To be or not to be : teaching practice, becoming and remaining a teacher : a case study of science students in teaching practice at the University Of The Witwatersrand (Wits) School of Education

M.Ed. (Teacher Education)Abstract: In this study, I introduce the modelled experiences approach of training student teachers, which takes into account student teachers different types of experience. To explore the practices of the student teacher during teaching practice, considerations of their previous experiences before training, their experiences and responses to their formal training programme and the experiences during teaching practice were considered. While the trilectic of the three levels may be central to student teachers’ rationales for becoming and remaining teachers, this study shows how these form a basis for understanding how they learn to teach, how they adjust, align, reform their identities while learning to teach in schools. I studied twelve FET science student teachers at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Education (WSE) about their experiences on teaching practice. I draw on evidence obtained from an analysis of their reflective books where they record their experiences in teaching practice as well as narratives from the individual and focus group interviews. Concerning reflective books, I draw inter alia on the narratives of ‘critical incidents’ to unpack some of the aspects that student teachers reflect on during teaching practice. In the interviews, questions were sequenced based on student teachers’ pre-teaching images (previous experiences); fictive images (formed from their experiences in formal training) and lived images (from the actual experiences in teaching practice). To understand these are sociocultural perspectives and theories of pedagogical content knowledge and situated cognition. My findings show that, while in a particular domain of experience (PRE/formal training/PRE-teaching, formal training and teaching practice), student teachers are constantly negotiating the links and discords between them through internal reflection, therefore making the process of learning to teach complex and non-linear. Student teachers in this study strongly showed discomfort on the ways in which they are prepared to teach science at WSE particularly the lack of sufficient content knowledge, and yet their reflective books and interviews do not show how this lack of content knowledge has affected and influenced their teaching on the actual practice. There are three explicit contributions to this study: that teacher educators integrate an experiential approach to training student teachers, that institutions redefine their assessment criteria for monitoring how student teachers have developed during teaching practice, and that institutions adopt a model of..