prior to May 11 between Denise and Amy Ithe female teacher-candidate) had
focused on a concern of Amy’s absences from her placement. In this email, Denise
shifts her concern from Brad to Amy’s pattern of absences. This shift became a rich
point for further analysis of the chain of these interactions. Like Brad, Amy was not
following the program’s policies on how to inform the program when she would be
absent.
The repeated nature of both exchanges to Brad, and then to her supervisory team
members, led to identification of indicators of points of tension between the
field-based team and the university program’s expectations. The requests to her
own supervisor and program director identified a tension that the students’actions,
or rather lack of action, had for her in fulfilling her positions as support for these
students as well as assessor of their performances.
At this point in the analysis, therefore, we, in our role as analysts, faced a
challenge in explaining how to understand the significance of these chains of
analyses. While they made visible a tension between the perspectives of different
actors, they did not provide sufficient contextual information on which to build
warranted claims about sources of the epistemological differences. This led us to
seek additional sources of information. One such source was identified when, on
May 12 (see Table16.1) Brad“Informs her that he places past lesson plans in a
folder in the classroom,”suggesting there was a norm at the classroom level that
was agreed to by the instructional team in the classroom as to what to do with
lesson plans and where they should be placed.
This message, therefore, created an anchor for the second telling case. This
telling case required us, as the insider–outsider ethnography team, to (re)enter the
archive in order to identify additional records where classroom processes and
practices related to team planning were referenced. This second telling case,
therefore, was undertaken to provide further contextualized information about the
students’work in planning from the angle of classroom actors in order to identify
how these classroom actions related to the requirement demonstrating competence
in lesson-planning and teaching from the lesson plans.
16.7 Telling Case 2
Based on analyses of the exchanges described in Telling Case 1, ourfirst step was to
return to the archive to identify any references in emails from the teacher at, or, around
this particular point in time (May 12) that might provide contextual information about
what was happening in the classroom that might have led Brad to keep the plans in the
classroom, even though he knew that he was expected to send them to the
university-supervisor prior to her observations (1–2 times per week). At the same time,
we sought to identify potential records from interviews with Brad or Amy that could
add further evidence into the relationship between teacher-candidate actions and uni-
versity requirements from the perspective of the mentor-teacher and/or
teacher-candidates.
246 L. Katz and J. Green