Educating reflective teachers for teaching culturally valued subjects: evaluation of a teacher-training project

This paper describes and evaluates a teacher-training project for teaching culturally valued subjects. The study focuses on the practicum activities of the first year of the training programme. The assumption of the staff members was that appropriate teaching is reflective teaching and that teachers who teach culturally valued subjects should have the characteristics of critical reflection. However, they believed that reflective ability could be achieved spontaneously by every student teacher without any special training. The findings of the study have shown that although the student-teachers indeed displayed a significant measure of reflectivity, their critical reflection was almost completely undeveloped. On the basis of these findings we may conclude that the key to educating reflective teachers lies in the quality of the pedagogical guidance provided. Neglecting such reflective guidance limits the professional growth of critical-reflective teachers and restricts their ability to deal effectively with culturally valued subjects. In achieving all these objectives, the reflective-internship approach to training teachers of culturally valued subjects is perhaps the strategy of choice.