A Framework for Learning to Teach Science in Initial Primary Teacher Education

Abstract

When prospective primary teachers begin their university education, they have ideas, conceptions, and attitudes about science and the form of teaching and learning it which are the fruit of the many years they themselves spent in school, accepting or rejecting the roles of their science teachers (Gustafson & Rowell, 1995). Teachers’ conceptions are in a continual process of formation from the time when they were in school, and are the more stable the longer they have formed part of each person’s belief system. Many of the prospective primary teachers’ conceptions are implicit, so that during their university years they need to reflect on them and make them explicit. Also if the origins of the beliefs are not suitably analysed, it is quite possible that they will be perpetuated despite contradictions caused by teacher education.