Page 99 - Empowering pre-service teachers through inquiry - Lidewij van Katwijk

Pre-service teacher inquiry; an international comparison
of pre-service teacher research. We mapped these perceptions against four aspects
of pre-service teacher research derived from prior literature (e.g., Aspfors & Eklund,
2017; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Munthe & Rogne, 2015): (1) research knowledge,
(2) inquiry habit of mind, (3) applying research in practice, and (4) conducting
research. All the pre-service teachers and educators in the investigated contexts
stated their belief that an inquiry habit of mind is the main purpose of pre-service
teacher research even though this aspect is not explicitly described in the Australian
programmes. This finding is in line with Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009), who cite the
importance of a fundamentally critical attitude and an open mind to learn from one’s 4 own professional environment. We acknowledge that pre-service teachers in other
institutes, involved in a programme that is just focused on research knowledge, might not have mentioned characteristics of an inquiry habit of mind as a main purpose.
Other important purposes that pre-service teachers mentioned were “to be able to conduct research” and “to improve [their] own practice.” The latter is a form of applying research in practice and is widely identified as a goal of practitioner research by teachers (Ermeling, 2010) and by doctoral students who plan to become teacher educators (Jacobs et al., 2015). Gaining knowledge about research is not explicitly mentioned by the participants as a purpose.
An interesting difference emerged in the perceptions of Australian and Dutch educators regarding the purposes of pre-service teacher research. The former group mostly emphasized the need to “develop a professional learning strategy,” while the latter indicated the need for “innovation of education,” though one teacher educator also acknowledged that such innovation remained a vision, or “our dream”. Penuel et al., (2017) make a distinction among different uses of research such as “conceptual” and “instrumental”. In this light, the Australian teacher educators seem to perceive pre-service teacher research more in an instrumental way, while the Dutch teacher educators report a more conceptual use. Innovation of education is also cited as a key goal of teacher research by international researchers (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Elliott, 2004; Kemmis, 2009), and recent studies in the Netherlands report a positive connection between practice-based research and school development (Schenke, 2015). Some participating Dutch teacher educators work with academic professional development schools, which are supported by the government. In these schools, university teacher educators, teachers, and pre-service teachers collaborate to conduct practitioner research projects. The aim of these projects is to improve educational practice by sharing results and creating a research culture in the schools (Schenke & Heemskerk, 2016). Within these projects though, the purpose for the
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