Session Information
WERA SES 05 B, Inclusive Education and Teacher Education, Learning From Each Other
Symposium
Contribution
What approaches to initial teacher education better support teachers to work in inclusive schools? In New Zealand, debates have swung between embedding and immersing inclusive education within and across a programme of study to focussed courses or papers on special education (and often including recognition of various impairments and their corresponding interventions). Increasingly evidence is showing what kinds of approaches do not work. Gallagher (2005) traces the development, impact and tenacity of the technical-rational view of knowledge on teaching and teacher-education. Within this view, good teaching consists of faithful adherence to prescribed teaching methods, using prescribed teaching materials. Students who do not demonstrate learning (perform well on assessments), but who have been taught correctly are examined to discern the cause of their failure. These examinations usually locate the problem/deficit firmly within the individual (and/or their family or cultural or social group). This view is consistent with the pedagogical discourse of deviance described by Skidmore (2002). In 2012, the New Zealand Government announced its intention that all schools would be inclusive schools by 2014. In 2015 we are still some considerable way from achieving this aim. The Government also signaled a potential step change in policy for initial teacher education, the move to a postgraduate qualification in initial teacher education with adaptive expertise as a core construct (Ministry of Education, 2013) ..The construct of adaptive expertise posits two contrasting types of expertise (Hatano & Oura, 2003). One was relatively routinized and technical in response to proposed problems and contexts. The other appeared to offer a more flexible and adaptable approach to such situations. Subsequent research indicates that the intentional and explicit development of adaptive expertise must be undertaken in a teaching-learning context that simultaneously focuses on, and interweaves, learner-centred, knowledge-centred,and community-centred experiences and practices. The implications for teacher education are significant. It suggests that to address these three conditions for the development of adaptive expertise, preservice programmes must: 1) ensure explicit engagement with student teachers’ prior knowledge, skills, and dispositions; 2) provide clarity and cohesion across the programme with respect to knowledge and conceptual frameworks, and; 3) consciously attend to the norms of learning environment, including establishing connections to the wider world that support the core learning values. In this paper we discuss the theoretical constructs and practical arrangements we have adopted in one New Zealand teacher education programme.
References
Gallagher, D.J. (2005). Searching for something outside of ourselves: The contradiction between technical rationality and the achievement of inclusive pedagogy. In S.L. Gabel (Ed) Disability studies in education: Readings in theory and method (137-154). New York: Peter Lang. Hatano, G. & Oura, Y. (2003). Commentary: Recoceptualising school learning using insight from expertise research. Educational Researcher, 32(8): 26-.‐29. Downloaded 21/11/2014 http://edr.sagepub.com/content/32/8/26. Ministry of Education (2013). Request for applications for provision of exemplary postgraduate initial teacher education programmes; Round two – 30. September 2013. Unpublished tender document. Skidmore, D. (2002). A theorietical model of pedagogical discourse. Disability, Culture and Education, 1(2), 199-131.
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