Abstract

CIFUENTES ARCILA, María Cristina  and  URIBE GARTNER, Carlos Julio. Developing Knowledge about Students through Pre-Service Experiences: A Prospective Physics Teacher Case Study. Rev. Fac. Cienc. Tecnol. [online]. 2016, n.39, pp.5-30. ISSN 0121-3814.

This paper shows how a pre-service physics teacher developed her practical knowledge about her students through her first year of pre-service experiences. We adopted a narrative inquiry as a methodological frame: we used the stories as a rhetoric resource to show the teacher's knowledge, and as both an object of study and a research method. Our data sources were audiotaped interviews, videotaped teaching episodes, researcher's field notes and the teacher's written documents. The data analysis revealed some characteristics of the teacher's developing knowledge about her students, and allowed us to document this development as a three-stage process of making new sense of particular classroom situations, responding to students' singularities. In the first stage the teacher got acquainted with her students' motivation, academic performance and classroom behavior. In the second stage, she learned some effective motivation strategies and ways to interact with them, especially with those students that made her feel a cognitive, emotional and relational security or insecurity. In the third stage, the teacher learned about some students' difficulties to perform certain typical tasks of physics classes-solving standardized problems and reading science-related textbooks-, to understand some concepts-such as distinguishing every-day and scientific language meanings, or inferring meaningful relations between scientific concepts-. We discuss some implications of the results for physics teachers' initial training.

Keywords : Physics teacher; pre-service; practical knowledge; knowledge about students; narrative inquiry.

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