Transformations in Teacher Candidates’ Development as Literacy Teachers in a Summer Literacy Camp: A Sociocultural Perspective

In this inquiry I applied an innovative sociocultural framework to explore transformations in preservice teachers’ development as literacy teachers as they worked with children at-risk in a summer literacy camp. The camp incorporated a community of practice model in which teams of master’s and doctoral students mentored small groups of preservice teachers. In this study I explored preservice teachers ’ learning following Rogoff’s (1995,1997) notions of the personal, interpersonal, and community planes of analysis. I also employed a postmodernist crystallization imagery to capture multiple perspectives on the preservice teachers’ growth as literacy teachers. The study assigns importance to the contextual dimensions in which learning takes place, and emphasizes learning is nourished by interactions with others.