The Article

In this case study, Professor Mary M. Kennedy provides a personal account of her struggle to learn to teach in an environment and culture quite different than her own. She traveled to Thailand as a visiting scholar and found that her audiences held different assumptions than she did about what should occur during her lectures, roundtable discussions, workshops, and so on. The case offered Kennedy the opportunity to take a different approach by examining the problem of learning to teach.

Discussion

Kennedy notes that much of the literature on teacher learning concerns whether or how novices can overcome the beliefs they have formed through their apprenticeship of observation. In her case, the situation is different in that the central conflict was between “my own well-established ideas about my role as a teacher and, on the other hand, the role my hosts expected me to play.” Her well-established ideas about her role as a teacher, she notes, were established during her lengthy career as a researcher and consultant and rather limited experience as a teacher. Over the years, she tacitly drew a “strong analogy between ‘consulting or directing research,’ on the one side, and ‘teaching,’ on the other, and assumed that both roles should be enacted in roughly the same way.” That meant she viewed learning as group discussion and conversation and involving collaborative activities. But she quickly discerned from the reaction of her Thai hosts (mostly members of the Faculty of Education at Chulalongkorn University) that she was not meeting their expectations. The cultural gulf was wide. The Thai educational system emphasizes didactic instruction, and other aspects of the culture promote student passivity. “The Thai culture is remarkably deferential to people in authority roles and it is very difficult for most Thais to speak out in presence of authority.” The Thai audience wanted formal presentations rather than the interaction that Kennedy preferred. There were myriad other differences, involving even the mundane, such as the use of the black board and audio-visual props. Her experience parallels the situations many novice teachers face in the U.S. in that she had pre-formed ideas about what should happen in the classroom, the role students should play, and how learning occurs. After trail and error and the aid of a “would-be mentor,” Kennedy learned to teach in a way that her audiences expected and were more comfortable with. Ultimately, Kennedy found that while the experience forced her to think hard about the teaching and learning process, and to alter her behavior, her essential beliefs remained unchanged. For Kennedy, her experience revealed how potent prior beliefs are as inhibitors to learning, even when the context that formed those beliefs is inappropriate to a new teaching context.

What It Means To You

As Kennedy notes, prior beliefs can power inhibitors to teaching and learning. Are teachers in your district conscious of these deeply imbedded beliefs and open to altering them in differing educational contexts?

For More Information

Kennedy, M.M. (2000). Learning to teach in a different culture. Teachers and teaching: Theory and practice, 6(1), 75-100.

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