Innovation in pre-service teacher education: Exploring the Social Science teaching beliefs in student teachers

Abstract

Pre-service teacher education is positioned as a great influential variable to promote changes in our schools’ classrooms. That is why this paper wants to contribute to the innovation and enhancement of this field, rethinking some of the teaching plans of some of the subjects on this teaching degree. The changes in these programmes will be based on the exploration of beliefs and ideas of a group of 295 students on this degree pathway in the University of Barcelona. In particular, the aim of this paper is to get to know the beliefs upheld by the students about the kind of methods they would use to teach Social Science. This exploration was carried out through a survey made by our own group of researchers. The results show that students maintain mixed beliefs about how to teach, because they consider to be important both the constructive character strategies as well as transmissive ones. Also, significant differences appear between the first year and fourth year students’ valuations. In keeping with the results, we present some interesting courses of action to deal with rethinking pre-service teacher education in the field of teaching Social Sciences.