Student teachers' outlook on teaching: a content analysis of their reflective reports on experiences in practice

Abstract

This article reports on student teachers' experience-based knowledge regarding teaching and learning to teach in secondary general or vocational (mostly agricultural) schools. Insight into this knowledge has been gained by analyzing the content of their written reflections on experiences in practice. The framework for this content analysis was derived from literature on teachers' professional identity, starting points of the course they had followed and comments of teacher educators. The student teachers involved (n=34) reflect on many different experiences during their teaching practice. However, it is difficult to reconstruct a learning process out of their reflections. Mostly, these reflections are of a descriptive nature. It is argued that a field-based teacher education programme has to be extended by frameworks derived from theory and research in order to promote more structured ways of thinking and reflecting.