorials, charted the development of pedagogical decisions made by the educators to promote reflection.

The pre-service teachers had difficulties undertaking deep reflection of their own and peers’ teaching practice. The response by educators was to promote collaboration among pre-service teachers by discussing specific aspects of the teaching in small groups and to use a jigsaw approach. This enabled a deeper analysis of particular elements of the lesson that were then integrated to produce a more holistic understanding of the teaching. The video data are most suitable for reflection and provide valuable evidence for pre-service teachers to develop their practice.

For pre-service teachers to develop effective skills to analyse their own practice they need to experience teaching in a safe but challenging environment, over a sustained period; have opportunities to develop a shared understanding of what constitutes quality teaching; have opportunities to critically analyse their teaching in discussion with peers and educators and be able to be guided by a framework of reflective strategies.

To explore the use of video-stimulated reflection during read aloud activities in early childhood to promote self-awareness, reading comprehension, and metacognitive literacy practices.

The increasing visibility and accessibility of video recording devices across learning environments is the cause for investigating their potential utility as effective instructional tools. This chapter outlines a pedagogical approach to the implementation of video reflection in early childhood education. Grounded theory is used to build an understanding of how video can support effective emergent literacy and metacognitive strategy instruction.

Video recordings facilitated students’ reflection. Common reflective themes include revisiting the recorded event in reflective discussion, elaboration on story elements toward increasing comprehension, and explaining students’ own thinking. These findings indicate students’ ability to engage in emergent practices fundamental to a disciplinary literacy perspective.

The use of tablets as a video device in early childhood can be utilized to promote reading instruction and metacognition. Video reflection can leverage practices that are necessary for disciplinary literacies.

To determine the key aspects of writing as a disciplinary literacy evident in videotaped peer talk during the writing process.

Sixth-grade students talk with peers during the writing process, the peer talk is videotaped and played back to the participants, and students reflect on the impact of peer talk on their writing.

This study gains sixth-grade students’ perspectives on how they experience talk in the disciplinary literacy of writing. Students use the content knowledge of writing and discuss habits of thinking specific to the disciplinary literacy of writing.

These findings are from a sixth-grade classroom, under the guidance of an exemplary English language arts teacher who encouraged daily writing and peer talk. Without these instructional routines and classroom talk, alternate findings may emerge.

This chapter makes a significant contribution to the field of writing as disciplinary literacy and the use of video as a mediational tool. The chapter foregrounds the voices and perspectives of sixth-grade students to understand how students themselves experience and view talk in the context of disciplinary literacy of writing.

University methods instructors emerging from disciplinary silos (art, English, mathematics, science, and foreign language) co-created a seminar to support candidates’ using video reflection. They explored how the Inquiry into My Practice protocol (IMP) could be used as a vehicle to surface Three Durable Practices critical for educators: intentional collaboration, instruction, and reflection.

Grounded in an interactional ethnographic perspective, this analysis draws on two telling cases to examine how the faculty team and teacher candidates co-constructed an intentional ethnographic learning community using physical and video-based practices (TeachingChannel.org).

Three Durable Practices came to life in the IMP, and through this shared and coherent conceptual approach, candidates made visible their process for bridging the disconnected worlds of theory and practice as they took up video analysis of their teaching.

Orienting across disciplinary boundaries to a shared conceptual language with associated protocols, faculty and candidates are afforded approaches to navigate their face-to-face and virtual worlds of practice.

To examine – through video – the literate life as a school administrator through the use of multimodal interaction analysis (Norris, 2004) and dramaturgical metaphors (Goffman, 1959) in order to address how school administrators use language – both verbal and nonverbal language – to negotiate the roles they play with various audiences in daily interactions.

While studies on communication in school administration focus on its practical, relational, and logistic aspects, they tend to neglect the truly complex nature of literacy, communication, and social interaction. Through the use of video, Multimodal Interaction Analysis (MMI), and dramaturgy, it is possible to capture and analyze language use in its totality – to explore how it truly works on the stage of school: a constant, overlapping marriage of nonverbal and verbal communicative modes that cannot be divorced and should not be examined separately. This chapter provides a progressive approach to help school administrators understand how their verbal and nonverbal language affects the interactions they have with various audiences every day.

The autoethnographic study revealed the intersection of language and leadership in the life of a school administrator. It also showed how video, multimodal interaction analysis, and dramaturgical metaphors can help educational leaders understand their own literate lives through new lenses and how they can grow from that understanding.

