Pedagogies of and pedagogies in distance learning material for teacher education

Abstract

This paper is a response to calls made in the teacher education pedagogy literature (e.g. Loughran, 2006; Moletsane, 2003; Murphy, 2008; Russell, 1997) for teacher educators to take a critical look at how they mediate knowledge and skills to pre-service and in-service teacher education students. Teaching teachers is a particularly complex kind of teaching, and is even more complex when this teaching is done on the page or screen in distance learning programmes. It is argued that, when teacher educators design materials for teacher education at a distance, they should consider not only the pedagogies they wish to describe and discuss in the materials, but also the pedagogies of the materials because both contribute to the constitution of particular subject positions for readers (as students and as teachers). Such positioning is likely to affect their “investment” (Norton, 2000) in their studies and in the classroom practices advocated by the designers. I use examples from a critical pedagogic analysis (Reed, 2010) of selected South African teacher education materials to illustrate this argument.