Preservice teacher education: Towards a transformative and reflexive learning

Abstract

Changing initial teacher education and lifelong learning experiences has become a real challenge for education as we strive to cultivate 21st-century skills in our students to ready them to become new cosmopolitan learners and knowledge professionals. The concepts inherent to transformative education and reflexive pedagogies, even though they are evolving concepts, have posed some serious concerns for the structure and experiences of preservice teacher education. This article presents a reflexive account of 207 preservice teachers attending a regional city university in Greece. In this study, the prospective teachers adopted the Learning by Design pedagogical framework during their Practicum experience. Their focus was to engage in learning design in a meaningful and collaborative way. A participatory action research methodology was adopted. Major findings revealed ‘reflexive deliberations’ on planning learning repertoires and making pedagogical choices.