How can I improve my practice as a teacher and facilitator while working together with instructors/teachers in order to discuss with them and facilitate them in increasing the learning outcome of their students?
Original version
MAYP 2010Abstract
This dissertation is a self-study research approach into my practice as a teacher and facilitator at Wau Vocational Training Center (WVTC). I examined my experiences as a teacher for 7 years, enquire the forms of my knowing and my claims that I know, through adapting a self-study research approach under the umbrella question: how can I improve my practice (Whitehead, 2009)? Throughout my first year as a master student at Akershus University College (HiAk), I have come to acquire new knowledge about a variety of research methodology and methods. Furthermore, my second year and gaining a perspective of Whitehead & McNiff, enlightened me more and found that self-study research approach is one of the valuable methodologies which offers a way to systematically look at ways to improve the "I". The "I" is a key element of self-study research approach that distinguishes it from other types of research methodologies.Self-study research approach places emphasis on the "I" within forms of action, and in relation to other people ideas, and events (Hamilton, 1998). My approached to self-study research approach was based on the question: how can I improve my practice as a teacher and facilitator while working together with instructors/teachers in order to discuss with them and facilitate them in increasing the learning outcome of their students? The purpose of this study is to look into what I encountered in my past experiences as a teacher as I moved to examine and improve my practice of it through the facilitation of instructors at WVTC. As I traveled down the path of improving my practice as a teacher together with instructors at WVTC, I learned so many roles of being a teacher, discovered my vulnerabilities, and found a community of support in the writings of Whitehead, McNiff and Tom Russell, and Hamilton. The improvements and understanding I gained through engaging in this study demonstrate that self-study can be beneficial for me to improve my practice in order to increase the learning outcome of the students. For this study I collected data from Wau Vocational Training Center (WVTC). The findings are divided into two sections. The first section handled the preliminary meeting with the leadership of WVTC, followed by the first workshop conducted for the staff of the same center by the experts from HiAk. The second section displayed my periodic meetings with the instructors at WVTC for one and half month. The same section (2) portrayed the interviews conducted for three head of the departments, namely; Electrical, Carpentry and Masonry as well as observation in the same sections for theory class and workshop practice. It is through the methods and tools that I used e.g. photography, research dairy (log writing), and audio recordings, I documented all the activities that I engulfed in at WVTC, which are explicated in the later stages of this work
Description
Master i yrkespedagogikk