Session Information
27 SES 08 A, The Enactment of Practice in Teacher Education – Comparing Teacher Preparation in Multiple Countries
Symposium
Contribution
In the current paper we argue that in order to bridge the well-known “gap” between theory and practice, teacher education institutes need to advance student teachers’ ownership for learning, improve opportunities for enactment of practice, and facilitate continuous deliberating on practice in order to extract “patterns” from the teaching activities and to develop a theory of action. Such abstraction is needed to find the most effective strategies, rules or principles for practice as already proposed by Shulman[1] and summarized by Author[2] as action-oriented knowledge. Following, the guided reflection procedure[3], containing oral and written reflection assignments based on video recording of a lesson, was further developed in the course of an international research and development project and tested among 254 student teachers at five universities in different countries (Estonia, Finland, Spain and The Netherlands) during 2013 to 2014. More specifically, we addressed the following research questions: (1) What knowledge types do student teachers express in their oral and written reflections? (2) What is the role of mentor teachers and peer students in the process of developing knowledge based on practical teaching experiences? Student teachers’ oral and written reflections were analyzed following a pre-defined coding scheme containing six categories (recalls, appraisals, rules, artifacts, practical and theoretical reasoning). Significance of the study lies, firstly in introducing a new procedure that aids student teachers in constructing their own knowledge grounded in and from their practical experiences. This knowledge, in turn, supports future enactment and learning from teaching practices on entering the profession. Moreover, we show that mentor teachers and peer students have a crucial role in this learning process. The results of the study illuminate the importance of guided inquiry into artifacts of practice, thus providing insight into pedagogy of teacher education that supports learning from enactments of practice.
References
[1]Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14. [2]Author (2011). [Blinded for review purposes] [3]Authors (2008). [Blinded for review purposes] Authors (2014). [Blinded for review purposes]
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