ABSTRACT
The central mission of this volume is to draw appropriate applications from constructivism to the practice of teacher education. The essence of constructivism is the learners’ knowledge-building process (Derry, in press; Fosnot, 1996). Understanding knowledge acquisition therefore seems to be a central task for those attempting to define the role of constructivism in teacher education. As a result, key questions guiding our own research agenda for the past several years have been:
This chapter describes our attempts to document how teachers construct knowledge, to understand this knowledge growth within a constructivist theoretical perspective, and to apply these findings in refining and redesigning teacher education programs.
Despite the centrality of knowledge in both cognitive (Shuell, 1996) and constructivist (Derry, in press) views of learning, the importance of knowledge in teacher education is controversial. Under challenge is the applicability of theoretical knowledge to the complex and everyday practical concerns of teachers. Kessels and Korthagen (1996), for example, dispute the relevance to teacher education of abstract knowledge derived from systematic research on classrooms. They argue that the problem with such knowledge is that it is universal, and that the type of knowledge needed to be a good teacher is knowledge of particular situations and contexts. Kessels and Korthagen define universal knowledge as
