Teacher change: the effect of student learning on science teachers’ teaching in Kenya

This paper reports on an instrumental case study that employed narrative and teacher change methodological and analyticalframeworks to investigate Kenyan science teachers’ views of the effect of student learning on their teaching. Interpretation of theteachers’ views revealed that they: 1) gained an increased awareness and understanding of their students’ science learning abilitiesthat allowed them to take increased responsibility for own learning, 2) developed and accepted new understanding of their teachingroles, and 3) became more critical of how science pedagogy was modeled for them as former high school students and later,continuing practitioners. In the paper we demonstrate how the study’s findings validate the emergent literature’s support forcontextualized science learning and teaching. The study’s findings show that students’ learning impacted the teachers’ pedagogicalpractices. Therefore, we argue that students’ learning and teachers’ teaching are not mutually exclusive.

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