RR 91-4 The dialogues of teacher education: Entering and influencing preservice teachers' internal conversations.
Abstract
Teacher educators have acknowledged the importance of preservice teachers' biographies but remained largely inarticulate about how shared knowledge of personal histories helps shape preservice teachers' thinking and ultimate practice. This report provides a detailed description of how preservice teachers use their personal histories to generate premises which in turn constitute an internal, reflection-like dialogue between Self-As-Student and Self-As-Teacher which preservice teachers use to make sense of course work. It analyzes the relationship between the personal histories of nine preservice teachers and the practical arguments they employed to defend decisions they made about the potential value of instructional principles they encountered during formal studies of teaching. This report also explores the implications these dialogic strategies have for how teacher educators might cooperate with and so shape preservice teachers' thinking/practical arguments.