The Meaning Of 'good'

By Author: carling
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In early January of 2007 following a teaching practice block, we began the seminar by asking teacher candidates to complete a short survey on school impressions after this second practicum. Survey questions were designed to tease out how teacher candidates felt they had dealt with classroom management; we were also interested in learning about classroom dynamics, such as relations with students as well as with respective associate teachers. We also asked teacher candidates to reflect on specific events they remembered as embarrassing or joyful and to think about resources that would help them succeed as future school teachers. Our intent was to use their survey responses to discuss common themes. Before discussing their responses to the survey, the teacher candidates were asked to verbally offer one word that summarised their practicum experiences. These words were recorded on the board as they were given by each teacher candidate. The words were: 'excellent; exciting, good, enriching; rewarding; busy; a learning experience; unexpected; challenging; stressful'.

When each teacher candidate who had used 'good' to describe ...
... his/her practice teaching experience was asked to elaborate what was good about it, we were surprised by the outpour of stories none of which were any close to describing a 'good' experience. One after another, these teacher candidates started to openly discuss negative practicum episodes, which, however, had been summed up as good, and upon observing how surprised we were by the use of good to summarise negative experiences, the teacher candidates laughed. When we asked how they could call well something that was obviously bad, one candidate stated that 'this good [was] not [their] good, but a Canadian good' upon which the rest of the group nodded in agreement. Upon noticing that we had incidentally tapped on to a contradictory discourse (Gee, 1991) in which the articulation of an experience differs from the experience as commonly understood, we wondered whether we had missed similar incidents in previous seminars also. We then began to look closer at responses to the written survey to see whether or not there existed any statements of ambiguity or ambivalence, which however could be written using positive terminology such as 'good', 'fine' and so on. We re-examined the responses to the survey paying particular focus on candidates' responses to the question, 'Was your associate teacher supportive' We chose to focus on responses to this question because of knowledge gained from supervising candidates in their practicum where we observed that the associate teacher's attitude often determined the candidates' overall experiences. The fact that these associate teachers determine whether the candidates pass or fail the practicum component of the programme adds stress to an already challenging situation (for a detailed description of the role of the teacher associates see, for example Allen, 2008; Dlamini & Martinovic, 2007; Solomon, 2000).With years of experience in making delicate LV Replica Handbags, we are waiting to provide the crowning touch to your style. Just feel free to shop LV N40146 shoulder bag here.