Continued studies using video, multimodal interaction analysis, and dramaturgical metaphors can further illuminate the complex language practices of school leaders and provide unique lenses to examine other school-based and non-school-based social interactions, so we can better understand the myriad roles we play and the language we use to negotiate those roles.

To describe how a digital storytelling project used in preservice elementary literacy methods courses expands the notion of video reflection and offers an intentional zone of contact in which preservice teachers create their own idealized vision of their future classroom.

Using the multimodal text as a point of departure, each researcher used a different analytical method to approach the data, allowing for examination of different aspects of the product and process of digital storytelling. These analysis methods include theoretically driven analysis based upon theories of Bakhtin (1981) and Vygotsky (1978), metaphor analysis, and performative analysis. This chapter describes the findings from each analytic lens, as well as the affordances of the multiple research lenses.

The results of the study shed light on how preservice teachers constructed a dialogue around their beliefs about themselves as teachers and visions of their future classrooms. The space between the real and the imagined provided a critical writing space where preservice teachers were able to vision their evolving identity and make visible their negotiation of intellectual, social, cultural, and institutional discourses they encountered. These artfully communicated stories engaged preservice teachers in creating new meanings, practices, and experiences as they explored possibilities and imagined themselves in their future classrooms. In these compositions, the preservice teachers maintained, disrupted, and/or reinvented classroom contexts to accommodate their own understandings of literacy teaching and learning.

The zones of contact that were consciously created in this digital storytelling assignment allowed teacher educators to provide the cognitive dissonance which research shows makes teacher beliefs more amenable. Additionally, asking preservice teachers to engage in the type of analysis described in this chapter may prove to be a useful avenue for helping to make the negotiation that took place during the composing of the digital stories more explicit for the preservice teachers.

To describe the use of a Composer’s Cut video as a tool for reflecting on and celebrating one’s experience creating multimodal compositions for personal and social audiences.

Two adolescents designed and produced digital video stories about their prior experience composing a webpage and a multimodal literary analysis hypertext in response to the Vietnam war novel, The Things They Carried.

Each student remixed Camtasia screen capture video, class video, and images, enhanced with text overlays and music, to showcase their unique vision as a multimodal designer and to highlight their composing processes. They viewed the Composer’s Cut video as a powerful vehicle for reflection and appreciated that their videos would have a public audience.

Reflection often tends to be oral or written. Digital video supports students in showing, as well as telling their experience through multiple modes. The Composer’s Cut video is one example of how video might be used for reflection that is both personal and social.

To describe the use of digital video as a tool for preservice teachers to examine their own literacy learning (rather than teaching) practices in order to document the potential benefits of developing observation skills and metacognitive awareness.

During a literacy methods course, preservice teachers engaged in literature discussions. They then analyzed video of discussions to identify their processes, the effectiveness of their talk, and areas needing improvement. Content analysis was then performed on discussions, responses, and reflections about video as a learning tool.

The preservice teachers engaged in varied discussions, subsequently evaluating their practices in sophisticated, contextualized, and personally relevant ways. They articulated multiple benefits of video to enhance their roles as both learners and teachers. While examining their learning practices, they frequently shifted focus to teaching.

Digital video allows preservice teachers to reflect independently, generate theory about practice, and compare their practices to those of others, both peers and students. By analyzing their own learning, teachers can develop empathy toward students, discover the relative benefits of assignments, and model personal learning.

This chapter describes a new video-coding tool, Edthena, and how two teacher preparation programs adopted and implemented this technology. We present our successes and our missteps to help other teacher preparation programs learn from our experiences.

Multiple stakeholders were involved in the implementation of Edthena: teacher candidates, cooperating teachers, university supervisors, and university course instructors. Each of the authors of this chapter fills at least one of these roles. Each author reflected on his or her use of this tool, and we collaboratively analyzed our reflections to ascertain successes and lessons learned in the implementation of a new tool.

We found that Edthena provided many enhancements to traditional teacher candidate field experiences and internships, most notably more consistent and richer reflection on and communication about instruction.

When implementing a new technological tool, teacher educators need to be very strategic and intentional in introducing the tool. All stakeholders need to know the benefits of using a new tool and also require clear guidelines for its use to reduce the natural tendency of resisting change.

To provide a video reflection model based on interactivity for teachers to facilitate disciplinary literacy and a culturally responsive pedagogy during video reflection. The model presents multiplicity of voices within the context of classroom activity crossing boundaries to expand teachers beyond their zone of proximal development for enhanced pedagogical practices.

