ABSTRACT
Although questions of significance to teaching and learning may involve private, inner conversations with self, Freire (1972) argues the need for teachers to adopt a reflective posture, one that enters the public arena and examines personal experience through conversations with others. Implicit within such discourse is recognition that several possible meanings can be associated with any course of action in relation to a particular teaching group within a particular context. From a social constructivist perspective interpretation is a meaning-making process, which Parker (1997: 40) notes, requires teachers to recognise that:
problems do not exist ‘out there’, ready made, well defined and waiting to be solved … a problem is seen as a human construct which arises out of a particular perception or interpretation formed about a unique educational context with its values and ends; the values, interests and actions of its inhabitants; and crucially, the particular relation of these features to a theoretical perspective which describes and explains them and their interrelations.
