Introduction

Field experience plays an essential role in the whole pre-service teacher education program wherein they are furthering the professional preparation of teachers, and it is the most powerful learning experience for future pre-service teachers (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Hodges & Hodge, 2017; Lawson et al., 2015). Since the 1960s, an increased emphasis on field experience and clinical practice has been considered a way to improve teacher preparation.

University supervisors are uniquely situated to understand the intertwined nature of theory and practice in education. Many teachers have reported that student teaching experience was one of the most crucial aspects of their professional preparation (Hodges & Hodge, 2017; Lawson et al., 2015; Wilson & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001). As the representative of program commitments, the university supervisor helps student teachers synthesize concepts learned during coursework (Cuenca, 2012; Hodges & Hodge, 2017). As Abdal-Haqq (1997) pointed out,

Both school and university faculty engaged in schoolwork are frequently called “bicultural” or “boundary spanners” in the literature because they cross conventional lines of demarcation between school and university cultures and/or between roles within a particular culture. (p. 22)

Pre-service teachers participate in university course work and practice teaching simultaneously, and supervisors can draw upon fieldwork experiences to help them make connections between theory and practice.

The anthropologists are outsiders to the culture who were studying in traditional ethnography. I can relate to this situation as I identify as both an insider and an outsider when I instruct, supervise, and advise my American students. I am an “insider” in the teacher education program but an “outsider” of American school culture. I am originally from China, but I have been learning and familiarizing myself with the American education system since my doctoral studies in the USA ten years ago. I instruct teaching methods classes of PreK-3 and K-5 programs and have also served as a supervisor for students’ field experiences for several years. As a minority educator, I faced multiple challenges from the academic and research success of higher education areas and supervised student teachers at the local schools.

Research Objectives

The importance of supervision work, predominantly minority supervisors’ experience, is rarely acknowledged and valued; different ways to think about the nature of supervisors’ experience should be explored. Also, the increased use of technology, such as videos, remote observation, online supervision systems for assessment, faced some new challenges; therefore, it is needed to help supervisors identify their roles and responsibility in fieldwork and change the regular supervision and instruction style. Moreover, there seems to be a limited theoretical framework associated with supervision during the student teaching experience to explain the triadic relationship between student teachers, minority supervisors, and mentor teachers.

This study aims to better understand the different expectations the minority educators bring to the teacher preparation program and how their different background influences the pre-service teachers’ professional development. First, the chapter will reveal compare to the white supervisors, how cultural factors and backgrounds inform minority supervisors’ practices in the field placement. Moreover, there is a discussion about how the challenges and difficulties they faced influence the triadic relationship among minority supervisors, student teachers, and classroom mentor teachers. Finally, the chapter explores how the minority instructor/supervisor can balance instructing and supervision and use their diverse background to prepare their students to be significant future teachers.

Theoretical Frameworks

Foucault, Bourdieu, and Latour did not write about teacher education, but their theories could conceptualize the supervisor’s practices. Foucault’s and Bourdieu’s theory work together to understand how power flows in the field experience and influence supervisors’ expectations on pre-service teachers’ behaviors. Additionally, Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) theoretical lens investigates how different actors, mentor teachers, minority supervisors, and pre-service teachers, change their actions and relationship in the triadic social network.

Michel Foucault

According to Foucault (1982), “Power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of” (p. 208). In other words, power exists everywhere in society, and it operates in particular social contexts. The power has never been fixed in an actor, and the field placement includes student teachers, mentor teachers, supervisors, the local school, the university, children, parents, and the school district, where both large and small entities exist in a structured relationship and relate to one another.

Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu (2000) pointed out that a biological individual occupies a physical and social space position, even simultaneously several physical and social positions. For example, a pre-service teacher’s social position is both that of a university student and a temperate teacher in a classroom and cannot be separated from their physical position. Many participants in this research are both instructors of student teachers’ teaching method classes and supervisors of their field placements. Their physical and social positions overlap each other.

Bourdieu (1984) explained that the field could provide a framework to explain and understand how pre-service teachers establish their beliefs and then consciously or unconsciously normalize their behaviors. According to Bourdieu’s idea, when pre-service teachers enter into the new environment, their field placement has to change their behavior and even tastes to follow the new field’s rules. Also, social status and social class are essential parts of cultural capital, and they also impact people’s behavior and opinions. Most teachers in America come from a middle-class white culture, the mainstream American culture; therefore, middle-class whites’ ideology represents the foundation of teacher education programs’ educational courses and the local school’s classroom culture. Minority supervisors face the challenges of adapting themselves to the mainstream American culture.

