This article examines the policy and quality assurance debates in teacher education ensuing at one school of education in Zimbabwe following the sudden closure of schools and universities due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Unfortunately, final year university pre-service teacher education students' practicum assessment could not be finalised. The practicum is a critical component in teacher education as it engenders professional transformation, reflection and growth. Unlike other academic modules which could be completed via online and distance education, the practicum, being a practical undertaking in a classroom situation, presented unique challenges. The research question that the article addresses is: How would certification of teachers be finalised when this time-tested assessment had not been done?The articleemploys content and discourse analysis to unpack the philosophical and professional arguments being advanced by faculty, in order to understand how they are likely to determine future directions of teacher education. The argument is that the emerging 'new normal' should not compromise the quality assurance mechanisms developed overtime.
This paper reports on the findings of a qualitative interpretive study that was undertaken to determine how in-service teachers at Great Zimbabwe University were able (or not) to translate a theory that they were exposed to into practice during history lessons. Drawing on a range of data, the study explored how the teachers, who were purposively sampled, reconceptualised curriculum through their pedagogical practices during lessons. Teacher's utterances in the interviews helped clarify their notions of history teaching in terms of the theory they were exposed to. The study found that while the teachers could articulate the theory, they faltered and hesitated to draw on it when reframing their pedagogical practices. The paper argues that this is not because of exposure to bad theory. Rather, it reflects the need for teachers to be assisted to weave together curriculum theory and curriculum practice into one coherent interdependent landscape that reflects praxis and its dialectics and thus make the theory-practice gap difficult to perpetuate.
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