Theorising practice in initial teacher education

Abstract

Drawing on semi-structured interviews this small case study examines the perceptions of a group of trainees on the employment-based Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP) towards the close of their initial teacher education. Building on earlier work on the experience of secondary GTP trainees that had revealed trainees' ambivalence to 'theory', this paper examines what these trainees understood theory to be, and what they saw as the benefits from 'learning from experience', and more generally how they acquire professional knowledge. Findings suggest that GTP trainees were able to identify ways in which 'theory' had positively influenced their practice. Yet, we concur with Eraut's claim that most workplace learning occurs on the job and that this masks an uncertain interplay between formal and less formal elements of how trainee teachers learn on the employment-based GTP route studied here.

Pre-service teachers' reflections during field experience

“…The theory-practice gap is an important issue that has been discussed in many studies concerned with teacher education (e.g. Ashcroft and Griffiths 1989;Cheng, Cheng, and Tang 2010;Griffiths and Tann 1992;Smith and Hodson 2010). The pre-service teachers' comments on this issue can be summarised under two interrelated points: the difference between theory and practice, and putting theory into practice.…”

Postgraduate student teachers’ developing conceptions of the place of theory in learning to teach: ‘more important to me now than when I started’

“…In keeping with this, Smith and Hodson (2010) suggest an appetite among school-based student teachers for exposure to theory in situ. This, however, places greater demands on mentors to make these connections and, as noted by Jones and Straker (2006), considerable support and development may be needed before this becomes a reality.…”

“…Following the example of Laursen (2007), the decision was made to avoid introducing the word 'theory' at the outset and potentially creating a theorypractice dichotomy where none may have existed for the participants: a danger alluded to by Smith and Hodson (2010). Questions in the first interview, therefore, were carefully grounded in definitions of theory from the literature, but the actual term 'theory' was used explicitly only later in the research process, when spontaneously introduced and subsequently defined by participants.…”

Rethinking Research in Teacher Education

“…Its purpose was to better understand the implications of SD for university teacher education, towards rethinking the distinctive role of universities in teacher education. The work builds on earlier practitioner research studies by the authors, carried out over three years, which were concerned with how conceptions of theory had changed for tutor and trainees as a result of participation in an earlier school-based model (Hodson et al, 2012;Smith and Hodson, 2010;Smith et al, 2013a). Here knowledge was seen as relating to particular states of knowing that ultimately failed to meet the needs of new situations, provoking a break with earlier guiding principles towards creating something new through constantly revising the narratives that guided subjective connections to the world.…”