Preservice Teachers' Experiences in a Required Reading in the Content Area Course

Abstract

Strong literacy skills are needed to be successful in the 21 st century. All teachers are charged with developing students' literacy skills and abilities. To help better prepare preservice teachers for this task, students at the University of Missouri are required to take a Reading in the Content Area (RICA) course. This intrinsic case study focused on preservice agriculture teachers who were nearing completion of the RICA course. Two focus groups were conducted with a total of nine participants. Four themes emerged from the data: 1. students held misconceptions and concerns that were dispelled, 2. the structure and content made it an impactful, yet incomplete, experience, 3. they recognized the importance of literacy in agricultural education, and finally 4) they were still hesitant to use literacy in their future classrooms. Recommendations for practice include: adding a literacy component to microteaching experiences, developing confidence surrounding literacy assessment abilities, and providing preservice teachers with literacy strategies specific to agricultural education.

The Effectiveness of a Metacognitive Strategy during the Reading Process on Cognitive Allocation and Subject Matter Retention

“…Reading is a fundamental learning skill for students in all disciplines; however, it is a necessary ability for the agricultural discipline (Gordon & Ball, 2017;Hasselquist et al, 2019;McKim et al, 2016;Park & Osborne, 2005;. Agricultural educators have been called upon to promote metacognitive strategy implementation to help students become active readers (Park & Osborne, 2005;.…”

“…Many of these topics have permeated into agriscience classrooms (Owens et al, 2017). Because agricultural students are expected to develop strong reading skills to understand and evaluate these critical issues (Park & Osborne, 2005;, there is a need to identify and incorporate more efficient instructional reading strategies into agricultural education to facilitate students' reading process (Gordon & Ball, 2017;Hasselquist et al, 2019;McKim et al, 2016;Park & Osborne, 2005;. For example, Gordon and Ball (2017) emphasized the importance of integrating metacognitive processes into agricultural education as a necessary component to enhance students' understanding of complex agricultural issues.…”

Will the First Through Fifth Years Please Stand Up? Quantifying National SBAE Teacher Experience

“…Some discuss experience with content (Lambert et al, 2014;Watson et al, 2015;Wells et al, 2013), while others discuss experience to assess teachers' professional development needs (Figland et al, 2019;Wolf et al, 2010). Notably, much of the research around teacher experience focuses on the pre-service teacher experience (Hasselquist et al, 2019;Rice & Kitchel, 2015;Sellick et al, 2017;Smalley & Rank, 2019;Smalley & Retallick, 2011;Swan et al, 2011). While this research is certainly beneficial, there is an obvious lack of consideration for a teacher's career progression once they leave a pre-service program.…”

Exploring Content, Pedagogy, and Literacy Strategies among Preservice Teachers in CASE Institutes

“…Literacy skills and strategies are foundational for quality teaching, yet many secondary teachers feel unprepared by their preparation programs to implement literacy strategies within their classrooms, and literacy strategy integration often runs counter to traditional secondary instructional methods (Buehl, 2011;Hasselquist et al, 2019). Practicing teachers purport various attitudes toward teaching reading in the content areas, including a) content area teachers cannot or should not teach reading, b) teaching reading is the responsibility of others, c) teaching reading in the content is important, or d) content area teachers would like to teach reading but do not know how (Hall, 2005).…”

“…(L. Busdieker, personal communication, 27 Feb 2019). However, reading in the content area courses often leave students with an incomplete experience, where they are hesitant to utilize literacy in their future classrooms (Hasselquist et al, 2019). CASE is an important source of literacy strategy training for agricultural education.…”