A Pedagogy for Teacher Education: cultivating the disposition to think

Abstract

This paper seeks to find ways of confronting the sociocultural backgrounds of student teachers in such a way that new patterns of thinking/talking become possible both for personal learning and for pedagogical purposes. Excerpts from a transcript of a lecture session dealing with reading comprehension is used to give an account of specifically intended mediated action. The intention is to mediate such that students become consciously aware of their thought processes and cultivate the disposition for higher order thinking. The account draws in the main from Vygotskian psychology. It is argued that through this process a pedagogy which takes metacognition into account be developed and used in order to free ourselves from undesirable instructional thinking/talking patterns which currently oppress and repress certain categories of children in schools in South Africa.