Fostering Reflective Practice in Teacher Education: inquiry as a framework for the construction of a professional knowledge in teaching

Abstract

The paper addresses the interconnectedness of theory and practice in initial teacher education, in teacher development and in educational reform. Focusing on the role of the teacher as it is reconceptualised within the international movement to reconstruct schools and schooling, the rationale for new kinds of teacher‐education programmes is outlined. A programme for the education of reflective professionals is described, where, within a community of inquiry, prospective teachers construct a professional knowledge in teaching that is uniquely theirs, and come to new understandings of themselves as professionals, of the students they teach and of the educational landscapes within which they live. Following this, a new vision of teacher education and teacher development is proposed which links personal and professional reform to the reform of schools and schooling, within communities of inquiry where teachers and students learn together, and collaborate to reform their own understandings, and the cultures and contexts in which they live. Reform is imagined here as a creative process involving conceptual reform for students and for teachers, who are also engaged in the curricular, cultural and structural reform of the places in which they live and learn.