Chapter 10: Freshman Survival Guide: A Multimedia Case Study Approach for Exploring High School Writing Instruction in Teacher Education

Preservice teacher instruction traditionally relies on instructors’ lectures, textbooks, and supplementary readings. While all of these resources are useful in providing much relevant content and information about instruction, many instructional practices often remain abstract to novice teachers (Kinzer & Risko, 1998). This is because these systems of knowledge transmission cannot always provide novice teachers with the opportunities of seeing instructional practices in authentic teaching contexts, analyzing decision making behind such practices, and learning on their own how to make such decisions for new instructional contexts. These skills are, however, critical for developing preservice teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987). As Shulman explains, pedagogical content knowledge “represents the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, adapted and represented for instruction” (p. 8). Like Shulman, Segall (2004) underscores the critical importance of understanding the link between content and pedagogy when he argues “that powerful teaching (and powerful means for learning to teach) are an outcome of recognizing that interrelationship” (p. 489).