Acting and Teacher Education: Being Model for Identity Development

Year 2011, Volume: 2 Issue: 2, 36 - 49, 01.02.2011

Kemal Sinan Özmen

Abstract

This study follows three pre-service teachers during three academic semesters in which they took an acting course for teachers and participated in practicum with a special focus on rehearsing and developing their teacher identities. In order to create the necessary context for them, an acting course for pre-service teacher education was designed in parallel with a model which is based on an influential acting theory. This model, namely the BEING (Believe, Experiment, Invent, Navigate, Generate), was also designed by the researcher. The incentive behind designing a model grounded on acting literature was that the relevant literature does not provide trainers with a universal model which can be referred as a manual for running and monitoring acting courses for teachers. In this case study, this model was also tested in terms of its applicability and functionality in practice. Based on analyses of audio taped interviews, session journals and reflections, the five stages of the BEING Model was found to be highly applicable and functional in terms of reflecting the natural development process of teacher identity development. Pre-service teachers displayed a significant development in communication skills and professional identities. Therefore, the BEING model provides a perspective and a philosophy of benefiting from acting literature for teacher educators with little or no knowledge on acting and theatre

Keywords

Pre-service teachers, professional identity, acting