English Education - Volume 47, Issue 1, 2014

University teacher education programs are the “foremost settings for learning how to teach” (Smagorinsky et al., 2003). Yet, how to prepare preservice teachers to teach writing has received little attention from literacy researchers. Despite research reviews for reading teacher research, currently one does not exist for writing teacher education. This article attempts to address this gap by presenting a 20-year literature review (1990–2010) of peer-reviewed studies focused on preparing preservice teachers to teach writing.

In this qualitative study, we examined preservice teachers’ articulations of what it meant to teach literacy in urban settings and the roles that we as university instructors played in their understandings of the terms urban, literacy, and teacher. We framed the study within extant studies of teacher education and research on metaphors. Data indicated that the participants metaphorically constructed literacy as an object that could be passed from teacher to student and that was often missing, hidden, or buried in urban settings. Implications of the study suggest that faculty members are one factor among several important influences in preservice teachers becoming professionals, and the metaphors faculty use in teaching preservice teachers deserve careful consideration.

The authors address the age-old problem of theory and practice in the perceptions of English preservice teachers and the teacher educators who wish to best prepare them for school settings.