A Study on Teaching Practice Experiences of Social Studies Student-Teachers Using Phenomenological Method

This study is done to find out what kind of experiences current teaching practice actually provides for Social Studies student-teachers and what specific roles teaching practice plays by using phenomenological description analysis. To focus on individual experience of each participant, this study analyzed experiences of seven student-teachers who completed their teaching practice by using Giorgi description analysis. The main results of this study are as follows. Firstly, student-teachers evaluated teaching practice was necessary and useful experience while they evaluated teaching practice wasn’t effective enough for them to enhance their teaching professionalism. In particular, student-teachers evaluated they lacked in experiences with self-leadership in designing the lesson and practicing teaching and communicating with students. Secondly, student-teachers evaluated that a mentor teacher’s feedback was not enough both in quality and quantity, that reflection on teaching with fellow student-teachers was meaningful experience but not high quality. Also, a problem was found that the ability which improved through teaching practice was limited to the aspects of simple teaching skills. Thirdly, it seemed that student-teachers’ checking their views on teaching profession was done only superficially. They hardly experienced checking and improving their teaching philosophy, views on teachers, views on learners and views on subjects. They just stayed on the process of checking whether they really wanted to be a teacher or not. To make teaching practice more professional and pedagogically meaningful teacher training course, opportunities to play diverse roles independently should be provided for studentteachers and more specialized mentor system should be built.