| This study examines the cultural models of teaching in two informal educational settings: a theater training program for teens at an urban arts center and a youth leadership institute offered by a social service organization. The study is motivated by a lack of research on the beliefs of teachers in contexts other than schools. Researchers interested in the cultural nature of teaching beliefs have proposed that the transmission model, in which teaching is conceived as a matter of transmitting knowledge from the minds of teachers to the minds of students, is the pervasive "folk pedagogy" for all forms of teaching in Western culture. Empirical work on this topic, however, has focused narrowly on the beliefs of school-based teachers. This study broadens the conversation about teaching beliefs to include informal settings and challenges assumptions about the pervasiveness of the transmission model.;The cultural models of teaching in both settings aligned well with formal constructivist theory. For example, in both groups, teachers believed that teaching is best done by strategically designing experiences that will challenge students to revise their existing understandings. The transmission model was not found to govern teaching in either setting. In fact, teachers in both groups explicitly associated the transmission model with school-type teaching and rejected it as not relevant to the teaching they were doing.;These findings suggest that the transmission model may not be as pervasive as has previously been thought; it may be a model for school teaching only, rather than for all forms of teaching. This has implications for teacher education, where the transmission model has been shown to interfere with learning to teach according to the principles of constructivism. I suggest that studying a wider range of teaching contexts may be useful in helping prospective school teachers learn to think about teaching in ways that differ from the transmission model. |
