Professional development in teacher education: (Vocational) teacher students’ descriptions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7577/sjvd.5753Keywords:
Professional development, (vocational) teacher education, Communities of Practice (CoP), interview studyAbstract
This article focuses on a learning objective, as part of a teacher education course at a Swedish university, where student teachers should be able to discuss their own professional development and identify further development needs. Since both research and policy documents highlight professional development as an important part of teacher education, it is important to study professional development from the perspective of student teachers. The theoretical starting point is Communities of Practice (CoP), and the study focuses on knowledge and learning within a social community. Ten subject teacher students and six vocational teacher students are interviewed about their descriptions of what the professional development for teachers in teacher education means for them, which results in six prominent themes: 1) the developmentof identity formation, 2) the development of subject specific and vocational knowledge, 3) the development of leadership, 4) the development of relationship-building, 5) the development of knowledge about policy documents, laws, rules and regulations, 6) the development in relation to changes in the society.
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