Chinese Journal of Science Education


Vol. 16 No. 2 , Pages 215 - 237 , 2008

Exploring High School Pre-service Teachers’ Identity Development and Participation in a Community of Practice: From a Situated Cognition Perspective (Article written in Chinese)

Sung-Pei CHIEN & Hsin-Kai WU

Abstract

Taking a perspective of situated cognition (Lave & Wenger, 1991), this case study explored two pre-service science teachers’ learning trajectories and investigated how their identities changed under the influence of other experienced teachers. Multiple sources of qualitative data, including video recordings of teaching, interviews, and classroom observations were collected from the two pre-service teachers (teaching chemistry and physics) and 11 experienced teachers. Two different trajectories emerged from the data analyses. The chemistry pre-service teacher gradually increased her level of participation and engaged in more core practices of the community. However, the physics pre-service teacher stayed marginal due to her consistent lack of participation. Additionally, experienced teachers had differential influences on the two pre-service teachers. After interacting with experienced teachers, the chemistry teacher integrated the shared repertoires and experiences into her own teaching. On the other hand, the physics teacher’s marginal participation restricted her interactions with other teachers; her identity therefore did not change and her learning trajectory was not influenced by the experienced teachers.

Keywords: situated cognition; legitimate peripheral participation; community of practice; pre-service teacher

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