INSERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION AND TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT - REPORT(S) OF AN EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Teacher education entails the responsibility to promote teachers’ development as educational professionals who understand their teaching activity as intellectual work, rather than merely based on content knowledge and mastering of classroom techniques. This being a valid objective also in teacher development contexts, the experience reported in this paper, aimed at language teachers, highlights the importance of creating conditions for awareness raising about the need to understand educational action as a privileged example of professional activity aimed at providing a service to others, namely as regards the development of the competences needed to face the challenges of a permanently changing society. This empowering vision of education implies redefining pedagogical roles in the teaching and learning process and attaching special importance to the adoption of an enquiring stance towards practice, in view of its transformation. This paper focuses on examples of the teacher development strategies, as well as on the teachers’ reflexive practices during the teacher development process. It also includes excerpts of the reports of the didactic projects carried out by the two co-authors, in the role of trainees, which reveal some aspects of an action-research approach to teaching. The analysis of those excerpts reveals that both of them recognize the formative potential of an inquiry-oriented approach to teaching.