Exploring the Pedagogy Associated with Transformational Learning in the Initial Teacher Education Context

Abstract

The highly regulated practice of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in the UK represents an area of learning in higher education that is characterised by traditional pedagogies that are often functionally driven and instrumentally oriented. This is incongruent with the reality of the school environment, which requires teachers to be adaptive learners, self-motivating, and self-determining in respect of their initial, early, and continuing professional development. Here a signature pedagogy of partnership is offered that represents a paradigm shift in thinking about teacher learning, repositioning the focus of learning from content to concepts and towards a vision in which key learning dispositions and capacities are fore grounded. Underpinning this pedagogy is the notion of transformational learning and its epistemological foundations for ways of knowing and understanding the 'classroom'. This vision builds on research investigating the conceptions of trainee teachers, academics and professionals in an ITE partnership concerning the promotion of subject knowledge for teaching. Initial findings have revealed three hierarchically inclusive pedagogies associated with teacher learning: teacher replication in practice, teacher formation and teacher transformation. The affordances and constraints of an ITE pedagogy and architectural design aligned with transformational learning in which a willingness to engage in, persist with and comprehend challenging tasks and concepts in an 'uncomfortable time of uncertainty', is one which is elaborated here. Key partnership practices and learning designs are identified that promote the learning dispositions and capacities characteristic of effective teachers in the 21 st Century.