Monash University Education Faculty

search


 

PDF
Professional Learning

 

Home ::

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _
_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
Page1 _

 

 

professional learning

writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning

In pre-service education courses throughout the world, students are invited to write reflective narratives in which they reflect critically on their journey toward English teaching. Teachers also do this throughout their careers, as part of their ongoing professional learning.

Consider these two memories of learning English in secondary school that emerged out of pre-service students’ critically reflective narratives at Monash:  

High school English for me was the site of contestation. We battled sometimes violently to have our individual and differing values accepted. Thrashing out ideas, thrashing one another’s beliefs, drawing blood with claws of reasoning. We were kangaroos resting on tales/tails of personal experience, leaning back and kicking our opposition (each other) full in the face with carefully aimed retorts…. English was the class that brought us together from various interest areas and talents. Sometimes we would emerge with bloodied ears, fur falling, our egos and tails bruised. Why? Because in any search for meaning, core is shaken, values are called into question. And at that age in those classes we were validating our own existences. We were asking the big questions: Who do I want to be? What kind of me? Where do I want to be? And who do I want with me?

Pippa Kirwan
Pre-service teacher (2003)

 

When I was in high school, English was a strictly and narrowly defined subject. Students worked individually. We listened and wrote things down. We studied texts and wrote answers to questions. We interpreted. This kind of atmosphere, without any group, hands-on or interactive work, had many consequences. …. Students who were interested and ‘intellectual’ excelled. They dove into the text and deconstructed it, analysed it, worked through it, began to develop their own thoughts and feelings about it. They build a world in their minds. Other students were bored. They sank into the text and ploughed through it, doing just enough work to get the marks they wanted. They found interest in some parts, boredom in others. They could answer the questions set by the teacher and pass.

Andrew Drummond
Pre-service teacher (2003)

 

Top

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _
_ English Teachers: a diverse community of learners Negotiating the sameness and the tensions Connections between professional and student learning communities What are pre-service teachers learning and how are they learning? Teachers learning how to know their students? Professional learning: obligation or accomplishment? school (university) stuff’ and ‘practical stuff’ Writing critically reflexive narratives as a focus for professional learning Critical inquiry as professional learning _ Page 11 _
Page1 _

 

| Home| About English | Becoming a Teacher | Curriculum & Assessment |

| Planning for Learning |Professional Learning | Voices | Sitemap |

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

voices
“For a variety of reasons, the process of constructing my professional identity, particularly through writing …seem to me to be a highly individual and solitary process…. grappling with and making sense of the disparate elements of my professional identity was often confusing. … There was a disconcerting sense in which I was ‘not even sure what I was being asked to do.’ Not surprisingly, I wasn’t entirely sure where it was going to end up. I was, however, attracted to the notion of constructing a professional identity, in some sense trying to define it. This seemed to me to be the only way to make sense of the cacophony of voices that seemed to be competing for my attention at any given time in my preservice year.”

Natalie Bellis

In Writing=Learning (2005, p. 30

  

_