The purpose of this study is to outline how teacher candidates (TCs) in required English as a Second Language methodology and special education courses negotiated their identity and agency in a year-long clinical teaching (YCT) teacher preparation program in inclusive classrooms in the USA.
We adopted Pantic’s (2015) agency and social justice theoretical framework and positioning theory (Davies and Harré, 1999) to analyze the experiences of TCs in the YCT program. On the basis of open-ended responses from TCs in pre- and post-field-experience surveys, lesson plans and teaching observations collected during their courses with the authors, the authors analyzed the data using content analysis.
The findings indicated that TCs had variable success toward developing their agency and identity as emerging teachers in inclusive classrooms as well as a social-justice orientation as outlined by Pantic (2015). The linguistic choices in the TCs narratives revealed their positionings and how they negotiated agency and identity throughout their experience in the YCT field toward becoming inclusive teachers.
Limitations of the study include a relatively small sample size of 31 TCs. Therefore, the findings may not be generalizable to other contexts. Additional limitations are that the TCs were all from PreK to 6 grades and from the same university, and data was collected from courses offered by the researchers as a purposeful sample. In future studies, the authors plan to expand the lines of inquiry to TCs from other universities with similar educator preparation models and TCs working in 7–12 grades.
The practical implications of the findings of this study lend further support to the effectiveness of the YCT model in TCs’ development of their identity, agency, and social justice focus toward becoming inclusive educators. Future studies should further focus on how novice or in-service teachers enact their identities and agencies within the classroom and how their evolving identity and agency affect their lesson planning, teaching and relationships within the sociocultural context of their schools.
The findings resonate with previous literature on experiential learning and situated learning. They are similar to what Wu (2020) found, “pre-service teachers can develop a great sense of personal efficacy” (p. 90), in clinical experiences. Many TCs in this study demonstrated confidence in their ability to advocate for their students as they experienced more time in the classroom and became better prepared to teach multilingual learners and students with disabilities. The YCT experience created authentic opportunities for TCs to work with students, mentor teachers and administration which they would not have experienced in a traditional classroom (Wu, 2020).
This study contributes to teacher education for inclusive classrooms literature in two ways. First, to the best of authors’ knowledge, it is the only model using Pantic’s (2015) framework on identity and agency for social justice education in an immersive field-experience setting. Second, it focuses on TCs’ linguistic resources during field experience using Davies and Harre’s (1990) positioning theory, bringing further attention to TCs’ discursive choices and negotiation of their emerging identity and agency as inclusive educators.
