Exploring transformative learning experiences of the vocationally interested and vocationally disinterested pre-service teachers in selected teacher training colleges in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the transformative learning experiences of 40 vocationally interested and vocationally disinterested pre-service teachers in four selected teacher training colleges in Zimbabwe. This multi-site case study was guided by Mezirow’s tenphase Transformative Learning Theory to understand and unpack the pre-service teachers’ transformative learning experiences, how they understood their transformative learning, and the forms of support offered by the institutional communities that enhanced their transformative learning experiences. Having employed a multi-modal approach which involved focus group discussions, individual face-to-face interviews and continuum drawings and discussions to generate data, a qualitative data analysis strategy using open coding was adopted. Findings suggested that student teachers experienced transformative learning through two major avenues: disorienting dilemmas and learning experiences. While the majority of the pre-service teachers, both the vocationally interested and the vocationally disinterested, experienced transformative learning in teacher education, this thesis found that some did not experience transformation. From the findings, the pre-service teachers investigated understood their transformative learning as embracing two domains: transformative learning as change (of perceptions, views, attitudes and beliefs and understanding of the teaching profession); and transformative learning as the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Such change and knowledge acquisition gave rise to personal awareness that created new ways of thinking and seeing the world. Infrastructural (libraries, theatres, halls of residence), material (computers, books) and human (staff, peers) resources, as well as spiritual support, emerged as critical for enhancing student teachers’ transformative learning. However, where infrastructural resources offered inadequate spaces, particularly in private institutions, this tended to limit the pre-service teachers’ transformative learning experiences. This study thus recommends the provision of adequate and spacious learning spaces to foster student teacher transformative learning. Drawing on Mezirow’s ten-stage Transformative Learning Theory, it is argued that vocationally interested and vocationally disinterested pre-service teachers experienced transformative learning differently. Although the transformative learning phases were sequential and undeviating in Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory, for the pre-service teachers investigated, the transformative learning experiences were neither linear nor experienced by having passed through all ten stages. This thesis discovered that vocationally interested pre-teachers achieved transformative learning having passed through fewer stages of Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory, while their vocationally disinterested counterparts had to move through more stages to realise shifts in their paradigms. The thesis suggests a need for comprehensive longitudinal studies, drawing on this framework to trace the transformative learning journeys of pre-service teachers from first year to third year, to understand their transformative learning experiences as well as establish whether or not all of them experience perspective changes at the end of their teacher training