A practice turn in teacher education in Turkey: Is a balanced practicum at risk?

ABSTRACT

The practicum in teacher education programmes typically includes an observation of the mentors or peers, as well as an actual teaching phase. In most programmes, the focus is more on the direct experience of teaching. Turkey, moved by a general dissatisfaction with how teacher education programmes prepare student teachers for the realities of the classroom, has initiated a new field experience programme that does not include observation. We aim to depict the realities of all participants including student teachers, mentors and supervisors on the disappearance of a once central component of the teaching experience- the observation, as well as its replacement with more practice time. A qualitative research design has been adopted and the data have been collected from surveys and interviews. The findings demonstrate that the participants value both the potential of learning from observation and the opportunity to be involved in more practice during the practicum process.

KEYWORDS:

• Practicum
• teacher education
• observation
• practice-based teacher education
• pre-service teachers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tugba Simsek-Rackelmann

Tugba Simsek-Rackelmann She works at the School of Foreign Languages of Gendarmerie and Coast Guard Academy as an assistant professor. She is the Head of English Department. She completed her PhD in 2020. Her current research interests are applied corpus linguistics, foreign language teacher education, and the use of technology in education.

Eylem Perihan Kibar

Eylem Perihan Kibar She is a research assistant and a PhD student at Çukurova University, English Language Teaching Department. She focuses on media literacy education for language teacher candidates in her dissertation. Her research interests are media literacy, teacher education and language assessment.

Sibel Aybek

Sibel Aybek She is currently working as a research assistant at Çukurova University, English Language Teaching Department. She has completed her PhD in 2023, majoring in applied linguistics. Her main research interests include corpus linguistics, sentiment and semantic analysis, and teacher education.

Zuhal Okan

Zuhal Okan She holds a PhD degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury. She currently works as a full professor at the ELT Department, Faculty of Education, at Çukurova University. Her research interests include critical discourse analysis, educational technology and teacher education.