Reflective Practices: Exploring Teacher Educators’ Perceptions

Abstract

The author has posited that reflective practices can be understood through different theoretical perspectives and engagement with the cited perspectives aims to make teaching practices more critical, enriching, and meaningful. This qualitative interpretive study explores teacher educators’ perception of reflective practices with the basic premise that teacher educators need to have a deep understanding of reflective practices to develop insights in pre-service teachers. Twenty teacher educators, who were teaching B. El. Ed, a teacher education programme of the University of Delhi, were selected on the basis of purposeful sampling. Three themes emerged from the data obtained through a semi-structured interview, representing the teacher educators’ perceptions of the level of their understanding, the challenges that they need to tackle, and the scope of improvement that is required in this area. The findings indicate that a majority of the teacher educators emphasized that reflection is related to the thinking processes, where one is re-thinking one’s own actions and experiences. Only two teacher educators visualized it as examining one’s own assumptions, beliefs, and knowledge, while contextualizing it in the socio-political domain. The teacher educators acknowledged the critical role of reflective practices in the growth of pre-service teachers as reflective practitioners.