Articulating Our Values to Develop Our Pedagogy of Science Teacher Education

Abstract

As our understanding of science teacher education has developed, we have identified a need to delineate between pedagogy of science teachers and pedagogy of science teacher education. For the past 4 years, we have team taught the general science education course at Monash University while also investigating our practice with a focus on articulating that practice and our notions of science teacher education pedagogy. This chapter builds on our previous work and investigates how our efforts to better understand our practice and articulate our developing ideas of pedagogy have influenced what goes into our science course and how we present it. Our primary research questions are ``How do I live my values more fully in my practice?'' and ``How do we improve our practice?'' Data sources include our professional journals and the journal maintained by a research assistant who attended our classes. As the course has evolved from the research into our practice, so has our ability to articulate our purposes and values. Making our purposes explicit has helped our students to better understand what we value in teaching science. We are beginning to understand the values we promote and how they are perceived by our students.