A 3D approach to first year English education
Authors: Zeegers Margaret 
Published: January 2013

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the suggestive possibilities of an approach to undergraduate English teacher education that the author has called the 3D Approach – Develop professional knowledge, Display professional knowledge, Disseminate professional knowledge – in relation to a number of groups of first year pre‐service teachers (PSTs) engaging the teaching and learning materials of their English education course.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper examines ways in which this approach has been assessed by the PSTs themselves, constructing this as an expression of their lived experience as PSTs. The author draws on Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, initiates a systematic and orchestrated program of explicit scaffolding of first year PST learning and draws on University‐generated student assessment of their courses, focus groups and individual interviews to investigate ways in which the 3D approach may be considered as enhancing first year PST learning.

Findings

PSTs' own informed evaluations of their own developing knowledge have made visible the teaching and learning that they have engaged and articulated. What the author outlines in this paper is not a “Eureka” moment for first year PSTs, but it is the result of careful scholarly considerations of what careful scholarly considerations by first years in Education courses may engage. For this cohort of PSTs, and for the author, it is a particular form of engagement with pedagogy. It is a pedagogy for teachers, part of active engagement on the part of the teacher and the learner, producing knowledge together.

Research limitations/implications

Lack of generalisability from case study research may be considered as a limitation, but the author would argue that it is the details thrown up for careful examination in a case study which may serve to inform professional discussion and debate.

Practical implications

Negative press of inadequate teachers emerging from universities, with their specious claims will not progress reasoned discussion; research on how the PSTs are themselves taught and how they develop as professionals will. PSTs' own informed evaluations of their own developing knowledge will go some way towards enabling this to happen. This sort of research opens up possibilities for starting with the right sort of questions, a shift from asking the wrong sort of questions, which the author would argue is that sort on which the media are basing their opinion pieces.

Social implications

Continuing public discussions, usually conducted in and by the media, about teacher quality, particularly as this tends to be tied to notions of teacher pay, indicates a wider social concern about the need for quality teachers. This sort of social concern is also a major concern for teacher educators, and is to be addressed as such. This paper addresses some of those concerns.

Originality/value

The paper engages issues about teacher education raised publicly in the media and ties these to the more private domain of university practice in a given teacher education course.