Collaborative Learning to Foster Critical Reflection by Pre-service Student Teachers within a Canadian–South African Partnership

Abstract

Teachers often enter practice with a narrow perspective of teaching. Through critical reflection, the minds of pre-service teachers can be opened to the bigger realities of teaching and social justice practice. Paired pre-service student teachers from two diverse university settings, Canada and South Africa, were immersed in a collaborative learning experience that involved exchanges through email, text messages, and artwork collages. As lecturers, we implemented action research to determine how to foster critical reflection by pre-service teachers from diverse education contexts. We anticipated the diverse contexts to serve as a disrupting incident in support of critical reflection and possibly also transformative learning. Findings confirm that the collaborative reflective learning across contexts supported the development of critical reflective skills and provided an opportunity for students to confront their own assumptions of ethical and moral teaching practice. Revised strategies are suggested to support deeper critical reflections in collaborative learning across teaching contexts to support transformative learning.

Sustainable Education in Higher Education: A Systematic Review on Reflective and Cooperative Learning

“…Reflective journal writing (RJW) also helps to gain insight how to become reflective practitioners. They are more comfortable to write as way to communicate and it went well (Kruger & Buley, 2022). The experimental group will be more motivated to learn if they work together frequently on learning assignments and are more engaged (Zafeer et al, 2023).…”

“…This systematic review reveals that reflective learning and learning has been integrated across various disciplines in higher education level [1][2][3][4]6,7,[9][10][11]13,14,[16][17][18]20,[22][23][24][25]27,29,36,39,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51]. The table below shows the 26 articles chosen and the disciplines they are in 4, English Language contributed the most number of studies to reflective and cooperative learning which are six articles [Murugaiah & Thang, 2010;Yaacob et al, 2021;Howlett, 2020;Singh et al, 2020;Hebert, 2015;Ryan & Ryan, 2011), four articles from the education field [Christensen, 2021;Hashim & Yunus, 2018;Fernandez-Dias et al, 2019;Greenberg et al, 2021), technology contributes three articles, [3,21,24], two articles about pre-service teachers (Canabate et al, 2019;Kruger & Buley, 2022) and others contributed to one article each. These conclude that both strategies has strong relationship.…”

“…Cooperative learning is one of the general principles of sustainability pedagogies which emphasises student-centred and interactive teaching and learning strategies (Yunus & Arshad, 2015). Besides, it open a space for reflecting on the actions that promote participation, collaboration and exchange between students (Danaher et al, 2021;Mauri et al, 2019;Kruger & Buley, 2022). For big sized classes, it is more practical to give feedback on their peers' works and exchange of ideas during discussion (Ryan & Ryan, 2011).…”

“…Beside that, it is also important for lesson planning, instructional delivery and lesson outcomes (Howlett, 2020;Xie et al, 2008). Relationship building due (Kruger & Buley, 2022;Mauri et al, 2019;Acob et al, 2022;Steel et al, 2019) can happened because of collaboration, communication and shared understanding. Partnership programme for example between university and school is helpful to build own's educational experience through collaboration (Resch et al, 2022).…”

“…As seen in articles (Ayres, 2020;Canabate et al, 2019;Godber & Atkins, 2021;Acob et al, 2022;Buckingham et al, 2021;Fernandez-Diaz et al, 2019;Quew Jones, 2022;Naziz, 2019;Steel et al, 2019;Howlett, 2020;Mauri et al, 2019;Resch et al, 2022;Kruger & Buley, 2022;Uday Younis, 2021), they are discussing about how reflective learning happens because of cooperative learning. The reflective learning is used to sustain cooperative pedagogical tools (Ayres et al, 2020) for beneficial self-reflective practice (Godber & Atkins, 2021), to improve instructional practices (Acree, 2019), to support transformative learning (Kruger & Buley, 2022) and so on. In general, reflection happens during cooperative learning to address the cooperative learning environment and to improve areas lacking in the sector.…”