Bruno Latour

Another influential theory dealing with actors in a complicated relationship is the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which treated objects as an integral part of social networks and explained how material-semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (Latour, 2005). Any actor can be considered linked with other actors, and different actors relate together in a network to form a coherent whole. The classroom is an example of a complicated system containing many components, such as mentor teachers, students, and pre-service teachers, all of which are virtually hidden from the pre-service teacher’s view, who deals with the whole class a single object. The relationships among the actors are not two-dimensional or three-dimensional; they are nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections. For example, the unique background of each pre-service teacher will influence the atmosphere of a classroom. On the other hand, classroom culture also influences pre-service teachers through the social interaction between all actors in the classroom.

Context of Research

Pre-service Teacher, Field Experience, and Supervisor

Pre-service teachers are enrolled in an undergraduate, graduate, or alternative-route university-based teacher education program but have not yet completed training to be teachers. Field experiences are defined as various early and systematic P-12 classroom-based opportunities in which pre-service teachers may observe, assist, tutor, instruct, and conduct research (Capraro & Helfeldt, 2010; Hodges & Hodge, 2017; Lawson et al., 2015). Field experiences are a crucial feature of teacher education programs due to their ability to blend theory and practice, promote reflection, and focus on student learning. It provides a good chance for pre-service teachers to transition from campus to school, from theories to practice, and from professionals in preparation to school reform agents. Sandhotlz (2011) examined writing documents from 290 pre-service teachers enrolled in a combined teacher credential and master’s degree program at a public university in Southern California to explore the potential value of preparing pre-service teachers to engage in reflective practice focused on student learning. The researcher demonstrated that field experiences are meaningful for encouraging students’ learning, getting compelling teaching experiences, and obtaining critical reflection for pre-service teachers.

Many literary works explore how to be a supervisor in a teacher preparation program and the supervisor’s crucial role. Elfer (2012) described the complexities of supervision and stated some troubles, travails, and opportunities he faced when he transformed from a classroom-based teacher to a field-based teacher educator. In his final section, he talked about the “value of collaborative inquiry, dialogue, and program design in the context of developing and problematizing effective field-based supervisory practices” (p. 3). His narrative shows how a new supervisor can mesh his beliefs of teaching with the goal of the institution’s program to support student teachers and unpacks ways in which collaborative inquiry and dialogue helped him through this initial experience with supervising student teachers.

Strieker et al. (2016) examined 15 university supervisors’ communication approaches with the pre-service teachers enrolled in P-12 clinical experiences. The authors concluded that after 20 h of professional training, these university supervisors primarily used collaborative and nondirective communication approaches to improve pre-service teachers’ teaching skills. Through the authors’ statements, people have a deeper understanding of supervisors’ real situation and their work; simultaneously, the argument makes supervisors rethink their work, communication approaches, and more flexible work methods with student teachers.

Triadic Relationship

Triad relationships between university supervisors, mentor teachers, and student teachers are another hot topic about the student teacher’s field experience. Schmeichel (2012) argued that the literature fails to reflect the complex context in which power circulates in the field experience. She drew on her own experiences as a field instructor and teacher educator to explore the use of power imbued in the supervisors’ position; the power shifts between the triadic relationship and will benefit each actor. She used Michel Foucault’s (1976) theory of power to explore the fluid and mobilized power within the student teaching triad and stated that the supervision spaces are saturated with power dynamics and complexities in which the supervisors can use power and mobilize it toward pedagogical goals. The power circulating in triadic relationships is inherent but fluid. Understanding, exploring, and accepting our power and responsibility might be an excellent way to deal with the conflicts’ triadic relationships.

Garrett (2012) introduced psychoanalysis as a theoretical framework to develop the physical and psychical spaces for student teachers’ supervision. He stated,

The ‘third space’ is simultaneously inside and outside of the normalized conceptions of time and duration; inside in the sense that it is presenting a productive possibility for subjective change, but outside in the way that it goes beyond what has counted as stable knowledge before. (p. 159)

The third space--student teacher, mentor teacher, and supervisor--shifts, and with each of those shifts come different forms of relating and relation. His argument provoked us to rethink the timing and spaces of supervision that might create different possibilities for field-based teacher education.

