It's Not All About School: Ways of Disrupting Pre-Service Teachers' Perceptions of Pedagogy and Communication

Source: Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 25, Issue 3, April 2009, P. 424-429

Many pre-service teachers enter teacher education with problematic or unexamined assumptions about learners and teaching. The paper reports on an authentic learning opportunity offered to 22 pre-service teachers in their first year at university, which attempts to disrupt these perceptions about learning and pedagogy. Using a new application of Butin's conceptual framework, the authors show that during the project these participants developed more complex notions of learners and ways of making meaning. The authors argue that these ‘real-world’ experiences, when offered before pre-service teachers begin practicum in schools, provide more ‘resources’ to problematise the practices and institutional discourses encountered in schools.