Journal reflections of pre - service teachers during teaching practice in Fiji

This paper retells pre-service teachers’ reflecting on their experiences. These sketches of their experiences have been lifted from their reflective journals and are in its original form. It describes their hopes and desires for the classes they taught, their methods for appreciating those aspirations, and the tribulations and triumphs encountered in the process. These are remarkable anecdotes, for they are scholastically appealing and pleasingly personal. This complement of thoughtful perception and personal experience licenses the reader to both identify with and learn from them

Student teachers’ perceptions about teaching practice: a case study of the University of the South Pacific

Teaching practice/practicum is a compulsory course taken by the final year graduating teachers. Students are attached to various schools for classroom practice for 14 weeks. This presentation evaluates the students' experiences during teaching practice

Acquisition and enhancement of teaching competencies during teaching practice: a Fijian experience

This paper is a report of the study conducted to find out how much teaching competencies student teachers had acquired and enhanced during teaching practice. The research sample included 64 student teachers in urban secondary schools in Fiji. The findings revealed that student teachers had a good grasp of some teaching competencies but needed more preparation in others. There was evidence that teacher education providers and Associate teachers, play a pivotal role in enhancing these significant teaching competencies to student teachers. The findings reveal that any laxity in this provision gives rise to a number of problems like lack of confidence, and poor classroom management, to name a few

Journal reflections of pre - service teachers during teaching practice in Fiji

This paper discloses the personal thoughts and feelings of Pre-service teachers reflecting on their experiences during their second phase of a fourteen-week practicum in local schools in Fiji. Each reflection comes from the journals students wrote. The journals were a means to express their hopes and desires for the classes they taught, their methods for dealing with issues as they arose, and the tribulations and triumphs encountered in the process

Negotiating conflicting discourses of quality teaching in Fiji: initial teacher education and practicum at the University of the South Pacific

This article identifies a number of conflicting discourses informing education in Fiji and their impact on Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes and students. The socially constructivist progressivism of the Ministry of Education and the ITE provider is being eroded by a set of socially conservative discourses symptomatic of neoliberal education reforms elsewhere. It is the practicum where the conflict is most acutely evidenced. To highlight the conflict 90 ITE students, as ethnographic fieldworkers, have used an accepted quality teaching checklist to record the teaching they witnessed while on practicum. The resulting misalignments between discourses of quality teaching identified in this article, and highlighted by ITE students, contribute to debates about what constitutes effective teaching in Fiji. The complex set of discourses identified as impacting on initial teacher education and education in Fiji more generally can be utilised by ITE programmes to generate critical reflection among students. One way to do this is to take a learning-centred approach where ITE students are encouraged to make critical choices for teaching based on links between pedagogy, context and consequence