Demystifying Critical Reflection by Namala Tilakaratna;Eszter Szenes; & Eszter Szenes

Author:Namala Tilakaratna;Eszter Szenes; & Eszter Szenes [Namala Tilakaratna & Eszter Szenes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000966831
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

7

Teaching critical reflection in education diploma pathways

A pedagogic intervention

Daniel O’Sullivan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003177210-9

Introduction

This chapter reports on part of a pedagogic intervention in Education units within a Diploma program at an Australian institution. The aim of the intervention was to address challenges in ensuring international students in pathways to initial teacher education (ITE) develop the discipline-specific knowledge and language practices required for success. The work presented here focuses on the design and delivery of materials targeting the critical reflection practices used to assess students’ learning. The primary challenge was to develop an approach to teaching critical reflection that is accessible, teachable and learnable, in order to have a transformative impact on the learners in particular but also on teachers. The intervention used Legitimation Code Theory to explore and shape knowledge practices, motivated by a need to address the relatively opaque nature of critical reflection practices in teacher education. This chapter describes the pedagogic choices I made as a practitioner, making this a meta-reflection on what was relevant and useful in a complex and often challenging situation.

The chapter begins with a brief introduction to some of the challenges in teaching and learning critical reflection in ITE, to the theoretical foundations of the intervention and to Diploma Pathways programs in Australia. The following sections deal with the enactment of the concept of semantic gravity and semantic profiles from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton 2013, 2014b, 2020) in the intervention. The first discusses how the concepts served as the basis of an analytic framework for revealing the organizing principles of critical reflection and providing a lens for analysis of practice. The framework was operationalized to analyze relations between a model text and the task prompt which it addresses, and to predict semantic structures from task prompts. The second section addresses how knowledge was embedded within the intervention to enable analysis for practice. It discusses the principles that underpinned the design of the intervention to make the materials accessible, teachable and learnable. It concludes by using feedback from students, the unit leader and external moderators to demonstrate the efficacy of Legitimation Code Theory in revealing the organizing principles of critical reflection and in guiding principled pedagogic design.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.