Community Building Through Electronic Discussion Boards: Pre-Service Teachers' Reflective Dialogues on Science Teaching

This research study focuses on an electronic forum for building a community of pre-service teachers to reflect upon new directions in science teaching. The thesis of this paper is to model the notion of community building for teacher reflective practice. Through pre-service teachers' WebCT postings on students' theories in science, we provide evidence of how WebCT discussion board served as a forum for community building to carry out reflective practice. We conclude that WebCT discussion board can serve as a viable tool for building a community of reflective teachers. This study implies that WebCT and similar Internet electronic discussion tools may be effectively used for community building to carry out reflective dialogues in teacher education.