Tímarit um menntarannsóknir - 01.01.2007, Page 56

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Tímarit um menntarannsóknir, 4. árgangur 2007
deal with these complexities (Wideen, Mayer-
Smith and Moon, 1998). Richardson (1996)
describes it as “a weak interaction [because it
is] sandwiched between two powerful forces –
previous life history, particularly that related
to being a student, and classroom experiences
as a student teacher and teacher“ (p. 113).
Having spent thousands of hours “observing“
teachers in action and after having lived in a
society where folk theories about other minds
(Bruner, 1996) shape people’s views, student
teachers tend to have deeply ingrained ideas
about what it takes to teach and what it means
to learn. Such deep-seated ideas, it seems,
are not easily dealt with because they are
embedded in our common ways of speaking
about schools and teaching. While participating
in university courses student teachers may be
captivated by progressive ideas, but such ideas
tend to fade away when brought into contact
with common sense discourses in schools
(Hafþór Guðjónsson, 2007). Accordingly, if
new and better practices, for example of the
kind proposed by How People Learn, are to
be realized, more effective ways of educating
teachers need to be developed.
Realistic teacher education
Many teacher educators look with a hopeful
eye toward the teacher education programme
developed at the University of Utrecht in
the Netherlands. There, Korthagen and his
colleagues have been developing a new
approach which they refer to as “realistic
teacher education“ (Korthagen and Kessels,
1999). Basically, the programme adopts a
framework similar to what How People Learn
advocates for schools in general. In short,
it rejects the common application-of-theory
model and subscribes to a model which gives
primacy to the ideas students bring with them
to the teacher education programme and the
ideas they construct when grappling with
particulars in a school environment. The key
to successful teacher learning, Korthagen
and Kessels (1999) maintain, is reflection on
concrete lived teaching experiences. Helping
the students elicit their ideas in this regard
and reflect on them in company with others
enables the students to become aware of their
prior conceptions and to go on to construct
new ones.
Epilogue
The Iceland University of Education is
in the process of reorganizing its teacher
education programme. The goal is to create a
programme that will encourage future teachers
to use research findings and adopt research-
based perspectives on learning to guide their
classroom practices. Realizing this goal, I
argue, is a formidable task that requires new
ways of thinking about teacher learning, for
example of the kind suggested by Korthagen
and Kessels (1999) and mentioned above. We
ourselves, the teacher educators in Iceland, are
not free of the cultural forces that tend to keep
people captivated in a certain way of thinking
and behaving. In particular, we tend to think
that just “telling them“ (the student teachers)
how they should think and act is enough; we
tend to assume that appropriate actions follow
automatically from propositional knowledge
accumulated somewhere in the brain. There is
now ample evidence to support the view that
assumptions of this sort do not hold. As a rule,
actions are socially and culturally mediated.
This implies, for example, that when a student
teacher enters a school and a classroom her or
his actions will not simply flow from what she/
he has imbibed from courses at the university.
Rather, the student teacher’s actions will be
mediated by a host of factors, including prior
knowledge, but also by factors that constitute
the school environment, physical aspects as
well as people. A thorough understanding
of these complexities, I think, is key if the
task is to build a strong teacher education
programme.

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