Research Information System
Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences, vol.7, no.5, pp.371-379, 2010 (Peer-Reviewed Journal)
In teacher education literature, there is a special attention on the resistant nature of preservice teachers. There is a growing list of unconventional teaching methods in teacher education programs to deal with resistance. Educational drama is only one of these alternative methods that teacher educators utilized in their classrooms to facilitate learning and development of the future teachers.
This ethnographic case study explored the nature of resistance in a teacher education classroom among preservice teachers toward the teacher education program, teacher educators, and their choice of educational drama as instructional method. Data collection methods included semi-structured individual and group interviews, participant observation in the local settings, and WebCT discussions. The data were collected during one course over ten week period. The participants were one teacher educator and 16 preservice teachers enrolled in Masters in Education program at a regional campus of a Midwestern state university in the USA.
The results showed that when preservice teachers did not see the immediate connection between the activities and their expectations, they acted in a way that teacher educators considered as resistance. Also, when preservice teachers assumed the roles in a drama activity relevant to their interests, they were attentive and collaborative. The resistance was found to be often about conflict of interests. Conflicting interests in the classroom seemed to have created polarization between teacher educator and preservice teachers and as a result the preservice teachers became extremely critical against not only the teaching approach, but also the teacher educator. In return, the teacher educator focused on the symptom, which was resistance, rather than the underlying issues of this resistance.