On Monday, March 22, 2010, I presented a paper titled Beyond “repeating the textbook” and “problem-solving”: Teacher candidates talk about learning to teach physics. The abstract to the paper follows:

The way that science teachers learn to teach is profoundly influenced by the effects of what Lortie (1975) called the “apprenticeship of observation.” Teacher candidates’ long experiences as students in schools serve as a powerful acculturation into a dominant culture of teaching and learning. Science teacher candidates come to pre-service teacher education program with a default set of ideas about what science teaching and learning look and feel like. This paper is an in-depth study of how physics teacher candidates’ visions of teaching physics develops over the course of a B.Ed. program with a particular emphasis on how they construct professional knowledge during field experiences and in the context of a physics curriculum methods course. The results indicate that the practicum, a familiar and often unquestioned feature of teacher education, tends to encourage candidates to adopt conservative views of education. Attention to student-centred, active-learning pedagogy in a methods course, however, has the potential to disrupt many assumptions about teaching and learning. This paper considers the notion that coursework need not be perceived by teacher candidates as irrelevant to their development as teachers. A coherent pedagogy of teacher education can help candidates to reframe their understandings of how to teach.

Thank you to everyone who attended the presentation.

Download the paper | Download the audio podcast (21:48)