Field Experience and Course Work

Teacher education programs historically have been criticized for lacking the relation between course work and practical experiences. Real-life in school is often different from the knowledge shared in books. How might instructor/supervisor help the pre-service teacher connect their learned knowledge to real teaching is an essential step for their transition from teacher candidate to a real teacher and a crucial part of a university’s teacher preparation program?

Zeichner (2010) utilized the concept of “hybridity” and “third space” to make readers rethink the connections between campus courses and field experiences in college- and university-based teacher education. He argued that the old paradigm of university-based teacher education focuses on academic knowledge, which is viewed as the authoritative source of knowledge about teaching but ignores the nonhierarchical interplay between academic, practitioner, and community expertise. He suggested that we create expanded learning opportunities, the “third space” for prospective teachers, and help them enact problematic teaching practices.

Muted Voice of Minority Supervisor

Many literature pieces come from the supervisors’ own experience, but the minority supervisor rarely has a voice in recent literacy, especially in the area of P-12 teacher preparation education. Hernández et al. (2009) interviewed ten ethnic minority supervisors about their experience in clinical supervision. They suggested that “making diversity dimensions central to the supervisory process, deepening the exploration of self of therapist and identity issues, and providing more mentorship into the profession (p. 88)” will help minority supervisors deal with the dilemmas. Mcroy et al. (1986) examined racial and power dynamics that affect supervisory relationships for social work education and suggested enhancing learning and communication between supervisors and students in cross-cultural field situations.

Additionally, some literature touches on the topic of minority faculties’ experience in higher education. The literature explored the social and economic inequalities, issues of cultural conflicts, dilemmas about teaching in a different culture, and difficulties of the professional work experience the minority faculty faced (Gumpertz et al., 2017; Zambrana, 2015, 2018; Whittaker et al., 2015). The minority instructors and supervisors in this research are also the faculties or doctoral students in higher education settings; they may face the same issues which this literature stated.

Methodology

The chapter used the video-cued multivocal ethnographic methods. The 23 pre-service teachers registered in the Initial Teacher Certification Program in Early Childhood Education participated in this study. Also, there are eight University instructors and supervisors who attended the research. Four are White, and four are Asian. The white instructors’ and supervisors’ opinions are good comparations to understand the different expectations on pre-service teachers’ performance.

The pre-service teachers must videotape themselves teaching and submit a reflection paper on their teaching and videotaping experience as a part of their teaching methods class coursework. After collecting the videos and reflection papers, the researcher conducted the video-cued focus-group interviews with these pre-service teachers, instructors, and university supervisors. Tobin and Hsueh (2007) applied this method in their study; they claimed that, in this method, “the videos function primarily neither as data nor as a description but instead as rich nonverbal cues designed to stimulate critical reflection” (pp. 77–78). To guide the focus-group interviews, I used scenes from the videos, as they offered a visual aid for the questions, served to stimulate memory, and provoked reflection, placing more attention and scrutiny on the visible aspects of teaching. The interview questions include (1) What are the expectations for becoming an effective teacher? (2) How is video assessment impacting notions of teaching and teacher preparation, both positively and negatively? (3) How do you think about the importance of embodied aspects of teaching? This method is highly applicable to research on people’s multiple perspectives from different groups and may have various assumptions on the topic being discussed. In this study, each participant is both an insider and an outsider. She/he not only a person who was studied, videotaped, or interviewed but also an essential informant for the research and an expert on her/his practice.

The data for this study is videos and focus-group interviews. As has been mentioned already, I used the videos for the video-microanalysis and as cues for focus-group interviews. I used a camera and a sound recorder to record each interview and transcribed all of the interviews. I coded the results of the content analysis of the interviews in an Excel table and used a color-coding strategy to sort the data according to its relevance categories: expectations on the effectiveness of teacher; embodied aspect of teaching; video assessment, and others.

Position of the Researcher

There is still ambiguity about the nature of preparation for supervisors; in fact, supervisors need some powerful tools to understand their role and work. Ritter (2012) showed us an excellent example of using self-study as a powerful methodological tool to understand further being a university supervisor. The author first described the complex nature and aims of teacher education, and then she traced the origins of self-study, clarifies its meaning, and explains some typical motivations that drive teachers to study their practice. Ritter argued the pre-service teachers bring their biographies into the field, so it is difficult to build a model of learner-centered instruction within the student teaching triad; however, self-study is a potential method to develop and enact a pedagogy of supervision to response the varying contexts where clinical experiences take places. In this chapter, I also share some my personal experience to support the discussion in later.

