How a pre-service teacher acquires tacit knowledge of teaching from practice: the process of becoming a teacher

Abstract

Within various fields of research tacit knowledge has been a topic of interest in the last decades. Researchers from different disciplines are focusing on expanding our knowledge of the concept, thereby making tacit knowledge explicit. Only few have however tried to provide an explanation of the underlying learning mechanisms, in order to gain a better understanding of how tacit knowledge develops in the first place. For this study a practice-led approach has been chosen to investigate how a preservice teacher acquires her tacit knowledge of teaching in practice. As the development of teaching techniques is part of the training a pre-service teacher receives during his or her trial period, the study is also to be considered as empirically grounded research on the teacher's personal development as a professional; however, its main focus rests on the teacher's development of tacit knowledge. The single case study format has been chosen for this study to give full consideration to the participant's personal development as a professional, of both teaching skills and tacit knowledge. Video-cued narrative reflection was used as method for the data collection, involving the video-taping of teaching sessions and subsequent video-cued interviews with the participant. The method was considered especially suitable for the single case study format as it allowed the participant to review her own teaching sessions on the video material, and reflect on her teaching beyond the limit of prechosen focuses though questionnaires etc. The focus was thus on the participant rather than the method, or the researcher. The field research was conducted over the course of the academic year September 2013 to May 2014. With only a few exceptions, research data was collected monthly throughout this period. The subsequent data analysis was performed in a two-step system of (1) formulation interpretation and (2) reflecting interpretation. The method of analysis is also known as documentary method.