Supervision and assessment of the early childhood practicum : experiences of pre-service teachers who speak English as a second language and their supervising teachers

Findings are reported from the third phase of a small exploratory study that aimed to understand how pre-service teachers from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, and those who supervise them in early childhood settings, experience practicum assessment, and the extent to which practicum assessment takes into account pre-service teacher diversity. Discourse analysis (Foucault, 1972), applied to interviews with pre-service teachers and supervising teachers, revealed a persistent ‘discourse of denial’ of cultural difference on the part of supervising teachers, who nevertheless genuinely attempted to negotiate the inevitable challenges posed by the supervision of CALD pre-service teachers. The paper concludes that supervising teachers were at pains to produce and perpetuate a liberal humanist discourse within which all human beings are ‘the same’ or should be equal, even as they attempted to recognise CALD pre-service teachers’ learning styles and needs.