Develop an awareness of your worldview and how this relates to others’ worldviews
As you enter your Teacher Education Program, you bring with you knowledge, skills, beliefs, and dispositions. You bring both past experiences and beliefs to your teaching and learning and the beliefs you bring to your work are shaped by, among other things, the kind of teaching you have experienced as students.
Teacher Identity
Your professional, teacher identity will evolve over time with experience, continued learning, and reflection. Use the following prompts to consider your emerging professional identity:
- What does it mean to be ‘effective’?
- What characteristics does an effective teacher have?
- What kind of teacher do I want to become?
- What do I need to learn to become an effective teacher?
- What are my beliefs about teaching (my teaching philosophy)?
Worldview
While considering your emerging professional, teacher identity, you must also explore and reflect upon the worldview that you have, and how this will impact on your teacher identity and how it will influence the way you approach and perceive both your students and your planning for their learning.
Reflection
- What is a worldview?
- How would you describe your worldview?
- While thinking about your own worldview, also consider the impacts of your ethnocultural, socioeconomic, geopolitical and spiritual identities.
- Why, as a teacher, is it important to be aware of your own worldview, as well as those of your students and school community?
- What can you do, as a teacher, to ensure that your worldview does not impede the success of the diversity of learners in your classroom?
- When do you consider it to be necessary to challenge the western worldview as it impacts the K-12 education system?
- What aspects of the BC curriculum reinforce or challenge a western worldview?