Ní Mhocháin, R (2011) ‘The seniors told us’: insights into a Malaysian teacher trainees’ community of practice. In: Re-Imagining Initial Teacher Education: Perspectives on Transformation, 30 June 2011, St. Patrick's College, Dublin.
Abstract
Communities of practice within initial teacher education (ITE) is the focus of this study and the ITE course in question is a Bachelor of Education in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL) with a current enrolment of approximately 200 Malaysian students (100 first year, 100 second year). This ‘community of practice’ is unique in that the students training to be teachers here will return to Malaysia to both complete their training and develop their career, they are not being trained to work in the UK. Since September it has been interesting to observe how the first year students have settled in and to hear on occasion what they have learned from the ‘seniors’, which is how they refer to the second year group. This observed knowledge transfer was the catalyst for the current research as it prompted questions as to how much, and what exactly, the second years were passing on to their young peers. Lave and Wenger (1991: 98) define a community of practice as ‘a system of relationships between people, activities, and the world: developing with time, and in relation to other tangential and overlapping communities of practice’. The Malaysian community of practice may be influenced by a number of factors including other initial teacher education course students they interact with and the UK educational system which they observe throughout their own course. The current study is in its infancy and is initially focusing on the development and organisation of this Malaysian community of practice and how new members at the periphery learn and move towards being a core member of the community. The preliminary results from focus group data gathered in relation to the issues outlined above will be discussed as will the next stage of the research.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | L Education > L Education (General) |
| Divisions: | School of Education |
| Date Deposited: | 14 Jul 2014 11:51 |
| Last Modified: | 15 Aug 2021 09:35 |
| URI / Page ID: | https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/2651 |
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