Cultivating CT-oriented teachers in pre-service teacher education: what is there and what is missing?

ABSTRACT

Despite a plethora of studies on how to teach critical thinking (CT) in different subject classrooms, there is limited research on how teachers foster their CT and learn to teach CT through pre-service teacher education. Such a gap gives impetus to the present study, which seeks to examine to what extent and how a group of student teachers are prepared to become CT-oriented teachers in a Hong Kong-based pre-service language teacher education programme. Adopting a qualitative research approach and informed by a tripartite conceptual framework (i.e. coverage, coherence, and applicability), the study explored student teachers’ perceptions and experiences via in-depth interviews and relevant documents, supplemented by data gathered from language teacher educators in the programme. The findings reveal a rich yet unbalanced coverage of CT instruction, the transferability of CT learning to its teaching, as well as the rhetoric-reality gap in developing CT-related pedagogy in the programme. In light of the findings, practical implications at classroom and curricula levels are drawn to facilitate the integration of CT into teacher education programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical thinking
• pre-service teacher education
• teacher learning
• curricula development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on a research project supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [EdUHK 18603618].