Lived meanings: what teachers mean when they say they are learner‐centered

While the term ‘learner‐centered’ is invoked in many curriculum standards documents, packaged curriculum materials, mission statements and criticisms of educational practice, there is little agreement on its meaning. Shallow understandings and conflicting practices abound. And rarely do the meanings ascribed to the term take into account the meanings of thoughtful teachers who live learner‐centered approaches daily in their work. Here we introduce lived meanings of learner‐centeredness found in the personal and professional histories of experienced teachers. Data were gathered in interviews that took the form of focused conversations which yielded elaborated stories and reflections that suggest that learner‐centeredness is a concept that cannot be captured in finite, static, unquestioned definitions. The teachers’ lived meanings are expressed in fine‐grained detail, are embedded in particular settings and the teachers’ own personal and professional histories, go beyond surface features of practice and are in motion and unfinished. Taken together, these lived meanings have the potential to challenge and deepen current understandings of learner‐centered practices. Further, they have the potential to bring humanity, humility and integrity to the work of those who engage in these practices and of those who would support or criticize them.     

Explicating Students' Personal Professional Theories in Vocational Education through Multi-method Triangulation

Students in competence-based vocational education are expected to actively construct a personal professional theory, in which they integrate different types of knowledge and beliefs. Students' personal professional theories are seen as an important learning outcome of competence-based vocational education. However, it is unknown how personal professional theories can be measured. This study focused on measuring the content and nature of students' personal professional theories using a multi-method triangulation approach, in which 16 students in the domain of Social Work constructed a concept map, an interview and a self-report. The results show that the relatively structured methods (i.e., interviews and concept maps) reveal more insight into students' personal professional theories than less structured methods (i.e., self-reports). It is concluded that both structure as well as adequate prompts are important in the process of explicating personal professional theories.     

Language Teacher’s Information Literacy in the ICT context

With the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology(ICT),the modern information and communica tion media have been changing the rationale of learning and teaching.Under such circumstances,a person’s,especially an educator’s in formation literacy plays an important role in their personal and professional development.This essay discusses the influence of the new challenge on EFL(English as a foreign language) teachers’professional development.EFL teachers should be fully empowered to be infor mation literate language educators in the curriculum innovation of TEFL(teaching English as a foreign language).It is suggested that EFL teachers’awareness,attitudes,and personal needs should be taken into account in the process of integrating ICT into their professional practice and self-development.     

Experiences of master’s students regarding clinical supervision in an applied psychology programme in South Africa

This study explored and described the experiences regarding clinical supervision of master’s students in professional psychology programmes in South Africa. Four participants were purposively selected from four different universities. The participants engaged in reflective writings and in-depth interviews over a one-year span. Data were analysed through interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Findings indicated that supervision, as compulsory pedagogical activity for these students, serves an essential purpose, as it was identified as the main contributor towards their professional developmental journeys. Interpretation of the findings yielded themes of significance across cases. Identified themes are emotional support, self-acceptance, autonomy and personal growth. Themes were contextualise within broader educational theories as well as within professional career developmental theory in psychology. While becoming a psychologist is known to be a difficult journey, the results indicated that it can also be rewarding, and holds the potential to enhance growth which can be unlocked by the supervisory relationship.     

Let’s begin with ourselves: attempting resonance responses in the exchange of researchers’ professional autobiographies

The economic, social, cultural, technological and labour changes experienced by Spanish universities in the last 40?years have had their impact on the professional lives of the university teachers. Our methodological decision to study, through the construction of life histories, how scholars cope with social and institutional changes in their professional lives led us to start by writing our professional autobiographies which were followed by a resonance practice in which each of us wrote a response to a partner’s autobiography. Results show that our responses appeared to have three different functions: give some feedback to our partners, tell our group our position about our partner’s autobiography and make sense of it for us. It became clear that writing about our resonance responses is a difficult task for academics like us and that our texts were bound by the position each one occupied in the research group and at the university. Our experience lets us rethink the interweaving of reflexivity, personal practical knowledge and resonance. The tension between our academic rationality and our efforts to give spontaneous resonance responses shows that even with narrative researchers, changing one’s personal practical knowledge may conflict with a rationalist point of view.     

