Abstract:

One central requirement for teacher training is that teacher students gain understanding of the circumstances and realities of their future work already during their studies in teacher initial education. At the same time many teacher education institutions worldwide have been forced to lessen the amount of practical training in schools due to budget cut and lessened funding, and, during the last few years, effects of pandemic. This, we argue, creates a complex demand for teacher-students' learning in teacher education.

This paper focuses on teaching a specific approach called Phenomenon-Based Learning (PhBL). We introduce a “How to plan and carry out PhBL projects” course that aimed to offer the basics of phenomenon-based learning methods in teacher education through developing hands-on methods to capture the complexity of student-teachers' learning demands. Phenomenon-based learning is one way of carrying out multidisciplinary learning in comprehensive school.

The overall goal of the “How to plan and carry out PhBL projects” course was to give readiness to plan, carry out and evaluate learning projects in classrooms and other settings that are based on theories and concepts of PhBL. In the course, altogether 24 hours consisted of face-to-face education and 12 hours of studying in self-organized small groups. To maximize the sense of participation and authentic experience the Future Dialogue (FD) and learning diary reflections were developed as specific teaching and learning methods on the course.

Based on the above-mentioned methods three assignments in the small groups were introduced, including “PhBL project of the future”. During this assignment we first asked the teacher students to recall any kind of a school event or a project they had participated in as pupils or, for example, as substitute teachers. Applying the FD, we then asked them to imagine that they had worked as teachers in this project. We asked them to further imagine that after three years they had met again on the ‘How to plan and carry out phenomenon-based teaching’ course. Then we asked them to reflect what they think had happened and why it had become such a good example of the theory and praxis of phenomenon-based learning reflecting their thoughts to the course literature.

In this paper, two cases of students’ processes for the development of PhBL project based on “future remembering” according to FD methods are presented from the perspective of students participating in this course.

It can be concluded that imagining being a teacher in this new role was helpful to students so that they could understand PhBL teaching in practice and to feel ownership of the knowledge and teacher’s main tasks in PhBL in a deeper way even when they could not practice it with the actual interaction with the students.

Keywords:

Phenomenon-Based Learning (PhBL), Future Dialogue (FD), teacher training, pedagogical innovation, student-centred learning.