Expansive learning as model of learning originates from the Cultural Historic Activity Theory framework. It enables viewing learner–teacher–technology interactions embedded within classroom walls that embrace diverse socio-cultural-historical practices. Given its connectedness to a responsive teaching-learning approach the model is adapted with the tenets of interactivity to help teachers with a professional learning tool to include, promote, and expedite pedagogical practices that reflect learner background through video reflection.

The video reflective model using four central question and five principles of the expansive learning matrix examines the various interactivities during a science class period to embrace and enhance a disciplinary literacy approach to teaching. The chapter provides details of opportunities on how the teacher uses this model to adopt a disciplinary literacy and responsive pedagogy approach. It provides directions on how to improve learner–technology interactivity and assist teachers to orchestrate other classroom technologies along with videos as teaching and learning artifacts.

Knowledge construction occurs in spaces that are hard to identify, that is to say that it is difficult to measure when, why, and how knowledge construction happens. By identifying, drawing connections, and making interconnections of the various activities and interactivities from their classroom worlds to lived practices through the tenets in our proposed reflective model the teacher will initiate, facilitate, and eventuate expansive learning and teaching processes. Thereby videos can highlight teacher’s motivations and contradictions when paired with this model and promote the examination of one’s practices to cross-boundaries that embrace the dynamics of learning and knowledge construction as and when it occurs.

To provide an understanding of how video recording can be used to mediate university level teacher development for language learning in diverse classrooms.

This study draws on cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 1999) and the subsequent professional development literature to conceptualize video as a tool for self-reflection and critique to further learning. This chapter outlines how video analysis can be used in inservice teacher education to investigate the micro- and macro-interactions with English learners.

We found that utilizing various forms of analysis on a single video from the classroom can help teachers build connections between the micro and macro processes and implications of language in classrooms with English learners. Additionally, by studying videos of classroom activities, teachers learn how linguistic theories and particular instructional and assessment tools can be implemented in their own classrooms.

Videos can be a powerful tool for teacher educators and professional development experts because they allow for the analysis and reflection of a variety of analytic levels. Additionally, this study provides evidence that videos can be used to anchor otherwise discrete university coursework and bring cohesion and collaboration throughout the curriculum.

In this chapter, we describe how a rubric-style observation instrument for observing classroom writing instruction was used to focus and optimize collaborative video analysis sessions among teachers and researchers spread across six states. As part of a three-year Institute of Education Sciences (IES) development grant, we used videos of classroom instruction both as data for researchers studying the nature and impact of a specific instructional approach, Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI), and as a vehicle for collaborative teacher professional development – for both teachers and teacher leaders.

By tying video analysis to a shared observation instrument, we were able to target video clip selection for discussion and focus our analysis to support teachers across several states and school settings implementing a new approach to writing instruction. After a brief overview of the project for which videos were used, we describe the tools and protocols developed over time to ensure the efficient and powerful use of collaborative video analysis. We also share our experiences on the nature and outcomes of these collaborative sessions both in terms of teachers’ involvement and changes in practice over time.

We argue that the use of a common rubric to guide video clip selection, discussion, and analysis allowed teachers to strategically engage in “data reduction” – that is, not be overwhelmed by the amount of video data – and to use the videos as catalysts for conversations as well as evidence of what works well for individual students. As researchers, these sessions allowed us to ensure collaborative video analysis sessions were focused, efficient, and growth-oriented as well as sources of data for understanding trends in challenges and trajectories of growth for teachers implementing a new approach to instruction.

This work illustrates how researchers can use video for dual purposes – to conduct literacy investigations and to provide teachers with professional development involving video review and reflection.

To describe how a defined video reflection prompt for preservice mathematics teachers shaped their reflective writing, which was examined using academic reflection as a genre model.

Academic reflection as a genre model was used to unpack the reflective processes evident in preservice teachers’ written reflections on a practicum teaching experience in the context of a methods course assignment, prior to any formal instruction about reflective genre. This chapter examines how the quality of participants’ reflective writing corresponded with two promising products of reflection – the accuracy of participants’ claims about the effectiveness of instructional tasks used during teaching and the quality of suggested revisions to the lesson.

The findings indicate that the extent to which participants engaged with the required parts of the assignment corresponded with the accuracy of their claims about the effectiveness of instructional tasks and the quality of revisions they suggested to the lesson. The authors discuss the writing produced by the participants, providing examples from their reflections to demonstrate preservice teachers’ initial competencies in using genre.

Informed by the nature of writing produced by the participants, the authors extend the model of reflection as a genre and suggest how it could be used to teach preservice teachers to effectively structure reflective writing. Furthermore, the authors offer recommendations for how to define the video reflection prompt to serve as a more effective scaffold of preservice teachers’ analysis of student learning.