RR 89-8 Tilting at webs of belief: Field experiences as a means for breaking with experience.
Abstract
Early field experiences are typically intended to show beginning teacher education students what "teaching is really like." The author of this paper describes an early field experience intended to force students to confront their assumptions. Early field experiences are usually an initial submersion in a lengthy socialization rite that culminates in student teaching. The experience, coupled with activities and readings in the university classroom, is designed to force students to reconsider a variety of issues: what it means to learn something, the intellectual capabilities of children, the role of the teacher, and students' own knowledge. To achieve these ends, students wrestle with a seemingly simple piece of mathematics. They then see a class of third graders discussing the same mathematics. They interview the teacher of the class about her purposes, her knowledge of mathematics and learners, and her approach to teaching. They then interview a third grader, discussing both their understanding of mathematics and their feelings about the class. Finally, they attempt to teach the mathematics to someone.
To document his students' learning, the author offers quotations from students' papers and their final examination in which they had to compare two teachers' approaches to teaching operations with negative numbers. While many students appear to reconsider their fundamental understandings of themselves as learners, their knowledge of subject matter, the capabilities of children, and the role of the teacher in the learning process, the author warns that his students may have merely figured out what he wants to hear. Further, he has no evidence that even if students genuinely reconsider their views, such reconsiderations are not reversed by subsequent experience in teacher education.