Authentic Voices From The Newly Initiated: Graduate Teacher Education Candidates Blog About Teaching and Learning
Abstract: This study explores the voices of graduate teacher education candidates as they work to understand the rich complexities of teaching and learning through blogging. Candidates blogged in response to a carefully selected sequence of readings designed to promote constructivist paradigms and critical pedagogy perspectives. The blogs were analyzed for themes as candidates grappled with their perceptions of “what teaching is” and “how learning looks” in current classroom practice. Results indicate that blogging allowed these teacher candidates to exam their deeply engrained notions of teacher-directed paradigms aligned with maintaining a cultural status quo, and that they openly positioned themselves along a continuum in response to these issues as follows: rejection, awareness, commitment, and obligation
Presider: Ron Morgan, University of South Alabama