Between “saying and doing” in the teaching-learning relationship. A case study on the representations of teachers in initial training

Abstract

The paper reports an exploratory research carried out in the course of “Design and evaluation of training processes” for the “Corsi Abilitanti di Tirocinio Formativo Attivo” (TFA) at the University of Salento. The research question aims to explore diachronically the representations of teachers regarding the vision of the teaching-learning relationship they developed during the course conducted following the principles of socio constructivist teaching for the expected learning outcomes. These representations were collected tanks to a semistructured questionnaire at the beginning and end of the course period and twelve months after the closure of the TFA. The data collected were analyzed with an exploratory Factor
Analysis. The first results show that, at the end of the course, teachers have developed representations more oriented to a socio-constructivist view of the teaching-learning relationship with respect to what was detected at the beginning of the course when the representations were stereotyped on a traditional transmission-type view. This is evident twelve months after the end of the TFA, where teachers return more realistic representations despite of what emerged at the beginning and at the end of the Course. This exploration is a first step in understanding the “dispositions to act”, which, in future research, can be correlated with the competent practices performed in the exercise of the profession.