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Tracking: Its socializing impact on student teachers, a qualitative study using in-depth phenomenological interviewing
Abstract
This study explores the experience of student teachers working in a track-system, and the meaning they make of that experience. A track-system purportedly separates students according to ability and interest. Most studies of tracking focus on the impact on students. This study focuses on tracking's impact on student teachers. In order to gain access to the meaning and understanding of the student teachers' experience with tracking, three, ninety-minute, phenomenologically based, in-depth interviews are conducted with each participant. This model of interviewing operates on the assumption that a person makes meaning of his or her experience after reflecting on the constitutive details of that experience. Of thirty-one participants, twenty-nine work in a track-system, while two teach in heterogeneous classrooms. The interviews reveal how student teachers' prior experiences with a track-system in high school influence their relationships with students. Some student teachers are uncomfortable working with students in the lower tracks. Some talk about how they do not understand the students in the lower track but feel more comfortable with students in the upper tracks. Student teachers discuss how their cooperating teachers inform them about the kinds of teaching tasks and activities students in different tracks are capable of. The cooperating teachers identify for student teachers those students who will succeed and those who will fail. The classroom students also affect the student teachers' attitudes. In the student teachers' eyes, students exhibit and model the "expected" behaviors of that track. These behaviors become the basis for how some student teachers respond to students. Student teachers often work in schools in which the policies of tracking remain hidden. These policies affect the content of their courses and their evaluation schemes. The two student teachers' experience of working in heterogeneous classrooms offer a qualitatively different experience from the participants working in a track-system. Their experience calls into question the role of the organizational context and the student teacher's biography in understanding student teacher socialization. This study shows how the track-system impacts on the emerging pedagogical practices of student teachers and has implications for teacher education programs.
Subject Area
Teacher education|Secondary education
Recommended Citation
O'Donnell, James, "Tracking: Its socializing impact on student teachers, a qualitative study using in-depth phenomenological interviewing" (1990). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9110199.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9110199