Liberated to learn: Teacher education as transformation of relationships

Abstract

This paper reports on a process of curriculum innovation for a pedagogy course with a focus on the perceptual gaps between teacher educators and student teachers. As a collaborative inquiry by teacher educators, it was a response to government-led education reform for a new subject at senior secondary level – Liberal Studies – which aimed to cultivate citizenship with humanitarian values. Observing critical discourse and community learning as desirable pedagogical principles to nurture a new generation of teachers for social awareness and commitment to citizenship, the curriculum innovation began with recognition of student teachers' lack of readiness to embrace such learning orientations due to the pre-university approach to learning for examination performance. The challenges were met with the design of assessment tasks that shaped independent thinking and collaborative inquiry, while building relationships in multiple human and conceptual dimensions. Through analysis of a flow of episodes, the paper captures the meaning of the processes of liberation to learn, and concludes with depiction of a growth model for transformation of relationships amidst a performance-related assessment culture.