Sigrun Gudmundsdottir from University of Norway and I want to invite you to
participate in an AERA interactive symposium with a tentative title "The
'knowledge base' of teacher education: A ghost from our positivistic past."
The goal of the symposium is to provide a critical analysis of knowledge
base of teacher education so popular in teacher preparation programs.
According to this approach, future teachers mainly have to learn results of
educational research to apply them in their practice. It can be argued that
implicitly this model is based on transmission of knowledge educational
philosophy, assuming that knowledge exists outside of practice. We want to
discuss pitfalls of this approach and possible alternatives to it (e.g., a
sociocultural participatory approach). If you are interested
in providing conceptual and/or empirical arguments for this discussion
and/or alternative perspectives, please, contact us immediately.
We think to submit the symposium proposal to division K, section 4 "General,
pre-service teacher education." We plan to invite Walter Doyle who is a big
name in the knowledge base business and teacher education and Wim Wardekker
from the
Free University at Amsterdam as our discussants. So we would have one
"critical" and one "friendly" discussant.
Please, reply to us as soon as possible if you want (or don't want) to
participate in the symposium. If you decide to participate, please, send us
later a half single-spaced proposal of your presentation. We need it rather
soon although because the deadline for AERA proposals is August 3.
Please, do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions.
Take care,
Sigrun Gudmundsdottir sigrung who-is-at bill.sv.ntnu.no
Eugene Matusov
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Eugene Matusov
School of Education
University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716
Office: 302-831-1266
Fax: 302-831-4445
email: ematusov who-is-at udel.edu
website: http://ematusov.eds.udel.edu
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