Learning in school and learning outside school: A study of how teacher education instructors interpret teacher education students' learning histories.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Two strands of thinking about education persist in the United States today. The first sees learning as a transmission from teacher and text to the student, emphasizing the passing of information and facts and the exercising of skills. The second sees knowledge as socially-constructed and emphasizes the role of the student as an active construer of meaning.
This study examines 50 time-lines which teacher-education students produced as part of an undergraduate course called “Explorations into Teaching and Learning,” which lies firmly in the progressive or constructivist tradition. Students were encouraged to reflect on their learning histories and to present them in any textural or visual format that they chose. Each of the five instructors of the course reviewed ten time lines from their section of the course.
The researchers, through five one-hour dyadic, conversations, came to see that the Explorations students typically presented their learning as a social process. Interactions with family and friends friends, as well as accidents and the ordinary events of daily life, chiefly comprised the presentations of these students' learning. Presentations of in-school learning were exceedingly rare. The teacher-education students presented no instances of poems written, history, learned, or math skills developed that are part of the normal curriculum of schools as they exist today. Through the time-line study, the researchers have come to understand that teacher-education students need assistance to relate their rich past instances of outside-school learning to their traditional understanding of the classroom instruction.
An unanticipated outcome of this research concerned the interaction between the five instructors of the Explorations course and the primary researcher. The research discussions became “second primary data,” and the process of the researchers trying to understand the time-lines became a study, of doctoral students who were also instructors reflecting on educational theory, philosophy and their learning autobiographies. The process of research became a subject of the research, as an important focus of this study involved the interests, biases, and “selective readings” of doctoral students “in conversation” with the student produced data.