Teacher Workplace Learning: Transnational Comparison of Teacher Professional Growth in Lithuania and the United States

• In Event: Roundtable Session 79
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Discourses of Teaching and Being a Teacher

Abstract

This paper discusses teacher workplace learning as a social process by focusing on relationships between national education cultures and teacher learning. By examining two education systems through synchronic and diachronic lens and employing discourse analysis to interpret meanings that teachers assign to their interactions with those systems, the study illuminates teachers’ as learners identities. Similarities and differences in teachers’ professional learning reflect national educational policies and transnational tendencies. Though informal learning is an essential part of teachers’ professional development, education systems in both countries do not recognize it as a form of professional development. To create diverse learning opportunities and accredit informal professional learning, re-conceptualization of teachers’ professional development is needed both by national and international education communities.

Author

• Elena Jurasaite-Harbison, International Baccalaureate