Enhancing Teacher Education through the Application of Open Science Principles

Abstract

PCF10 Sub-theme: Building Resilience // Teacher education continues to pose a formidable challenge to the Global South. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the lack of qualified teachers. Together with qualified staff, it is clear that relevant and local teaching-learning resources are essential if governments wish to enhance the teaching and learning processes. Solutions to the lack of qualified teachers/educators/lecturers and to that of localised resources (such as Open Textbooks) are not easily encountered. We propose a novel community-based approach (Ferreira-Meyers & Dhakulkar, 2021) to tackle this dual challenge by innovative use of technology. Our proposed approach is based on the principles embedded in the Open Science Framework (OSF) and envisions creation of grassroot-level communities of practices via networking of teachers and students. In this work we present a model through which the principle of openness can be put into practice for teacher education and address the various challenges in this task. The model makes use of different OSF aspects to create a teacher-student community of practice with a peer network of “critical friends”. It offers the opportunity to extend “openness” to teachers and students by fostering sharing, collaboration while also focusing on self-directed learning and constructionist pedagogy. // Paper ID 1286