"A Stepping-stone to do Something Else": Exploring why Jamaican Student Teachers Enter and Complete Teacher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The extensive educational reforms currently being implemented in Jamaica, in addition to my personal curiosity as a teacher educator, provide the rationale for this research. A better awareness and understanding of who enrols to learn to teach may be critical to the viability and success of the current reforms taking place in the Jamaican education system, and teacher education in particular. This study explores why Jamaican student teachers, who were not aspiring to learn to be teachers or teach, entered and completed a three-year teacher education programme. The study was guided by two essential research questions: (i) What accounts for Jamaican students, who indicate that teacher education and teaching are not their educational or occupational aspirations, entering and completing teacher education? (ii) What do these Jamaican students experience within the teacher education program that contributes to their belief that such a program is of benefit to their educational and occupational aspirations? Postcolonial theory (Ashcroft, Griffith & Tiffen, 1989) and theory of occupational choice (Ginzberg, 1963, 1972) serve as analytical frameworks to assist in better understanding the Jamaican student teacher experience. Qualitative methodology provided the means to including the essential “voices” of eight Jamaican student teachers; and, grounded theory the means to collecting and analysing what they had to say about entering and completing teacher education. The findings raise the notion of “youthfulness”, and how this may influence aspirations and decisions in an economic and academic environment of limited options and opportunities. They suggest that teacher education may serve as a “stepping-stone” to more desirable educational or occupational goals. The findings also reveal what these student teachers believed were significant aspects of the teacher education experience, and how this experience may contribute to their future educational or occupational plans and aspirations. Finally, this study supports the movement to reform teacher education in Jamaica; however, not at the expense of reducing the opportunities for higher education within the wider Jamaican populace. Suggestions are presented regarding possible reforms to secondary and post-secondary education in general; therefore, reforms which may support or enhance existing teacher education programmes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".