关于以口腔内科学为导向的PBL教学的几点思考

随着社会的不断发展,医学的不断进步,口腔医学在我们的生活中也发挥着越来越重要的作用.口腔内科学是口腔医学重要的一部分,也是在人们日常生活中应用较广的一门医学学科.通过调查分析可以看到,近年来人们的口腔疾病普遍较多,口腔内科学也慢慢的为人们所熟知,然而口腔内科学的高素质专业人才却较为匮乏.口腔内科学的高素质专业人才的输出主要是依靠当前的各大高校,因此,应该从高校相关专业的教学抓起,为社会提供高素质的专门人才.PBL教学是一种较为实用的教学模式,能够有效的促进口腔内科学相关专业的教学工作,提升学生们的专业技能与综合素质.本文就能结合当前高校内口腔内科学相关专业的授课情况展开对PBL教学的具体分析与探讨.     

教师个人教学哲学：必要与可能

教师个人教学哲学是教师对教学基本问题的个体性认识。教师个人教学哲学的缺失主要体现在教师对教学方法的迷恋和教学思想的混乱。教师对个人教学哲学的追求可以促进教师的专业发展,提升教师的生命质量,推动基础教育课程改革。教师应转变对哲学的态度,重视哲学之思,对身体力行和外部倡导的教学理论及其哲学根基进行持续地反思和批判,并在此基础上逐步形成自身对教学基本问题的认识。     

教育叙事:从教育研究方法到教师专业发展方式

教育叙事是一个相当模糊混乱的概念.本文通过追踪教育叙事的来龙去脉,历时性地揭示教育叙事概念的变迁以及分析我国教育界对教育叙事认识误区,认为对于教师而言,教育叙事是促进专业发展的方式.教师进行教育叙事能锻炼观察日常教育生活的能力,帮助洞悉个人实践知识,提高反思探究能力,提升课程意识.     

(Re)conceptualisation of ELT professionals: academic high school English teachers’ professional identity in Korea

This study investigates Korean English teachers’ responses to the current English Language Teaching (ELT) policies and reveals the attributes of their professional identity from their responses. Data collected from different narratives demonstrate that the teachers value the principles of communicative language teaching, but are not supportive of teaching English in English and do not regard oral competence as a prerequisite for ELT professionals, both of which are the main concern of the current policies. The teachers emphasise human education, having practical knowledge and willingness to learn something new, and using different methods or materials depending on the students’ needs and levels. These understandings of the meaning systems of their professional identity provide some implications for the establishment of professional standards and desirable pedagogies, as well as the reform of the English curriculum. First, broader attributes of the teachers’ qualities need to be reflected into professional standards. Second, the state needs to form a partnership with the teachers that leads to producing a more feasible and coherent curriculum. Third, to be accredited as professionals, English teachers’ active reflection on their own teaching is indispensable.     

Overarching professional identity themes in student teacher workplace learning

ABSTRACT

This study reports on how student teachers learn in the workplace. Data from 10 student teachers were collected by means of digital logs and in-depth interviews. By reconstructing data into stories and unravelling these stories, it became clear that the learning process of each student teacher was dominated by one specific theme, such as student-centred teaching or creating a positive learning climate. These themes could be typified as professional identity themes, because all appeared to be both personal and professional. Five student teachers experienced their workplace learning process as continuous: they integrated their teaching experiences relatively easily into their personal conceptual framework. The other five experienced their workplace learning process as discontinuous: they experienced tensions caused by frictions between personal and professional aspects of becoming a teacher. Both types of learning can stimulate and hinder student teachers’ professional development. The findings indicate that reconstructing data into stories and unravelling these stories is a useful technique for understanding student teacher workplace learning as a result of the interaction between personal and professional aspects of becoming a teacher.     

Learning and transition in a culture of playful physicists

It has been argued that in higher education academic disciplines can be seen as communities of practices. This implies a focus on what constitutes identities in academic culture. In this article I argue that the transition from newcomer to a full participant in a community of practice of physicists entails a focus on how identities emerge in learning how to highlight certain aspects of personal life histories. The analysis of interviews with 55 physicists shows that physicists often perceive experiences in their childhood as the first step into their professional identities as physicists. These experiences involve recollections of the ability to think scientifically (e.g., ‘go beyond the surface’), and the ability to play with toys which can be connected to the practical life of physics. The process of identity formation can be described as developing in a relational zone of proximal development, where old-timers recognize particular playful qualities in newcomers as a legitimate access to a physicist identity. The article discusses how play which physicsts connects with a scientific mind can constitute a relational zone of proximal developments in a community of practice as a particular “space of authoring” in a physicist culture, which cut across other cultural differences.     

