Discovering Inquiry: How Pre-Service English Teachers Experience Teacher Inquiry Assignments

This dissertation includes a linking document and a collection of three manuscripts all built around a central focus of teacher inquiry. The linking document first presents the underlying conceptual framework of teacher inquiry as a practice in which teachers investigate issues arising in their own classrooms and schools. It also explains that the three manuscripts are all derived from the same set of data, collected by following a cohort of 15 English Education pre-service teachers (PSTs) through their two years of methods coursework, practice-teaching, and related inquiry assignments. The three manuscripts then follow, each examining a different element of teacher inquiry, as experienced by the cohort. The first studies the questions PSTs asked in their inquiry assignments. The second considers how PSTs describe students in the assignments. And the third explores PSTs’ descriptions of their relationships with students. Each manuscript includes its own prefacing abstract, written in adherence to the guidelines of the individual journals where manuscripts are planned to be submitted, and giving more details about the individual study.