In this research, I have had the opportunity to situate myself as an insider and an outsider. I was an instructor for the 23 participants and supervised them when they were placed in the local schools to complete their field experiences. As an “insider” in this early childhood education program, I have had the chance to participate extensively in major-related courses with pre-service teachers. Also, talking and working with the other instructors, professors, faculty members, staff, and other program supervisors has allowed me to know the program more intimately. Moreover, I have known and understood the real challenges and conflicts that take place in the field through my observation and discussion with pre-service teachers as their supervisor. Lastly, I have witnessed and taken part in the plans, decisions, and deliberations in adjusting the program and curriculum in teaching methods courses to adopt new changes in the program.

However, I am also an “outsider” in another sense. As an immigrant, I have had to familiarize myself with the American education system in my doctoral studies. The training methods and evaluating new teachers are quite different in the US and in my country (China), which allows me to bring a different perspective into the discussion. Moreover, I am outside of the pre-service teachers’ social group. Most of the time, the pre-service teachers do not see the supervisors as their peers; a supervisor is a person who may be evaluating them at any time. Supervisors and pre-service teachers belong to different roles and hold different views and preferences. Observing the pre-service teachers and interacting with them as their instructor and supervisor, I developed an insider’s perspective as part of the program; on the other hand, I stayed on the pre-service teachers’ periphery group as an outsider.

Results and Discussion

Different Expectations on Students’ Performance

The following two scenarios reveal people from different cultures have different explanations for students’ performance. The first scenario shows the different understanding of embodied teaching from American students and their Asian supervisors. These different points of view influence they choose a different strategy to manage students’ behavior. The second scenario shows the different expectations on students’ engagement between white supervisors and Asian supervisors.

Scenario One-Embodied Aspects of Teaching

One interview question is, “how do you think about the importance of embodied aspects of teaching?” The use of touch is an aspect of teaching young children that varies by gender, class, race, and culture. When I introduced touch as a classroom management strategy, some pre-service teachers in this cohort of mostly white middle-class were confused, as they carried the implicit belief that touching children was inappropriate. In the focus-group interview with supervisors, two Asian field supervisors were surprised by the pre-service teachers’ hesitation to use touch. A Korean supervisor said:

When I was a teacher, actually especially for young kids, touching is a very, very usual habit as a teacher but when I came here [to the US], I just think about it, is it true, Asian teachers’ body strategy? When I look back at my student video, yeah, it’s a little weird. Even though they sit closely, my students, they didn’t show much about the touching strategy and just gently called the boys’ names if they got distracted. They didn’t use many touching strategies. If a boy or a girl is so distracted, I hold him or her on my knee and just continue to teach with the group. But in this culture, in our students' videos, I cannot see that kind of moment.

A Chinese supervisor built on her respond,

I feel like these teachers in our program are very disembodied because this idea of using your body—how they use their hands, gestures, and gazes—has never been, like, strange to me when I was still a student teacher… Even as a student teacher, even in the planning process, if we are going to teach a lesson by our self, we spend a lot of time to think about materials, bodies, and children.

We need to be sensitive to cultural, racial, gendered, and social class differences in bodily techniques. As Mauss pointed out in his 1934 essay, the body’s techniques are characteristic of genders, professions, classes, countries, and cultures. For example, in traditional Anglo-Saxon culture, avoiding eye contact usually portrays a lack of confidence or certainty, whereas in Japan and many other cultures, people often lower their eyes when speaking to a superior as a gesture of respect (Moran, 2007), and prolonged eye contact may be a sign of anger or aggression. I understand why the two Asian supervisors felt surprised because I also came from Asian; however, the cohort I studied was relatively culturally homogeneous; the different cultural backgrounds influence their understanding of their minority supervisors’ expectations.

Scenario Two-Student’s Engagement

When we talk about student engagement, a white instructor remarked, I’m sitting here, I’m rocking the whole time. I can’t physically sit still, and so I’m always moving, but I’m actually engaged—I’m listening—and they were like, “You need to quit moving, you need to quit rocking, or fiddling.”

Along with others, this instructor suggested that the pre-service teachers needed to get better at observing and interpreting students’ behaviors. These novice teachers tended to direct too much of their attention to misbehavior and problems during teaching, causing them to give less attention to their lesson and children who were well behaved. Another white instructor commented,

The thing that always makes me nervous is that they use their videos as evidence as of what the kids are doing wrong. Like, “I couldn’t get them to sit down, they wouldn’t listen, they’re not listening.” No, wait. She is listening to everything you’re saying and she just answered all your questions, so what does it mean to be engaged? What is engagement?

