How shall we know them? Trainee teachers’ perceptions of their learners’ abilities

• Main Author: Rushton, Ian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Huddersfield Press 2011-01-01
• Series: Teaching in Lifelong Learning: A Journal to Inform and Improve Practice
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5920/till.2011.3116

This article, being the final one in a series of three for this journal, is concerned with trainee teachers’ changing perceptions of their learners and focuses on two areas: trainees’ perceptions of their learners’ abilities and how they are formed by their own experiences as learners; and the changes in trainees’ perceptions over the duration of their two year Initial Teacher Education (ITE) course in the Lifelong Learning Sector (LLS). Working within a multi-method approach to action research, this small-scale study found that trainees’ perceptions were influenced not so much by their own identities and habitus, although social capital was a prominent feature, but by a problematic mix of competing cultures and the impact of casualisation in the sector.