A teacher educator’s challenges in educating research-literate teachers

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teaching and teacher education (TETP) round-table 1

Proposal

How to undertake research is as an essential component of teacher education programs, regardless of area, level or context of teaching, because it is widely accepted by educational scholars that programs which combines classroom practice with research-based knowledge and skills have the potential to improve student teachers’ learning and confidence. By this way, they prepare teacher candidates better for their future careers. However, student teachers usually consider research methods courses as abstract, demanding, uninteresting and redundant. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges for a teacher educator could be the process of motivating student teachers to embrace the value of research for teaching and equipping them with the 21st century research skills. In this respect, this paper portrays struggling experiences of a teacher educator who was assigned to teach a course entitled Research Methods in Education over a 16-week period to 176 teacher candidates for three years in a row at a public university in Turkey.

Benefitting from the power of qualitative inquiry, this study adopts a constructivist research methodology and follows a personal narrative approach. As a longitudinal descriptive case study, the paper focuses on the nature of being a teacher educator in a position to eliminate anti-research attitudes of prospective teachers but to promote scholarly thinking and research-engaged learning and teaching. The paper presents a compilation of themes emerging from periodic interviews, reflective journals, and artifacts. The analysis of all the data obtained from those sources was performed through thematic coding and narrative analysis.

The study generally reveals how a culture of learning and teaching can influence attitudes towards research in general and inquiry-oriented approach in teaching. Accordingly, the following dimensions draw the portrait of a teacher educator’s challenges in educating research-literate teachers: (1) Stimulating the development of positive attitude towards research; (2) Empowering basic research knowledge and skills; (3) Eliminating infollution and disseminating reliable knowledge; (4) Preventing misconduct: fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism; and (5) Promoting research ethics and sensitive research.

It is also seen that the issues lying behind those challenges generally results from: cultural context; the value attached to research in developing countries; lack of research-rich teaching programs; lack of required courses in research ethics; student profile; students’ perceptions on academic knowledge and scholarly thinking; and students’ conceptualizations of teaching and learning.

By addressing a teacher educator’s personal and professional struggles to educate research-literate teachers for future schools and providing implications for improving teaching and learning in research methods courses, this paper would considerably contribute to reconsideration of teacher education programs in developing countries.

Author

• Mustafa Ozturk, Hacettepe University