Towards Broader Views on Learning to Teach

Teacher education programs increasingly tend to include a variety of views on learning-to-teach. These not only focus on knowledge acquisition and development of skills, but also include attention to the formation of professional identity and to social and societal aspects of becoming a teacher. Little is known, however, about pedagogies that have such broad development as their goal. Building on research indicating the dynamic, interactive and often transformative nature of becoming a teacher in the broad sense, a course was designed for Dutch university student teachers that focused on ‘teaching for creativity’ and the creation of ‘creativity cultivating contexts’. Data were gathered in four subsequent courses (N = 67) that were designed according to the characteristics of such a context. The findings indicate that student teachers reported outcomes that refer to all aspects of their learning and, more than anything else, outcomes indicated extensions or (re)considerations of various aspects of their emerging identity as teachers. This leads to the conclusion that learning to teach for creativity goes hand in hand with a reconsideration of one’s identity as a teacher.