Episode Fifteen: Dr. Kathryn Will and Dr. Robin D Johnson “The Importance of Social and Emotional Learning for Teachers: Impact on Learning Communities”
Let's Talk About Sociology of EducationShow Notes
My guests in this episode are Dr. Kathryn Will, Assistant Professor of Literacy education in the University of Maine, Farmington in the USA and Dr. Robin D. Johnston, who is Associate Professor and field based experience coordinator, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, USA. I was very fortunate to meet both Kathryn and Robin a couple of years ago at the Clinical Fellows symposium in the States at the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) in Atlanta in 2019 and again in Atlantic City in February 2020. Clinical Fellows started in 2015 with the Association of Teacher Educators in the United States and the purpose of it was to really focus on the value of clinical experiences to support the way professors within teacher education and administrators approach clinical practice/ school practicum. Clinical Fellows offers practitioners an opportunity to meet and make connections, network and share experiences. For me it was one of the most energising experiences I have ever had and wasn’t like a conference at all because it was wholly participative in nature and participant led and focused. It's all about facilitation “is not a sit and get opportunity, but instead, it is inquiry. It is the use of protocols, equity of voice in conversations and it's just incredibly generative in nature”. I was really pleased to have the opportunity to interview both Kathryn and Robin for the podcast and to discuss teacher education and teacher preparation with them.
In the podcast we focus on Clinical Practice in teacher education in the US and the importance of social and emotional learning for teachers, both practising and pre-service. They mention the importance of communities and how “it's not just about the academic content. It's not about just preparing the future teachers to consider what are the standards, how do we use curriculum or how do we plan instructional practices, but instead, it's about the community, the community within the classroom, the community within the school, the community within a larger area, town, city, whatever it might be”. Kathryn mentions how we all have to come back to ourselves first as teacher educators, and who we are, what our positionality is and “how who we are impacts what we do”. She also says that “if you talk to teachers, they know that social emotional learning is the absolute key to what we do, you cannot ask a child to do Math if their needs have not been met”. She talks about how she designed a course in her teacher education programme in the last year, called social emotional learning which was framed around the Casel framework. The Casel ‘five’ as they're known, are self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision making relationship skills and social awareness. “It's all about taking ownership of yourself so that you can then expand out and grow, they build upon one another, my greatest learning in the last year, was just how much the future teachers needed to think about this for themselves before we could actually talk about what it was going to look like in the classroom, that became very apparent”.
Robin talks about trans-literacy which is one of her research interests. This stemmed originally from the writing she does as sustainable professional development. About six years ago, she came upon the term of ‘trans-literacy’ which she defines as the fluidity of movement across a range of textbook technologies medias and contacts, which six years ago didn't mean as much even as it does today. She goes on to describe how; “And part of my oral language development course was, of course, the difference between academic language, formal language, and casual, you know, informal language and how our schools have this formal language, you know, kind of the school rules, versus our home has an playground and friend experiences have this more, you know, casual language, and understanding how to help students bridge the two, because trans-literacy is really defined by the situational, social, cultural
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