Thesis in teacher education - research orientation,
professional relevance and student involvement
Abstract
Many teacher education programs concentrate on bringing theoretical
perspectives to bear on events of teacher practice. There is a concern for
fostering critical analysis. Writing of theses can be one way of promoting critical
analysis.
One aim of this development project is to integrate research orientation and
professional relevance as concerns university studies in teacher education, thesis
and future work. The idea is to make students gain deeper insight into academic
culture and research as well as into school culture. This concerns differences as
well as similarities within these practices. Another aim is to develop models for
group-supervision.
The students will have two supervisors. One traditional supervisor will support
the student as concerns scientific issues. One supervisor (a process supervisor)
will support the research process and guide the students into appropriating ways
of thinking, reading, writing, discussing and documenting their work.
Our experience is that the critical academic tradition in teacher education is
rather weak and that the students in general are not well prepared for this kind
of work. In this project we intend to promote students' critical thinking by
making them reflect on the research process and discuss together ideas, drafts,
and more developed texts among themselves. These activities are central and
self-evident in research. Students need to be involved in such activities to
understand their functions in research as well as in professional work. We
consider that this kind of activity will have favourable impact on teacher
practice and reflection on school activities in teacher teams in schools. Also,
students' thesis work needs to be related to ongoing research at the university
and/or development projects in school.
This development project is at an initial stage where students' and supervisors'
ideas about scientific work and professional relevance of the thesis will be
investigated. Students in teacher education will be involved in all stages of the
project, as for instance planning, definition of quality criteria of the thesis,
evaluation of models for supervision.