Pedagogy in Further Education and Vocational Teacher Education

Example 4 from research – Willemse et al., (2008)

Willemse et al. (2008) carried out a mixed methods study ‘of the actual … education practices of 54 teacher educators within one institution’ (ibid: 445)

On considering the results of a previous exploratory study, and a scoping of literature, they were led to ‘assume that preparing student teachers … apparently depends more on the efforts of individual teacher educators than it does on any collectively designed curriculum and that the process appears to be largely implicit and unplanned’ (ibid: 446).

When participating in the research, some teacher educators explained how they were searching ’for ‘golden moments’, which they defined as moments when a teacher educator could explain some information or theory (or express a value) in response to a question or problem raised by the student teachers’ (456)

Whilst recognising the presence and value of modelling and golden moments, this study expressed doubts about the degree to which TEds’ practices and the structures of TEd programmes embedded such pedagogies to the conscious degree that they should. To further develop and research this area was considered a high priority.