Transforming preservice teacher education: The influence of beliefs, experiences and structures on teacher educators' practice in a northern province of South Africa

This study investigated the teaching practice of three teacher educators by examining the interaction amongst their beliefs, their experiences, and the institutional structures in which they worked in an attempt to better understand the complexity of transforming practice amidst the current reform agenda in South Africa. This study was motivated by the policy put forth in the White paper on Education (1995) which claimed that every program in all levels of education should encourage, among other things, critical thinking, and the capacities to reason, inquire, weigh evidence, form judgment and be able to communicate. Currently, we do not have many comparative studies on teacher educators, their beliefs and experiences. Further, it is rare to find studies of this nature focusing on institutional structures to examine their effects on practice.; The data was gathered through observation, interviews and analysis of documents related to teacher educators who teach methods courses at Waterfall University's preservice teacher education program. Data analysis was performed as the data was gathered in order to interrogate it and discover emerging themes.; Three cases were developed demonstrating the manner in which the teacher educators differed in how they understood and implemented reform. The first teacher educator went to a graduate school where the new approaches of teaching being mandated were used. Subsequently, she was able to transform her practice when she went back to teach.; The other two teacher educators were less knowledgeable about the reform. The first of these two teacher educators was able to transform his teaching into a mixture of traditional and new ways of teaching by examining his beliefs, experiences and knowledge of his role as a teacher. The remaining teacher educator resisted the reform and taught his students merely survival skills. He maintained that there was nothing new in the reform that he had not done in his prior teaching. One major omission of the reform, according to this teacher educator, was the fact that it did not take into consideration differing contexts that might affect the implementation of the reform. Thus, he concluded that the reform was not realistic.; Teacher expectation about the institutional structures played a strong role in influencing teacher practice. Three key ideas emerged from the analysis of these cases: excellence in teaching, false clarity in teaching, and empathy in teaching.