Investigating how teacher educators can foster delight in learning of preservice teachers

Proceedings of ‏The 4th International Conference on Advanced Research in Education, Teaching and Learning

Year: 2021


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Investigating how teacher educators can foster delight in learning of preservice teachers

Naomi Thomas



Fostering preservice teachers’ delight in learning life science through group discussion has recently become a focus of researches and teacher educators globally. There’s no easy answer to the questions how are we learning? ‘And’ how can we bring in learning as teacher educators? ‘This is partially due to the fact that education deals with different goals and backgrounds that vary from each other and with students as individuals who are diverse in all respects and continuously alter. Dialogic talk, which takes account of various concepts, facilitates logical comprehension in science, and in line with the curriculum in South Africa. The issue is that it is difficult to promote conversation, and can run counter to cultural norms.

In South Africa teacher educators have supported the need to foster students creativity via the teacher education programme, however little is known about how teacher educators facilitate this daunting challenge. The purpose of the study was to explore how teacher educators prepare preservice teachers to model science talk in their lectures as well as investigate sociocultural factors of students’ engagement with life science concept as they craft arguments to support their claims or evidence in their given task. The study methodology was qualitative with an interpretive world view.  The design of the study was a case study of third year life science preservice teachers. The participant were selected based on their willingness to participate in the study. The communicative approach to language teaching was employed in the study.

Keywords: teacher education, learning, life sciences.