If I just arrived in the USA, I will be surprised by their responses. In Asian culture, the students all need to sit still and not move around during class time or do their works, which shows their engagement to the lesson or task. However, I saw several times at a local school classroom, the kids sit on the rocking chair during a teacher’s lecture or doing classwork.

According to ANT, everything is an agent that can influence itself and other actors, so supervisors’ behaviors and expectations also shaped and affected pre-service teachers’ performance and beliefs in the classroom network. As the minority supervisor, she/he has to mesh his/her beliefs of teaching with the goal of the program and unpacks ways in which collaborative inquiry and dialogue with student teachers.

Creating a Field for Symbolic Interaction

Foucault’s idea of power is helpful to explore how the power shifts within the complicated triad relationship. In the classroom, mentor teachers have much power over pre-service teachers, especially when pre-service teachers are just beginning to access the field; they do not even have much authority over students. As time goes by, pre-service teachers get more power from mentor teachers and gain authority over students. On the other hand, power is productive and constitutive. Supervisors gain power from their previous experiences and background; in fact, their previous position and experiences confer their constructive comments to pre-service teachers. Also, a faculty member’s current role and position in a university program bring them new power. Especially when they go into the field for observation, they have much more power than mentor teachers. On the other hand, they are powerless when they go into a classroom as a stranger.

I taught and worked with the 23 participants in the same teaching methods class. Every week in this class, we discussed the issues they met within their fields and the concerns about their teaching, their students, and the course works. These experiences played a crucial role in mediating our interactions and scaffolding their collaborative growth as teachers. In Bourdieu’s terms, this creates a “field” where their practices came into virtual contact. As Bourdieu (2000) wrote:

The field is the space of a game where thoughts and actions can be effected and modified without any physical contact or even any symbolic interaction, in particular in and through the relationship of comprehension. (p. 135)

According to Bourdieu’s idea, when pre-service teachers and supervisors walk into a specific school, they have to follow that school’s culture. Different local schools have different cultures. Some local schools are traditional; even as they partner with the university and accept the interns, they still keep distant from the university. Nevertheless, some local schools have more friendly relationships with the university’s people. When a new person, supervisor, or pre-service teacher goes into a school with a relatively loose relationship with the university, they have to be very careful because they are guests in their classroom. While when a new person goes into a school with a close relationship with the university, they can walk in at any time and feel like they are a part of the school or classroom. Therefore, when going into local schools, supervisors and pre-service teachers have to pay attention to principals and teachers’ attitudes, school culture, and implicit rules, and then they have to adjust themselves to the new environment, to build a good relationship with them and adapt to the new field. When the supervisor is a minority, this complicated situation may become worse, because the supervisor is not only outside of the school culture but also an outsider of this country’s culture.

One of the advantages of thinking in terms of actor-networks is that we may get rid of “the tyranny of distance” or proximity. As Latour (1996) pointed out, elements which are close when disconnected may be infinitely remote if their connections are analyzed; conversely, elements which would appear as infinitely distant may be close when their connections are brought back into the picture (p. 4).

That is to say, actor-networks can transcend spatial limitations and relationships, which provides people with a notion of space that includes all types of relationships—both physical and social. I often have pre-service teachers, working in different field placements and with different mentor teachers and students, but encountered the same issues, had similar concerns and therefore had empathy for each other’s situations. When we are in the same program and course, we could share similar feelings, which creates a field in which pre-service teachers and I could engage in symbolic interaction. The actor-network theory explores the idea that a minority supervisor who is unacquainted with mainstream American culture enters the school. She/he feels remote from others because of the differences in our cultures, positions, beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. However, she/he may be spatially close with the student teachers because they are staying in the same program for several semesters.

Growth as Both Instructor and Supervisor

As Bourdieu (1984) stated, “Academic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school” (p. 23). Teacher education programs reinforce this kind of mainstream academic capital in their courses to cater to the atmosphere of current society and the school system. A person who comes from mainstream US culture more readily accepts the cultural capital and transfers it to the others; however, a person who comes from a different culture and class needs to spend some time learning and adapting to the cultural capital. I think it is dangerous if the teacher education program reinforces the mainstream academic capital to their students. They will find it challenging to meet all kinds of children’s needs and feel frustrated when they meet some cultural conflict in the field. Therefore, one crucial element of my teaching philosophy is helping students become sensitive to and appreciative of cultural differences and diversity. After they graduate, many of my students will teach children from different countries, cultures, social statuses, and backgrounds. I always encourage students to share personal experiences and present non-judgmental comparisons among different lifestyles, cultures, and school systems. For example, in a teaching method course, I shared my experience as an immigrant parent and asked my students what they know about different families they have met. This type of discussion allows learners to connect their previous knowledge to “new” or “unknown” cultural backgrounds. I take great care to ensure that students feel comfortable in class and are not intimidated in any way. I strive to create a comfortable and respectful environment in the classroom and respond to each question thoughtfully and encouragingly to gradually become more confident and readier to face diversity issues.

