Exploring the South African Physical Sciences Pre-Service Teachers Pedagogical Orientations

The most essential aspect of teacher education is to attain different way of teaching science for learner's conceptual understanding. However, in most South African universities, science methodology modules do not fully expose pre-service teachers to different science teaching approaches. In these modules, pre-service teachers often are exposed to readings materials, observing one another in microteaching or create lesson plans for assessment purposes. To teach science effectively, teachers are encouraged to possess a good content knowledge and knowledge of how to translate content knowledge into appropriate teaching ways for specific topic. The study investigates physical science pre-service teacher's pedagogical orientations in one of the South African universities. The phrase 'orientation' refers to teachers' knowledge and beliefs for teaching science. Literature shows various classifications of pedagogical orientations. Based on research conducted in South Africa, orientations are classified into two approaches, namely direct approaches divided into direct didactic and direct interactive and a second approach is an inquiry approach divided into guided inquiry and open discovery. A qualitative method approach was adopted to obtain teachers pedagogical orientations using a questionnaire from the University of Western Michigan. The questionnaire comprised of 10 items and each item has four alternative teaching methods, students were requested to select the most appropriate and the most inappropriate options. For this paper, only the most appropriate teaching orientations were analysed and only two items were analysed, physics and a chemistry item. A descriptive statistics analysis was used. We then calculated a percentage distribution to the four teaching orientations. For calculation purpose, we arbitrarily ordered the spectrum of orientations along a scale of 1-4, where 1= didactic direct; 2 = direct interactive; 3 = guided inquiry and 4 = open inquiry. The results show that pre-service teachers exhibited a preference for learner-centered teaching method, which is centered within guided inquiry for both items.