Annual Conference for Research in Education ACRE

Description

When is a sheep not a sheep? Exploring epistemology in teacher education
Schwab argues that teachers need both knowledge of the substantive structures of their subject domain and the epistemology of that domain. Pre-service teachers join the PGCE course with differing levels of epistemic awareness which the literature suggests is reflective of their personal epistemology. Recent research has suggested that epistemic awareness can be observed in the epistemic practices people employ when making knowledge claims.
This area has been explored in science teacher education but not as far as I am aware in computing teacher education. Pre-service computing teachers often report feeling anxious about their programming knowledge and their ability to teach programming. Those with limited prior knowledge of programming often find themselves learning to program whilst simultaneously teaching programming in schools. Literature suggests that novice programmers struggle when applying knowledge during problem solving, and this may be because they are unfamiliar with disciplinary strategies or may be employing ineffective strategies. This lack of experience can lead to novices making “naive knowledge claims” which are based on limited reasoning or justification.
This talk explains how knowledge claims are underpinned by epistemic practice, considers how students’ personal epistemology affects their epistemic practice and explains why this is relevant to teacher education.
References
Erduran, S. and Guilfoyle, L., 2023. Learning to teach epistemic practices of science in secondary schools.
Robins, A., Rountree, J. and Rountree, N., 2003. Learning and teaching programming: A review and discussion. Computer science education, 13(2), pp.137-172.

Period	6 Jul 2023
Event type	Conference