Teachers’ Personal Epistemology Toward Constructivism-Based Educational Practice: Implications for Teacher Education with a Case Study of International Baccalaureate Teachers in Japan

In a rapidly changing society, school education is being fundamentally reconsidered. The OECD highlights a shift from viewing students as passive listeners to active participants. This shift reflects a move from an objectivist epistemology, which assumes objective truth, to a constructionist perspective, where meaning is created through interaction between learners and the world. Personal epistemology―teachers’ tacit beliefs about knowledge―provides the framework through which they understand educational theory and practice, influencing their classroom behavior. Therefore, personal epistemology deserves focused attention in teacher education. This study investigates how experienced teachers with International Baccalaureate (IB) certification reconcile their existing personal epistemologies with constructionist perspectives when entering a constructionist teacher education program. Using semi-structured interviews with a visual narrative methodology, two key cases emerged: one teacher struggled to integrate IB-acquired perspectives into a coherent personal epistemology, while another inconsistently managed two different epistemological views as separate stages of learning. These findings suggest that addressing personal epistemology is especially important for experienced teachers engaging with constructionist practices. Teacher education programs may benefit from providing opportunities for teachers to recognize differences between their own epistemologies and new educational approaches, and to develop personally coherent and convincing epistemologies. Future research will further explore teachers’ personal epistemologies and how teacher education can help resolve related conflicts.