Teacher candidates’ epistemological beliefs, dispositions, and views on teaching as persuasion

Abstract

Alexander and her colleagues proposed teaching as persuasion as a guiding metaphor for conceptual change pedagogy ( Alexander, Fives, Buehl, & Mulhern, 2002). However, there is reason to suspect that the term persuasion can have negative connotations for some individuals ( Dole & Sinatra, 1999; Murphy, 2001). Therefore, we examined 182 primarily preservice teachers’ views of teaching as persuasion, and related those views to their openness/resistance to new ideas as measured by selected epistemological belief scales and dispositional measures. Consistent with our hypotheses, our results indicated that teacher candidates who believed that knowledge evolves, that beliefs can be revised, and that learning is a process of constructing knowledge were more open to persuasive teaching. Our findings provide support for Murphy’s (2001) view of persuasion and suggest further that the teaching as persuasion metaphor would be more successful embedded in an instructional context designed to broaden teachers’ epistemological worldviews.