Beginning teachers’ teaching and pre-service teacher education in China

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to explore the match and mismatch between pre-service teacher education and beginning teachers’ first-year teaching in China. To understand the relationship between the two, document analysis on the curriculum of pre-service teacher education in South China Normal University (SCNU) and 15 individual interviews have been conducted to gather beginning teachers’ experience and reflection on pre-service teacher education. The document analysis shows that the SCNU pre-service teacher education program in Chinese language and literature offers general studies and specialized studies on Chinese language and literature. Besides coursework, there is a compulsory educational internship that every pre-service teacher needs to complete. As the curriculum on teacher education only takes up 17% of the total program credits, the program pays more attention to theory than to practice. Based on the interview data, the beginning teachers graduated from SCNU find that classroom management, being a homeroom teacher, subject teaching practice, student-teacher relationship and heavy workloads are the most challenging in beginning teaching. The match and mismatch between pre-service teacher education and beginning teachers are identified from such dimensions as knowledge, skills and values. In the knowledge domain, the core of knowledge is matched while the mismatch exists in the scope and depth of knowledge. In the skills domain, the skills taught in coursework mismatch those needed in beginning teaching. The design of microteaching and education internship, which are intended to bridge the gap between theory and practice, matches the needs of beginning teachers transiting from pre-service teachers to in-service teachers. The lack of quality control, however, reduces the skill training efficiency. Though beginning teachers adopt various teachers’ values in full-time teaching and find them hard to implement, the values in pre-service teacher education still match those in beginning teaching. The factors behind the match and mismatch include different institutional logic between pre-service teacher education program and basic education, lack of quality control on pre-service teacher education, and changing social and school contexts.