Learning to teach within and across the settings of teacher education coursework and field experience in local schools is subject to the “two‐worlds pitfall,” where practices, norms, expectations, tools, and other aspects of teaching can be jarringly different. This remains an ever‐present dilemma for preservice teachers, their teacher educators, and their school‐based mentors. This collective case study follows two cohorts of secondary science teacher candidates (22 in total) through their field experiences in local schools to understand how they reorganized, repurposed, and retooled practice as they worked on noticing and responding to students using ambitious science teaching principles and practices. Analysis highlights how instructional experiences in K–12 classrooms and relationships with mentors afforded and constrained preservice teachers’ efforts to recontextualize ambitious science teaching practices in the status quo science teaching contexts of local schools. Recommendations for increasing permeability between the two worlds of teacher preparation are included.
Rethinking Learning: What the Interdisciplinary Science Tells Us
Theories of learning developed in education and psychology for the past 100 years are woefully inadequate to support the design of schools and classrooms that foster deep learning and equity. Needed is learning theory that can guide us in creating schools and classrooms where deep learning occurs, where learners’ full selves are engaged, and that disrupt existing patterns of inequality and oppression. In this article, we build on recent research in education, neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology to articulate a theory of learning that has the potential to move us toward that goal. We elaborate four key principles of learning: (1) learning is rooted in evolutionary, biological, and neurological systems; (2) learning is integrated with other developmental processes whereby the whole child (emotion, identity, cognition) must be taken into account; (3) learning is shaped in culturally organized practice across people’s lives; and (4) learning is experienced as embodied and coordinated through social interaction. Taken together, these principles help us understand learning in a way that foregrounds the range of community and cultural experiences people have throughout the life course and across the multiple settings of life and accounts for learning as set within systems of injustice.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10307310
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.3102
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Educational Researcher
- Volume:
- 50
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 0013-189X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 557-565
- Size(s):
- p. 557-565
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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