mail reflections At the beginning of their student teaching placements, the interns planned to send me weekly e-mail reflections about their experiences in the

classroom. I encouraged the reflections by providing prompts. While the interns replied quickly the first week, their response time became noticeably slower as their student teaching responsibilities increased. In order to alleviate some of the pressure they felt, I modified the number and content of the reflections I asked from them. Rather than reflecting each week, the interns completed five reflections over their eight-week placement. For the final two reflections, I had them submit the reflections they had to complete for their student teaching coach. This seemed to streamline their workload, and it allowed me to get a broader perspective on their teaching experiences. Because two of the four interns verbally expressed a desire for feedback in their work and teaching, I always responded to everyone’s reflections with questions and comments. This prompted several meaningful e-mail exchanges between myself and one of the interns, Rebekah.

Student work samples. I asked the participating interns to collect work samples from their students that represented their literacy teaching efforts. Although these work samples played a minor role in the analysis process, it was helpful to see the student artifacts that arose from the interns’ teaching.

70 Data Analysis

Naturalistic research does not make absolute distinctions between data gathering and analysis (Patton, 2002). Throughout the Block III course and the interns’ student teaching experience, I collected data and engaged in early analytical work. During the course, much of this analytic work was driven by the need to identify focal interns for the second phase of the study. I spent time revisiting my notes and reflections from class, listening to audio recordings, and reading student assignments. I noted significant contributions to conversations and mannerisms in which the interns engaged during course activities that seemed indicative of their receptivity (or resistance) to Whiteness and culturally responsive literacy teaching. This early and ongoing analysis led me to select the focal interns for the study. As those selected interns entered student teaching, my analysis focused more on reviewing data collected from the course to identify ideas and specific activities from the course that appeared to influence the interns’ literacy teaching experiences. In general, the analytical processes I engaged in during data collection were exploratory and tenuous since they overlapped with collection. The bulk of my analysis work occurred after the course and the interns’ student teaching

experiences were complete.

After collecting all of the data, I was able to spend more time immersed in the data and could consider both aspects of the study – knowing and doing. During this time, I reviewed, reorganized, and reread data. I listened to audio-recordings and transcribed the invitations and the intern interviews. I had the large group conversations, instructor- led small group conversations, focus group session, and mentor interviews transcribed for me, so I compared those documents with the original audio files to check for accuracy. I

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re-read the intern assignments most relevant to the intersections of culture and literacy. I reviewed fieldnotes and classroom observations and looked at the samples of student work collected from the classroom.

As Richards (2005) explains, “The goal is to learn from the data, to keep

revisiting it until you understand the patterns and explanations” (p. 86). Trying to make sense of the big picture and determine the classroom activities and literacy events that were most relevant to the case, I wrote memos about large group conversations and course documents, summarized invitations on notecards, explored the data through the theoretical lenses described in Chapter 2, identified key words and phrases (potential codes) from data at large, and arranged post-it notes with important words and activities, as well as index card summaries, around one large whiteboard in an attempt visualize connections.

As I worked to construct this holistic view, the research questions helped me to consider and represent the developmental process the interns moved through as they progressed from the beginning of the course, to engaging with course curricular activities, and eventally to student teaching. Table 6 presents my research questions, identifies the purpose of each question, aligns data sources with each question, and provides an explanation of why I selected those particular sources for analysis.

72 Table 6

Research Questions and Data Sources

Research Question Purpose Data Sources Rationale

Knowing 1

How are preservice teacher interns situated to explore Whiteness in relation to literacy at the beginning of the course?

To determine the interns’ attitudes and understandings at the beginning of the course

Two written assignments

1. Cultural autobiographies 2. Big understandings of

literacy

Rich documents provided insight on interns’ backgrounds, thoughts about diversity, and literacy teaching

Knowing 2

What understandings and visions of teaching do preservice teacher interns construct through their interactions with the course curricular activities?

To learn what

happens when interns investigate Whiteness in the course

 Three large group conversations about assigned readings

o Richert, et al. (2009) Part 1

o Richert, et al. Part 2 o Blanchett (2006)  Online forum about literacy

instruction for English Language Learners

 A Day in the Life invitation  Reflective freewrite and

accompanying small group discussions

The four structures represent some of the various activities used to infuse content within the course. The three conversations selected dealt the most directly with Whiteness in education and maintained focus on the topic and the text (not tangential). I selected the invitation because it also directly addressed Whiteness and felt the most representative of the types of learning and interactions that were present throughout the whole set of invitations. Both the forum and the freewrite data provided insight into the interns’ connections between course ideas and envisioned teaching practices.

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Research Question Purpose Data Sources Rationale

Doing 1

How do preservice teacher interns actualize literacy instruction in their student teaching placements? To understand interns’ implementation of literacy instruction during student teaching

 Notes from one observation of each intern

I focused the analysis on a small teaching segment that was the most representative of the ways I saw each intern address culture in her literacy teaching across my visits.

Doing 2

How does the interns’ literacy instruction during student teaching show evidence of course ideas and

understandings?

 Intern-specific data from Knowing 2 subquestion  E-mail reflections  Informal conversations  Intern interviews  Focus group session

Each of these data sources contained segments of information relevant to the subquestion.

Doing 3

What supports and constraints do preservice teacher interns experience related to the implementation of culturally responsive literacy instruction?

 Mentor observations  Mentor and intern

interviews

 Intern observations  Informal conversations  Focus group session  E-mail reflections

Each of these data sources contained segments of information relevant to the subquestion.

