Observation Paper

5 Pages 1216 Words

As a prospective teacher I admit that when I first entered the teacher education program I thought of learning as memorizing, and understood teaching as showing, telling and performing. I admit feeling uncomfortable at the outset with the requirement to be reflective about past and current experience and practices, and with the expectation that I should be actively involved in the construction of my own professional knowledge.
A narrative and holistic orientation to teacher education is grounded in Dewey’s philosophy of education and his belief that we learn from experience and reflection on experience. As Dewy (1966) has explained: ‘[the] educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstruction, transforming experience’ (p.50), and this holds whether one is in a setting of teacher education, a high school or a kindergarten. As instructor, I emphasize the necessity for participants to understand the foundational concepts on which the courses are based; that the emphasis on reflective inquiry in learning to teach was established by Dewey in his work on conceptions of time, space, experience and sociality (Dewey, 1916, 1934, 1938a, 1938b).
A narrative and holistic orientation to professional learning is based on the education and development of the whole person who is becoming a teacher. The construction of professional knowledge is understood as a relational and interactive process where teacher, student and subject matter are interconnected (Schwab, 1971, 1983). Here, the particularities of personal and situational contexts are important. In the context of a curriculum for teacher education, this view challenges simplistic notions of a curriculum based on a set of theoretical and practical requirements, a course of study, or a list of competencies. It validates individuals’ experiences of schooling, their personal biographies and family histories, and experiences of growing up in different cultural envir...