Exploring Headway Pedagogies in Initial Teacher Education Through Collaborative Action Research into Processes of Learning: Experiences from Eritrea

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Engaging prospective teachers in collaborative inquiry into their own processes of learning was the driving intention of the collaborative action research (CAR) course which was part of a teacher education program at a college of education in Eritrea in the academic year of 2018/2019. The course led by the first two authors was collaboratively designed and developed by the authors who were closely and regularly working as passionate learning community of educators who are committed to enact change in their own practices for the past seven years. Embracing the complexity of learning teacher educating we align with the notion of inquiry as a stance in learning to live up to the complexity. Accordingly, we engaged in an intentional collaborative self-study into our own practices of facilitating a course on inquiry. The aim of this paper is to articulate key experiences of committed collaborative learning in facilitating a course of inquiry. Employing a self-study methodology, we were engaged in individual and team reflections documented in our shared diary, regular meetings to discuss and develop the CAR process, and analyzing written feedbacks given by our student teachers (STs). In this article we attempt to explore headway pedagogies while we were collaboratively learning to facilitate and support a senior class of prospective teachers (n-27) carry out their CAR projects into their own processes of learning for four months. We argue that those experiences have critical implications in developing professional identity of prospective teachers, creatively overcome the theory-practice conundrum in teacher education by developing essential experiences that prospective teachers could creatively adapt in their school practices.