A 3D approach to first year English education
| Published date | 25 January 2013 |
| Date | 25 January 2013 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09684881311293061 |
| Pages | 54-69 |
| Author | Margaret Zeegers |
| Subject Matter | Education |
A 3D approach to first year
English education
Margaret Zeegers
School of Education and Arts, University of Ballarat, Mt Helen, Australia
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the suggestive possibilities of an approach to
undergraduate English teacher education that the author has called the 3D Approach – Develop
professional knowledge, Display professional knowledge, Disseminate professional knowledge – in
relation to a number of groups of first year pre-service teachers (PSTs) engaging the teaching and
learning materials of their English education course.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines ways in which this approach has been
assessed by the PSTs themselves, constructing this as an expression of their lived experience as PSTs.
The author draws on Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, initiates a systematic
and orchestrated program of explicit scaffolding of first year PST learning and draws on
University-generated student assessment of their courses, focus groups and individual interviews to
investigate ways in which the 3D approach may be considered as enhancing first year PST learning.
Findings – PSTs’ own informed evaluations of their own developing knowledge have made visible
the teaching and learning that they have engaged and articulated. What the author outlines in this
paper is not a “Eureka” moment for first year PSTs, but it is the result of careful scholarly
considerations of what careful scholarly considerations by first years in Education courses may
engage. For this cohort of PSTs, and for the author, it is a particular form of engagement with
pedagogy. It is a pedagogy for teachers, part of active engagement on the part of the teacher and the
learner, producing knowledge together.
Research limitations/implications – Lack of generalisability from case study research may be
considered as a limitation, but the author would argue that it is the details thrown up for careful
examination in a case study which may serve to inform professional discussion and debate.
Practical implications – Negative press of inadequate teachers emerging from universities, with
their specious claims will not progress reasoned discussion; research on how the PSTs are themselves
taught and how they develop as professionals will. PSTs’ own informed evaluations of their own
developing knowledge will go some way towards enabling this to happen. This sort of research opens
up possibilities for starting with the right sort of questions, a shift from asking the wrong sort of
questions, which the author would argue is that sort on which the media are basing their opinion
pieces.
Social implications – Continuing public discussions, usually conducted in and by the media, about
teacher quality, particularly as this tends to be tied to notions of teacher pay, indicates a wider social
concern about the need for quality teachers. This sort of social concern is also a major concern for
teacher educators, and is to be addressed as such. This paper addresses some of those concerns.
Originality/value – The paper engages issues about teacher education raised publicly in the media
and ties these to the more private domain of university practice in a given teacher education course.
Keywords Teachers, Tertiaryeducation, Undergraduates, Australia, Education
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
This 3D approach was first introduced in 2009 to the First Year English Education
courses for which I am responsible at my university. I have a consistent record of high
percentages in my university’s Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) and Student
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0968-4883.htm
QAE
21,1
54
Received 8 March 2012
Revised 2 September 2012
Accepted 5 October 2012
Quality Assurance in Education
Vol. 21 No. 1, 2013
pp. 54-69
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0968-4883
DOI 10.1108/09684881311293061
Evaluation of Course (SEC) programs, as well as in other forms of evaluation that I
conduct on a less formal basis. At the same time, the results of the students in my
English Education courses remained consistently the same. As their lecturer, I would
want to see improvement in this area, but I have not found this to be the case over the
years in which I have been involved with them. Taking a position as a reflective
practitioner in response to the evaluation and assessment results, I have introduced
what I have called a 3D approach. This is a deliberate play on the e5 Instructional
Model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elabourate, Evaluate) (Department of Education and
Early Childhood Development, 2009), and the 3D trend in the popular entertainment
industry. 3D is for Develop knowledge, Display knowledge, Disseminate knowledge.
All teaching and learning activities and materials are structured around these three Ds,
drawing upon the work of Scho
¨n (1987, 1990), particularly in relation to investigating
those indeterminate fields of professional practice to which he refers, not only in
relation to my own work as a lecturer and tutor in my own program, but also in relation
to the first year students enrolled in it. Scho
¨n (1987, 1990) represents those
indeterminate zones of professional practice as having wider implications for student
engagement in discipline-based units than straight academic encounters with
discipline-based literature allows. This includes developing capacities for
self-monitoring and self-evaluation to deepen professional understandings of the
various dimensions of their professional undertakings. This sort of self-monitoring and
self-evaluation has been built into the program.
Underpinning the 3D concept is explicit and orchestrated working of the Zones of
Proximanl Development (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978) as far as these students are concerned.
Students are introduced to the Vygotsky’s work in developing cognition in children,
and with this, the concept of the ZPD. This ZPD represents the space in which all
learning occurs, being the gap between what a learner can do by themselves and what
they can do with the help of more knowledgeable others. Students are introduced to
this concept in relation to the children they will be teaching, certainly, but this is
extended to their own situations, as first years encountering unfamiliar concepts and
the language in which these are couched. Their own experience, then, illustrates at first
hand just what the ZPD implies, as they encounter concepts like pedagogy and
cognition in relation to what they are learning to do. The more knowledgeable others
are for them not just their lecturers or tutors, but also the scholars whose books and
articles they read as part of the course, the classroom teachers with whom they conduct
their teaching practice, their peers, and older student cohorts. This imparts a
dimension of reality to the abstractions of theory. Having explicitly encountered the
ZPD for themselves, students’ experience what Bruner (1986) calls scaffolding, that is,
a series of strategies that explicitly frames and supports the teaching and learning in
this course. Learning about scaffolding as part of their developing professional
knowledge, students experience it for themselves in explicit and overt ways.
Methodology
I have conducted research into the program using a phenomenological approach. In
doing this, I have drawn on van Manen’s (1990, 2002) concept of lifeworld experiences,
part of a phenomenological approach to the research in this case. According to van
Manen (1990, 2002), the essence of an experience is gained by means of an in-depth
understanding of the nature or meaning of the particular object or phenomenon as
First year
English
education
55
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