The influence of teachers’ interests,personalities and life experiences in intercultural languages teaching

This paper reports on a study that investigated teachers’ perceptions about the significance of intercultural understanding (IU) in the modern foreign languages (MFL) curriculum. The research was conducted in the wake of a National Curriculum revision in 2007 in England that for the first time listed ‘IU’ as one of the four key concepts underpinning the study of languages in the Programme of Study. In contrast to other writers who frequently explain MFL teachers’ attention to intercultural learning as a consequence of their (lack of) knowledge about intercultural languages theory or pedagogy, or as the result of contextual factors, our findings suggest that the significance attached to IU seems to be profoundly affected by the interests, personalities and life experiences of individuals. This finding emerged from a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 teachers in 13 secondary schools in the North-West of England between May 2008 and June 2009. We illustrate our point by mapping the narratives of four teachers, conveyed through pen-portraits, with an adapted version of Kelchtermans’s personal interpretive framework, and thus draw on narrative inquiry as our research approach. We claim that our hitherto relatively unnoticed finding, i.e. the central influence of the teacher as an individual on intercultural language teaching, has important implications for MFL teacher education. We suggest that the stories of the four teachers could be used as a professional development tool to identify motivators and inhibitors in developing IU that may resonate with practitioners’ own beliefs and practice, and that parallel to this, our adapted Kelchtermans’s framework may be used as a blank template to scaffold self analysis. Whilst this article considers teacher development in intercultural languages education, it also seeks to make a contribution to the literature on the usefulness of teacher narrative as a professional development tool.     

Constructing professional identities: Montessori teachers' voices and visions

In this study, occupational life histories of Montessori teachers in Sweden have been constructed in collaboration with a group of them. Data exploration and analysis have included journals, interviews, written reflections and conversations. Of interest has been to shed light on underlying values, ways in which professional roles reflect personal values and teachers' reflections on the present and future perspectives of Montessori education. Life histories make it possible for each individual teacher to be presented in the light of his/her own personal attributes and unique qualities as well as in relation to a wider (historical, cultural) context. The overall aim has been to come to a better understanding of what it means to be a Montessori teacher, by getting a group of Montessori teachers to reflect on their lives and work. Valuable insights have been gained concerning the changing roles of teachers in contemporary educational settings.     

少数民族教师专业成长的文化困境与出路——兼论民族文化课程资源开发的意义

当前课程改革给少数民族教师专业成长带来了双重困境,使他们面对传统课程理念与新课程理念、学习主流文化与传承民族文化的双重矛盾。少数民族教师在专业成长过程中,需要把本民族文化与其他民族文化通过某种合理的方式融合起来。而民族文化课程资源的开发利用可以帮助教师实现多种课程文化的整合,从而实现教师专业成长和促进民族教育事业的双赢。     

教育理想、教师专业认同与个人认同：试论三者的关系及其意义

教师具有的专业技能是教师专业身份的重要维度,但主要是有关教育活动的效用维度,且主要以技术性和工具性为特征。使＂教育＂成为可能的层面还必然涉及＂价值维度＂,因而教育价值和教育理想在教师的专业认同中占有不可或缺的角色。教师＂使命＂背后的教育理想无不与个人价值密切相关。个人价值是个人认同的一个构成维度,所以,教师的专业认同与其个人认同在价值层面应是一致的。如此,教师对教育理想的反思和对其专业认同的理解与她/他对个人认同的理解分不开。哲学家利科对个人认同概念和叙事认同概念的分析,为教师反思其教育理想和理解其专业认同提供了一种可能的学习模式。     

《大学的使命》与应用型本科大学人才培养

《大学的使命》是奥尔特加大学教育改革思想的集中体现。他提出了培养具有文化修养的优秀专业人才目标,并阐述了达到目标的途径:文化传授、专业教育以及知识整合等。我国应用型本科大学可以借鉴其观点开展人才培养改革:培养具有文化修养的应用型人才;专业设置兼顾社会需求与学校发展;课程体系按照合理逻辑整合文化、专业和科学内容;教学内容选取大学生生活必不可少和能掌握的知识。     

高校体育课程设置与专业技能的匹配研究

长期从事专项技能的劳作,将会伴有职业病的发生。运用访谈、调查、理论支撑等从各专业的实际出发,制定符合各专业技能工作特点的运动项目,在教学中大胆尝试,通过体育运动技能的传授,减少甚至是避免专业技能应用中职业病的出现,指导大学体育课程的开设。