Undergraduate Research for Preservice Teachers: Navigating Its Rich Complexity and Novel Possibilities

Learners grapple with ways of responding to the uncertainties that currently permeate their academic experiences. In that environment, preservice teachers (PSTs) strive to cultivate complex thinking to master their learning; simultaneously, teacher educators (TEs) wrestle to create instructional designs that facilitate meaningful outcomes. Both groups’ success occurs when they adopt frameworks and strategies that enhance the teaching/learning experiences. This chapter reports the results of a qualitative study, which aimed first, to uncover the features of one TE’s approach to the design undergirding a research-integrated preclinical secondary education course; and second, to analyze the implementation progression to illuminate those features that facilitated PSTs’ engaged learning. The findings uncovered the TE’s capacity to anchor the course redesign on elements of the RSD Framework, and PSTs’ capacity to persist across learning environments that integrated research thinking into habits of mind routines. These have implications for the responsive and thoughtful adoption of curriculum-based undergraduate research experiences, TEs’ role extension into curriculum design, and faculty-student partnership for academic success.