learning from experience
Learning in/from other professional contexts
But, as said earlier, relevant learning does not just emerge from experiences
in schools. Having completed her arts/law degree Julia, another pre-service
students from 2003, worked as a legal officer in a Federal Government department
for a short time. When reflecting on her journey into English teaching,
she used the following to construct some sense of her experiences working
in that environment.
‘I need that Executive Minute yesterday. The Minister’s not happy as it is. Get it done.’ (My boss to me via email from the next room.) ‘I don’t care if the Queen’s coming to dinner. We’ve got managers’ drinks and the Secretary is going to be there, so finish the Ministerial I was working on, plus the one you were working on, and circulate them before you leave tonight.’ (My boss to me via phone from the next room, at 4.30pm on a Friday. Guess who left at 10pm that night?)
Julia Maier
Pre-service teacher 2003
Julia continues on to explain how this sort of experience prompted
her to become a teacher. She used this vignette to communicate
a sense in which her professional identity in teaching, even as a pre-service
teacher, was much stronger and clearer for being valued by her colleagues.
As she wrote about this experience, it became clear that she had developed
a critical awareness of the professional issues mediating this experience.
The experience per se did not provide the wisdom, but her critical reflection
on it was proving to be generative.
Experience is a rich resource and a mediating influence for learning to teach,
and yet it should not be considered an unquestionable good. Experience, as
Feiman-Nemser has said, can inform learning, it can stimulate further learning,
and yet it can also inhibit learning. All teachers might do well to pay head
to Dewey's advice to ' extract the full meaning' of experience rather than
treating it as some sort of fetish that immediately bestows wisdom on those
who are 'experienced.' Pre-service teachers already have such a wealth of experiences
about which they can reflect, and they will always look to engage in professional
conversations with more experienced teachers in order to benefit from their
wisdom and understanding. However, pres-service teachers should also appreciate
that they too have much wisdom that can be valuable in any professional conversation
about teaching and learning to teach.
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