In the focus group interview, the different background instructors and supervisors shared different ideas about using video as a tool for reflection and video-cued practice. One instructor suggested that the pre-service teacher and her instructor watch videos of her teaching together, identify examples of effective and ineffective teaching strategies, and practice practical techniques. Another instructor asked his students to share their videos with the whole class, talked about each video’s practices, and encouraged classmates to offer their feedback. In this study, some participants said that their classmates’ suggestions during role-play and reviewing the video were very beneficial. The videotaping assignment was a useful tool for facilitating communication between pre-service teachers and their instructors. Supervisors and pre-service teachers might ordinarily miss some of the details captured on video, but when a lesson is recorded, they can sit down together to review the video and discuss the lesson’s issues. Also, the pre-service teachers can explain the context and share their thoughts about the lesson and their students with their supervisors, which can facilitate rethinking their lesson’s meaning. As one instructor commented, but just practicing with each other. They get the sense of their own voice, they get the sense of their own tone. When they address interact they get sense of how important eye contact is. And where their presence is, where their bodies are in space. Where their bodies probably their bodies can come in the presences or come in the attention or engage, so I think it’s (videos) really helpful.

Keeping the above considerations in mind, teacher educators need to make a serious effort to consider both the challenges and the productive applications of different pedagogical tools, such as video in teacher preparation. I learned a lot through different people’s sharing, which helped me expand my knowledge about the teaching profession, discover new teaching technologies, and add innovative ideas to develop new courses and curricula in the future.

Conclusions and Implications

Creating new roles for supervisors and finding out ways to bring academic, practitioner, and community-based knowledge together in the teacher education process is a timely topic in higher education. Building on Foucault and Bourdieu’s work, can better understand how power changes supervisors’ and pre-service teachers’ behaviors in field-based learning and field supervision. Additionally, it draws from Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) theoretical lens to investigate how different actors, such as cultural factors, the university, the local schools, mentor teachers, supervisors, pre-service teachers, and their different background change their action to transform field experience. This chapter aims to bring minority supervisors’ voices in exploring the impacts on pre-service teachers’ professional development. These voices must be given a hearing in the current context because the minority faculty can advocate for cultural equality in the school settings. The implications for understanding issues and difficulties of minority educators encountered and how to most effectively implement strategies to use their diverse backgrounds and views to help future teachers.

Even bring different cultural backgrounds to go into the field may bring different expectations on the pre-service teacher’s performance, minority supervisors can reexamine their roles and work responsibilities and cultivate dialogic spaces and interactive relationships in the supervision of student teachers. Additionally, as the university and program representative, the supervisor can create a useful field for symbolic interaction with their student teachers and add congruence between them and teacher preparation program goals. As the bridge between university and field, supervisors play a vital role in this process. Last but not least, as both instructor and supervisor, can scaffold pre-service teachers’ learning from their field practices and help them make authentic connections—to the different class environments, to each other, to their community, and to themselves—is facilitated by being purposeful and present-focused, as well as well-informed and non-judgmental regarding processes of learning and teaching.

As a fieldwork supervisor, I have spent much time with students in schools, helping them work through problems and difficulties in their school settings. I can encourage them to apply what they have learned in the university as much as possible to the classroom’s real world. Pre-service teacher’s learning is best stimulated in situations that require a new perspective. Students should step into unfamiliar territory in the classroom by participating in a wide variety of in-class activities that may require them to move around the room, make impromptu presentations, or approach a debate topic from a viewpoint other than their own.

In this study, all the research participants and the researcher were in the same program at the same university. This specific location is a context that undoubtedly shaped the participants’ and the researcher’s experiences and ideas. Therefore, more experience and more research are needed to help determine the most effective way for instructors and supervisors to help students draw out their field experiences’ most significant benefit. Teacher preparation programs also call for more practical and useful research, such as case studies or self-study, to deal with the problem between field experience and course work in the future.