Exploring Preservice Teachers’ Perception on Rural Teaching and Education through the Mediation of Photovoice

Abstract

Teacher preparation programs (tpps) are expected to help preservice teachers (psts) to be aware of identify and revise their possibly biased perceptions on potential students and schools they may serve. Field experience, a requirement of every accredited tpp, has long been viewed to have an awareness-raising effect to reconstruct experiences into meaningful insights as well as to impact psts’ perceptions. This study employs photovoice to explore five psts’ perception on rural students and education during their 5-day field experiences from visiting five rural and ethnic minority schools in Yunnan, a southwest province of China. The findings from this study indicate that psts in the field far different from their personal education background shift their perspective concern from instruction to student, which could be the sign that psts improve their reflection to become more inclusive, student-centered other than egocentric, teacher-centered. The study also found that photovoice mediates the participants to document and report their lived experience. It gives the opportunities to psts to ascribe meanings to the photos representing their knowledge and perspective of the phenomenon. Implication to tpps is finally discussed.