We don't have the liberty of being brainless: exploring pre-service teachers' use of weblogs for informal reflection

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  • March 22, 2019
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  • Shoffner, Melanie
    • Affiliation: School of Education
Abstract
  • Pre-service teachers enter teacher education programs with a working practical theory formed from personal experience, knowledge and values. By engaging in reflective thinking, pre-service teachers reaffirm, reassess and recreate the practical theory that guides their actions and beliefs on teaching and learning. Weblogs, an emerging technology in teacher education, offer a new medium for reflective practice. This dissertation explores the tripartite elements of practical theory, reflective practice and weblogs as explored through a qualitative research study conducted in a secondary MAT program at a large southeastern university. Through the qualitative content analysis of weblog postings, focus group interviews and individual interviews, a grounded theory emerged to support weblogs as a forum for informal reflection. The research undertaken in this qualitative study reveals the positive potential of weblogs in pre-service teachers' reflective practice. The informality of weblogs, their accessibility through the Internet and their ability to support communal interactions on-line are positive features of weblogs. These features, in turn, support informal reflection, a component of reflective practice produced by the interaction of practical theory, flexible structure, personal expression and communal interaction. Informal reflection is not a substitute for the formal, hierarchical (and necessary) reflection frequently found in teacher education but a facet of the reflective process that, with further study, may prove to be a valuable component of reflective practice for pre-service and practicing teachers.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Trier, James
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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  • Open access
Date uploaded
  • October 20, 2010

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