A Vygotskian perspective on teacher education

Abstract

Contemporary teacher education demonstrates the continued use of competency‐based, personality‐based and inquiry‐based approaches. These approaches are commonly regarded as representing alternative paradigms for designing curriculum and pedagogy. From a Vygotskian perspective, characterized by the use of bridging concepts relating individual functioning and personal development to sociocultural process and setting, these approaches may serve to provide elements for a more comprehensive paradigm of professional development. Drawing on Vygotskian theory, a teacher‐education environment offers support to trainee teachers for developing a professional identity. A central element is that trainees explore the practice of teaching for its underlying public meanings and as these meaning relate to their own structures of personal meanings. Such an exploration involves the shaping and testing of personally‐meaningful action in professional practice. Commitment to meanings found to be valid and practicable constitutes the core of professional identity. The task students face in developing professional identity on the basis of an assignment of meaning to teaching needs an appropriate teacher‐education environment. These conditions are worked out from a Vygotskian perspective on professional development.

Notes

Peter van Huizen teaches in the Institute of Teacher Education, University of Amsterdam, Sloterkade 174, 1059 EB Amsterdam, The Netherlands; e‐mail: [email protected]. His study, Becoming a Teacher (2000), explores the development of a professional identity by trainee teachers from a Vygotskian perspective.

Bert van Oers is an associate professor in the Department of Education and Curriculum Studies, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is interested in Vygotskian studies of human development, especially in the context of primary school education, and focuses his research on the development of symbolic tools as means for (mathematical) thinking in young children.

Theo Wubbels is professor of education and chair of the Institute of Educational Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His research interests centre on inter‐personal relationships in education, learning environments, teacher learning, and reflection in teacher education.

1. See Vygotsky (1962, 1971, 1978, 1988–1999), Wertsch (1985, 1991, 1998), Ratner (1991), Van der Veer and Valsiner (1991), Asmolov (1998), and Chaiklin (2001c).

2. Tharp and Gallimore (1988: 113) reported that ‘[a]t the time of this writing, KEEP consisted of a laboratory‐and‐demonstration school in Honolulu enrolling about 500 Hawaiian and part‐Hawaiian children in kindergarten through the sixth grade, an organization for exporting and supporting the program into the public schools of Hawaii, some 60 classrooms serving about 2000 public school students of many ethnicities in five public elementary schools on three of Hawaii’s islands’.

3. Cited by Zeichner and Gore (1990: 336).

4. Cited by Zeichner and Gore (1990: 333).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter van Huizen

Peter van Huizen teaches in the Institute of Teacher Education, University of Amsterdam, Sloterkade 174, 1059 EB Amsterdam, The Netherlands; e‐mail: [email protected]. His study, Becoming a Teacher (2000), explores the development of a professional identity by trainee teachers from a Vygotskian perspective.

Bert van Oers

Bert van Oers is an associate professor in the Department of Education and Curriculum Studies, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is interested in Vygotskian studies of human development, especially in the context of primary school education, and focuses his research on the development of symbolic tools as means for (mathematical) thinking in young children.

Theo Wubbels

Theo Wubbels is professor of education and chair of the Institute of Educational Sciences, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His research interests centre on inter‐personal relationships in education, learning environments, teacher learning, and reflection in teacher education.