Browsing by Subject "Teacher knowledge"

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Open Access
Burrowing into the reciprocal learning collaboration of two instructors in an English-medium university in Turkey
(Routledge, 2012) Mitton-Kűkner, J.; Akyüz, Ç.
This paper explores the authors' experiences as an early career teacher educator and English-language instructor in an English-medium university in Turkey. The theoretical framework shaping their collaboration draws upon a narrative view of teacher knowledge as an embodiment of teachers' experiences in schools in close relationship with their identities. Inquiring into moments that disrupted what the authors knew as instructors, they demonstrate how thinking narratively was vital to their professional development and understanding of the complexities shaping the backdrop of their higher educational context. They situate their learning in the field of professional development at the university level and propose that thinking narratively enables instructors across the career phases and disciplines to draw upon their range of experiences in ways that offer potential opportunities for support, reflection and self-growth. This interactive process, the authors suggest, suits the aim of professional teacher development and emphasizes reciprocal learning possibilities for early career and experienced instructors working collaboratively. © 2012 Copyright Teacher Development.
Open Access
Pre-service elementary teachers' understandings of graphs
(Eurasia Publishing House, 2011) Alacaci, C.; Lewis, S.; O'Brien G. E.; Jiang, Z.
Choosing graphs to display quantitative information is a component of graph sense. An important aspect of pre-service elementary teachers' content knowledge; ability to choose appropriate graphs in applied contexts is investigated in this study. They were given three scenarios followed by four graphs representing the same quantitative data. They rated the appropriateness of each graph and indicated the reasons for their choices. Results showed that pre-service elementary teachers can recognize the situations appropriate for bar graphs, pie charts, and line graphs and match the suitable graphs to these situations. However, they had limited knowledge of scatterplots and did not recognize the situations for which they are typically used. Implications of findings for elementary pre-service teacher education programs are drawn.