English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Teaching as a craft: Making links between pre-service training and professional practice
Volume 2 Number 3 December 2003
Lisa Kervin (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Jan Turbill (University of Wollongong, Australia)
It is acknowledged in the literature and in professional practice
that there are "gaps" between the theory of pre-service teacher
education and the realities of classroom practice. The report from the
2002 National Meeting of Professional Educators identified tensions
between theory and practice and suggested that teachers were "living
these out in everyday learning environments" as a "creative tension"
(Cumming, 2002, p. 3). We believe the challenge for teacher educators
is to assist beginning teachers in making links between pedagogical
theory they have accrued in their pre-service training and practice
they are attempting to put into place in their classrooms. From our
work with teachers in schools it is apparent that beginning teachers
find it difficult to link theory with their practice This article
describes a model of profession learning that greatly assisted one
beginning teacher begin to make connections between her pre-service
training and the relevance of this training to her classroom
practice.