Abstract
Teaching practice is an important requirement to acquire a teaching qualification from South African universities. During teaching practice, it is customary for supervising teachers to guide and evaluate the students’ performance. However, very little is known about how the interaction with supervising teachers influences the students’ views about the teaching profession. Forty final-year Bachelor of Education students at the University of the Witwatersrand gave their consent to participate in a qualitative study using open-ended questionnaires. This research aimed to explore pre-service teachers’ voices, using Denise Batchelor’s (2008; 2006) research pertaining to conceptualisations of voice, namely, practical, epistemological and ontological, which were used to analyse the data. The findings suggested that pre-service teachers’ pedagogical choices were linked to the supervising teachers’ guidance. Many of the supervising teachers framed teaching as a profession that foregrounded administrative tasks and classroom management. Some of the supervising teachers’ negative perceptions of the profession caused pre-service teachers to question their choice to become teachers. Another issue was that pre-service teachers wish to feel welcomed and supported at schools, but most experienced a lack of mentorship from their supervising teachers. We recommend that supervising teachers attend workshops and courses on how to mentor pre service teachers.
Highlights
Research on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) internationally (Feinman-Nemser, 2001; Hagger & McIntyre, 2006) and in South Africa (Bertram, 2011; Reeves & Robinson, 2014), has grown considerably in the past decade, with regard to the mentoring of students on teaching practice
We have categorised them in the following way: 5.2 Pedagogical choices are linked to supervising teacher’s guidance Forty-three per cent of participants revealed the following: despite what they had learnt about lesson planning, selection, development of resources and learner engagement at university, during teaching practice they made choices that were influenced by the supervising teachers
One of the main findings was that most of the pre-service teachers’ pedagogical choices were linked to the guidance that they received from their respective supervising teachers
Summary
Research on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) internationally (Feinman-Nemser, 2001; Hagger & McIntyre, 2006) and in South Africa (Bertram, 2011; Reeves & Robinson, 2014), has grown considerably in the past decade, with regard to the mentoring of students on teaching practice. This paper focuses on the voices of pre-service teachers with regard to their mentoring experiences on teaching practice. During the four years of study, the participants completed twenty-four weeks of teaching practice in different school contexts, which included public, private, religious as well as non-denominational schools in South Africa. Many researchers, such as Seale (2010), Batchelor (2006, 2008), Fielding (2004, 2007) and Kidd (2012), have argued that there is a dearth and undervaluing of students’ voices in Higher Education research. There has been a call for more participatory research (Fielding, 2004), and this is why we have included pre-service teachers’ voices in our investigation
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