| The recently defined knowledge base for teaching provided by the professional teaching standards requires that prospective teachers be given the opportunity to succeed with these standards, a task which falls upon the teacher education program (TEP). This case study of preservice foreign language teacher electronic portfolios describes and analyzes the knowledge types and knowledge sources the preservice teachers (PSTs) used to meet the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) Model Standards for Licensing Beginning Foreign Language Teachers. In addition to examining the knowledge types (subject matter knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge) and sources (subject specific teacher education courses, general teacher education courses, subject matter courses, teacher factor, fieldwork, experience as a language student, language teaching, study abroad, and other experiences) to discover if and where the professional knowledge base is addressed within the TEP, this study also builds upon prior research that examined the impact of teacher education coursework on PST knowledge growth, but using current standards. Finally, it provides information regarding the use of performance assessments in evidencing teacher standards.; Both qualitative and quantitative procedures and analysis were combined to better understand the content of the portfolios and how preservice teachers use them to show evidence of the standards. The four main research questions that framed the study focused on the knowledge types and knowledge sources discovered, as well as patterns among the types, sources, and standards, in addition to any implications the findings suggested for the TEP. As a result of the study, some principal conclusions can be drawn from the data. First, that the PSTs included a substantial amount of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in their portfolios. Second, the findings suggest the importance of subject specific teacher education courses, in this case, specific to the foreign language (FL) TEP. The FLTEP courses were found to be the greatest contributors to artifacts within the portfolios as well as to PCK. The strong showing of PCK is encouraging as it is considered to be the type of knowledge that distinguishes a language major from a language teacher (Shulman, 1986). |
