Critical reflection through personal pronoun analysis (critical analysis) to identify and individualise teacher professional development

ABSTRACT

A central part of teacher education is critical reflection. To engage with the new – embrace change – is inherently difficult. The solution is teacher control of change. Those who embrace change, or not, are identified in their language. Pronoun analysis situates a teacher and determines areas of discomfort for change. Particular personal pronouns are evident when one is connected to, or distanced from, an artefact. This provides an avenue to individualise and pinpoint professional development (PD) requirements. Compared to traditional PD, this is efficient as it targets areas of discomfort for professional learning. Ideally, a teacher experiments with the new, indicates confidence and presents expertise to enable transmission into teaching. In this article, I illustrate how pronoun analysis was applied through interview data where science teachers were engaged in a discourse of Information Communication Technology integration. From this prior research data, a case is presented for individualised language analysis to direct PD. When a teacher is the active agent who self-analyses his or her own discomfort, an ownership pathway for directed proactive learning is created that goes beyond critical reflection into the new domain of critical analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical reflection
• teacher
• change
• personal pronoun analysis
• professional development (PD)
• critical analysis

Acknowledgments

I thank Associate Professor Donna Starks for her comments and feedback during the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacolyn Weller

Jacolyn Weller has almost 30 years’ teaching experience combined with almost 20 years’ Science coordinating in the secondary/elementary teaching environment. In the tertiary sector, she is an early career researcher with six years’ experience in academia and a repertoire of Science, Chemistry, Mathematics, ICT and is presently a teacher educator. A strong philosophy of a practical approach to researching while teaching, rich experiential teaching and a focus towards teacher sustainability has emerged through this history.