Dual vision: capturing the learning journey of pre‐service early childhood teachers of science

Abstract

Teacher educators are consistently challenged with the problem of how to construct more meaningful and relevant experiences within their science methods courses. The research presented in this paper addressed this problem on two levels. On a pedagogical level, the aim of the research was to capture the salient details about how one pre‐service early childhood teacher interpreted her journey about learning science and how to teach science over a 10‐week science methods course. On a methodological level, the aim of this research was to describe, trial and evaluate a new, qualitative research method called ‘dual vision’ that enables critical incidents to be constructed and interpreted through the combined lenses of the pre‐service teacher and the researcher. This exploratory research embraced a constructivist‐interpretive research paradigm and was informed by the literature on critical incidents. The dual vision methodological process provided the researcher with an opportunity to move into the reality of the pre‐service teacher, allowed both voices to be heard and, as a consequence, provided rich images of the pre‐service teacher’s experiences that are not accessible through other methods. Moreover, the dual vision method demonstrated rigorous advantages that are presented in this paper through an examination of three sets of criteria for legitimation.

Keywords:

• critical incident vignettes
• science teacher education
• co‐construction