Tendencias Pedagógicas (Oct 2015)
THE ROLE OF CRITICAL REFLECTION IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF TEACHING PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE
Abstract
It is largely assumed in educational research that adopting a critical awareness (i.e. being able to provide socio-political explanation for events) will be more effective for scrutinizing teaching action than teachers’ habitual thinking (giving accounts of events) or teachers’ descriptive reflection (giving personal justifications for events) because it provides richer understandings. However, it still remains unclear to what extent critical awareness assists teachers in constructing new situational knowledge, which, in the end, constitutes the ultimate promise of teacher reflection. In this study we attempt to describe the practical knowledge student teachers show in classroom and to examine whether adopting a critical stance helps teacher to infer (1) more practical and (2) better quality knowledge (i.e. being precise). One hundred and four preservice teachers, who worked in 73 different schools, participated in the study. Under supervision of their collaborative teachers, they wrote a report about their teaching. Reports were contentanalyzed following propositional analysis. The findings showed that practical knowledge varies in several degrees of complexity and that critical reflection does not always guarantee the production of more and better local knowledge. This implies that adopting a critical attitude does not necessarily imply a more effective way of redescribing practice than other sorts of thinking.
