Reconstructing Teaching Experience through Active Learning

This paper endeavors to demonstrate that practical teaching experience based on active learning helps to develop these graduate students’ practical educational knowledge and self-awareness. For the research, I employ a working concept of active learning with three distinct aspects: active and empowering learning experiences where one’s meaning making is fully supported and encouraged; pre-existing knowledge is safely challenged by others and new knowledge is then integrated; and as a result, metacognition inevitably occurs. My research sought to deepen graduate students’ learning by facilitating further self-reflection and analysis through a series of questionnaires/interviews. The findings highlight some of the active learning strategies instrumental to their growth. Five graduate students’ embodied experience of teaching have enhanced their learning both as a student and a teacher and through therapeutic discussion and writing a dialectic journal in a supportive environment they can reconstruct their knowledge of education and themselves.