Goals of Practitioner Research According to Teacher Educators and the “Formal” Curriculum

• In Event: Teachers and Teacher Educators Using Action Research to Inform Practice

Abstract

All pre-service teacher education programs in the Netherlands have a research component. However, teacher educators seem to have different beliefs regarding the actual importance of this research for student teachers and the purposes it might serve. In our study, we investigated both the perceived curriculum and the formal curriculum around student teacher research. The perceived curriculum was studied by interviewing 8 experienced teacher educators from 3 different teacher education institutes about their views on the contributions of student teacher research to their practice as teacher educators and about the main goals this research serves. The results reveal that some of the teacher educators whom we interviewed are not convinced of the importance of student teacher research; furthermore, they do not believe that it contributes to student teachers professional development. We investigated the formal curriculum by studying documents and quality criteria for student teacher research used by the 3 teacher education institutes. We found that these teacher education institutes use traditional quality criteria, derived from social sciences research, in which evidence of personal professional development and/or contribution to practice is almost absent. On the poster, we elaborate on this gap between the perceived and the formal curriculum.

Authors

• Helma Oolbekkink, Radboud University Nijmegen

• Eddie Denessen, Radboud University Nijmegen