ABSTRACT

The last chapter looked at the way young people absorb educational messages from their own culture. The present chapter stays with the focus on the learning of PGCE students, but examines the ways in which their implicit views of teaching and learning are brought to the fore and challenged by a brief, intense immersion in a very different national culture: a two-week field trip by a mixed-subject group of students to The Gambia. In terms of ‘method’, we are back with the small-scale reflective approach of Chapter 6, which not only offers insights into the views of students, but also provides food for thought for the lecturers on the trip. Do such experiences of ‘culture shock’ have any effect, and if so, what, and is it lasting? We might draw an analogy between this type of field trip and the commonly valued exposure of students training to be secondary teachers to life in the contrasting culture of a primary school: do we really know what the long-range effects of this are, either? The chapter provides particularly clear demonstrations of three key issues: the lack of transfer which such experiences have – echoing Mike Wallace’s concerns in Chapter 2; the ways in which adults, like children, defend and withdraw when the learning that is demanded of them feels ‘too much’; and the phases that learners go through, as they put it, from ‘disorientation’, via ‘coping’, to eventual ‘equilibrium’.