Abstracts - Earli

F 1229 August 2007 17:00 - 18:20Room: KonferenciaPaper SessionTeacher educationChair:Sylvia Rojas, National Autonomous University of Mexico, MexicoRethinking a deliberative context for teacher education from the aims of citizenship education inthe new Quebec education programDavid Lefrancois, Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres, CanadaMarc-Andre Ethier, Universite de Montreal, CanadaThe Quebec Education Program asks teachers to help students build and question – through adeliberative process – their own comprehension of history, society, and community life instead ofinsisting on an already established factual content, a dogma. This generates a public debate inQuebec about history teaching and citizenship education. In this condition, many teachers arereluctant to apply such a deliberative model of active learning. After describing this obstacle, weexplain how future teachers can proceed to experiment by themselves the effectiveness of thosemethods, or how they can bring corrections and improvements to unanticipated weaknesses ofmethods that could be detected in concrete situations. We shall contend that no one can preparefuture teachers to help students built their own comprehension without developing critical thinkingand integrating this objective into teacher education programs. Indeed, it is not possible tocultivate deliberative and democratic virtues without permitting future teachers to think criticallyand collectively about different or contradictory interpretations of social, historical and politicalrealities. Consequently, developing critical autonomy is one of the most important aims of teachereducation, even though future teachers learn to become much more critical vis-à-vis all sorts ofinstitutional authority and aware of their potential influence on the development of educationprograms. Some examples of critical deliberation will be derived from different pedagogicalactivities proposed to future teachers in a new course Education for Citizenship which has beenimplemented at Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres for more than two years.Teachers’ concepts of experts and children (Reflections on examining interpretations of cognitivedevelopment)Mária Hercz, Kodolányi János University College, HungaryThe success of educational reforms and changes are highly dependent on their key figures, theteachers. To improve the education of teachers and to make it more effective it would be essentialto explore the teachers’ thinking more deeply and thoroughly. The present paper aims atcontributing to a deeper understanding of teachers’ thinking on the cognitive development ofchildren, is a fundamental domain in education. Cognitive pedagogy provides the theoretical basisfor mapping the self-perception of nursery, elementary, secondary and vocational school teachersas experts, as well as their child-concept. We used empirical research methods: the data werecollected with questionnaires (reliability is Chronbach-alpha 0,81) containing open tasks thatasked for associations and definitions. Approximately 700 educators took part in the research withlayered sampling from 73 schools in Fejer County, Hungary. The data induction was processedwith SPSS 11.0 statistical software. Hypothesises of the research are the following: Teachers in thepractice overwrite their own expert knowledge learnt during their teacher training with the– 340 –