Teacher Educators’ Educational Orientations: Do They Support Learner Centred Education?

Abstract

The desire to embrace learner centred approaches at all levels of Botswana’s education system has been echoed in almost every curriculum document produced in since Botswana’s independence. Although efforts have been made to entrench these approaches in the education system, teachers and teacher educators have found this to be elusive. Often, they fall back to the more familiar teacher centred approaches. This paper reports on a study to ascertain the educational orientation of teacher educators in colleges of education in Botswana and how this orientation influences their educational practices. Using a dichotomous typology of educational orientations developed by Hadley (in Quam 1998:17-36), whether ones educational orientation is pedagogic or andragogic, a questionnaire was administered to a selected number of teacher educators in colleges of education to ascertain their orientation. The findings revealed that most teacher educators who completed the questionnaire had a pedagogic rather than an andragogic orientation. A pedagogical orientation is associated with teacher centred practices and an andragogical orientation is associated with learner centred practices. Findings from interviews with student teachers confirmed these findings. Based on these findings a number of recommendations are made to address this situation.