Session Information
10 SES 11 C, Research on Values, Beliefs and Understandings in Teacher Education
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper will present the findings of an investigation of student teachers’ changing perceptions of educational practice and the associated impact on their own emerging professional identity and values following a teaching placement abroad in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland or Romania during their one year Post Graduate Certificate in Education Course. Data has been collected from over 150 student teachers of both Secondary Geography or Science and Primary Languages within a University situated in an urban area in the North West of England. Research questions focused on the following areas:
Whether the experience of teaching in a different national context caused a shift in students’ perceptions and values and whether they articulated shared characteristics when evaluating the impact of the experience on their professional learning? Whether,through reflection and analysis of the differences and commonalties in the diverse cultural contexts, student teachers develop a greater understanding of their professional role and a deeper insight into their own values and beliefs about pedagogy? Whether the experience enables student teachers to develop their capacity for critical intercultural awareness and has the potential to transform student teachers who are in the early stages of their professional development, enabling them to develop a distinctly “Europeanised” identity?
Beijaard, Meijer and Verloop (2004) call for more attention to be paid to the role of context in professional identity formation; to “the professional landscape” within which teachers train. Teachers’ identities are constructed from their beliefs, values and practices, (Walkington, 2005) and the ecology of the classrooms in which student teachers train has been identified as having a major impact on their socialization (Zeichner and Gore, 1990; Sachs, 2001). The study draws on the work of Alexander (2000:27) who emphasises that by “making the strange familiar” we “make the familiar strange” and highlights the importance of a global and comparative experience and an “explicit comparative consciousness”. It also draws on Byram’s conceptual framework for intercultural citizenship, particularly the notion of tertiary socialisation which is described as; “offering learners the challenge that will make them rethink and unlearn….to de-familiarise and de-centre, so that questions can be raised about one’s own culturally-determined assumptions” (2008 : 31). Students who experience the bilateral exchange programme were considered as participants in a process of what Mezirow (1991, 2000) describes as “transformative learning” which begins with a “disorientating dilemma” and may lead adults to experience “perspective transformation”, a shifting of their “world view”. Through experiencing “otherness” the students learn to critique the ideologies manifest in educational practices and tentatively form their own ideology, based on their comparative experience. Brock et al. (2006) highlight the importance of “displacement spaces” as sites of critical reflection . In the case of our student teachers, this displacement space is both within a different cultural context and within an educational setting; this unique “vantage point” enables them to expand their cultural script and to question the dominance of any particular discourse.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Alexander, R. (2008) Reflections on Pedagogy, Oxford : Routledge. Alexander, R. (2000) Culture and Pedagogy, London: Blackwell. Beijaard, D. Meijer, P. Verloop, N. (2004) Reconsidering research on teachers’ professional identity, Teaching and Teacher Education 20, 107-128. Brock, C.,Wallace, J.,Hersbach, M.,Johnson,C.,Raikes, B., Warren, K., Nikoli, M and Poulsen, H. (2006) “Negotiating Displacement Spaces: Exploring Teachers’ stories about Learning and Diversity”. Curriculum Enquiry 36 (1), 35-6. Byram, M. (2008) From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural Citizenship: Essays and Reflections, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Byram, M. (1997) Teaching and Assesing Intercultural Communicative Competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Huberman, M. and Miles, M. (1994) The Qualitative Researcher’s Companion. London. Sage Publications. Mezirow, J (1991) Transformative dimensions of Adult Learning: San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Mezirow, J (2000) Learning as transformation, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sachs, J. (2001) Learning to be a teacher: Teacher Education and the development of professional identity. Paper presented as keynote address at the ISATT conference, Faro, Portugal. September 21-25. Walkington, J. (2005) Becoming a teacher: encouraging development of teacher identity through reflective practice. Asia-Pacific journal of Teacher Education 33 (1), 53-64 Zeichner, KM. & Gore, JM. (1990) Teacher socialization. In R. Houston (ed) Handbook of research on teacher education (pp.329-348). New York: MacMillan
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.