Learning While Teaching

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to describe a collaboration process between a teacher education program and a university ESL program that attempts to increase teacher candidate exposure to English learners (ELs) with “third space” as a theoretical framework. In third spaces, the boundaries of teacher and student get blurred, and new ways of thinking about teaching and learning emerge. In the collaboration project that this chapter describes, the three teacher candidates regularly volunteered in the university ESL classes and taught mini-lessons to the ELs while taking a class on EL teaching. The qualitative analysis of the participants indicates that in the collaboration project, a university-based class and a field-based class were in sync by providing the teacher candidates with opportunities to immediately implement what they learned in a traditional class with the ELs. In this boundary blurriness, the teacher candidates became the owner of their own practitioner knowledge, rather than the borrower of the existing academic knowledge.