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These research questions also guided the trajectory of my analysis. Although I initially anticipated coding for themes across the data as a whole, I found that the

individual questions and their related data sets revealed and promoted the analysis much more than a singular coding approach allowed. However, because my analysis work did involve so much coding of individual data sets, I found it useful to use NVivo software which allowed me to develop a coding tree that I could use across data sets. While many codes were actually specific to an individual data set, others carried over to multiple data sets. In this way, NVivo served as a useful tool for building an expanded coding tree that represented and accommodated the various kinds of data that I collected and analyzed in this study. Though I explored the possibility of grand themes across the data using NVivo, these themes emerged more concretely as I considered the individual analyses within the study. The following paragraphs explain the analysis strategies used to address each research question while concurrently describing the organization of the findings by chapter.

Chapter 4 provides an answer to the Knowing Question One which considers the interns’ attitudes and understandings at the beginning of the course. The autobiographies were a rich data source about the interns and their histories of participation (Rogers & Fuller, 2007). I broadly read these documents to look for patterns and themes across the class. I noted key words and phrases on post it notes and organized them to find

commonalities and idiosyncrasies across the documents. As for the interns’ literacy understandings, I retyped these documents into a Word document which I then coded using NVivo. Because the interns discussed similar ideas in the assignments analyzed in Chapter 4, it was easiest to present the findings in terms of dominant themes, major

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themes, minor themes, and idiosyncratic themes. Table 7 describes the criterion for each theme indicator.

Table 7

Theme Indicators and Criteria

Indicator Criterion

Dominant Nearly all of the interns’ thinking aligned (90% or over)

Major Most of the interns described the theme (over 50% but less than 90%)

Minor Some of the interns developed the idea (over 30% but less than 50% Idiosyncratic One or two voices developed the idea but it was particularly relevant

to the topic (less than 10%)

Chapter 5’s analysis addressed Knowing Question Two and provides a glimpse of what happened when the interns investigated Whiteness in the course. In an effort to present a depiction of the interns’ course experience, I sought to represent a wide range of course activities. I identified four different structures that played a pivotal role in

exposing the interns’ to concepts related to Whiteness and connecting cultural

considerations with their classroom literacy instruction: large group conversations, online forum discussions, invitations, and a reflective freewrite assignment. After identifying the most meaningful learning experiences within each structure, I analyzed each structure individually expecting to use similar codes across the structures. However, because each structure was unique and the individual data was particular to a given activity, there was great variation between the structures. This led me to reconstruct the themes and write a descriptive summary of the findings from each structure individually. In this way, writing became an integral part of my analysis.

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Writing about the themes and findings from each structure individually allotted me the opportunity to look for meaning across them, meaning that was not accessible by coding and seeking broad themes. The work of St. Pierre (2005) supports this notion of “nomadic inquiry.” She explains that “a great part of that inquiry is accomplished in the writing because, for me, writing is thinking, writing is analysis, writing is indeed a

seductive and tangled method of discovery” (p. 967). The findings in Chapter 5 emerged because, in the words of St. Pierre: “I wrote my way into particular spaces I could not have occupied by sorting data with a computer program or by analytic induction” (p. 970).

The analysis work for Chapter 6 involved sorting, organizing, and compiling relevant data from a variety of sources in order to present a thick, rich description of the interns’ student teaching experiences. Analyzing the data from the three Doing

Questions helped generate descriptions of the interns that showed their implementations of literacy instruction during student teaching.

Finally, Chapter 7 provides a synthesis of the findings across Chapters 4, 5, and 6. Chapter 7 discusses implications for theory, teacher education practice, and research resulting from the infusion of critical multiculturalism into a literacy methods course.

Trustworthiness

Throughout the research process, I implemented the following strategies to account for the accuracy and credibility of my findings:

1. Triangulation of data: I collected multiple forms of data from a variety of sources. Having multiple sources and modes of data allowed me to compare

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and integrate findings across different data types and participants’ perspectives.

2. Thick, rich description: I attempted to provide a thorough description of the setting, the case, and the participants in order to enable readers to determine how this work might be relevant to other settings (Stake, 1995).

3. Member checking: I had several opportunities to discuss emergent findings with Diane and Susan both during and after the Block III course. Their feedback at times affirmed my interpretations of the data and at other times pushed me to ask more questions, look more intently, or choose a different path of inquiry. I also had the opportunity to meet individually with each focus intern from the study the semester following the study. During those meetings we discussed my early interpretations of the findings from the course, and they offered insights on the accuracy of those findings.

4. Researcher reflexivity: I know that my own experiences, biases, and thoughts influenced this study. Therefore, I attempted to be self-reflective and

transparent as I wrote, even if, at times, it meant admitting my own short- comings as a researcher, a collaborator, and an infusion-model literacy methods instructor.

Summary

This chapter introduced the case study design I used to frame this research study. In addition to providing insight into my methodological choices, the chapter also

introduced readers to the course instructors and the study participants, the Block III interns. Because of my past experience with the course and relationships with the

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instructors, this chapter also defined the “neither and both” role I assumed as a researcher within the context of the course. I concluded the chapter by sharing the data collection techniques and analysis strategies I used to find and share meaning from the interns’ course and student teaching experiences. The next chapter provides a closer look at the interns’ attitudes and understandings at the beginning of the course.

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CHAPTER FOUR: INTERN READINESS FOR CONSIDERATIONS OF THE