Can Teachers Metamorphose; What Teacher Educators Believe

Since the introduction of postmethod by Kumaravadivelu (1994) researchers have been through several swings of the pendulum on this term with a lot of criticisms and responses. One of the solutions was proposed by Kamali (2014) who introduces ‗Teacher Metamorphosis‘ as one of the remedies for postmethod criticisms. He defines the term as ‗changing a teacher to a skillful professional or a package of material developer, syllabus designer, examiner, iconoclast and the like‘ (p.827). Although this is a solution which seems tenable, there are plenty of questions vis-à-vis its practicality. To shed light on the issue this study aims to investigate its practicality from the teacher trainers‘ perspective since they are the ones who are directly connected with educating teachers. To this end twenty teacher trainers were selected and interviewed about their belief on teacher metamorphosis and the data was analyzed to find out teacher‘s belief on this term. For the reason of triangulation of the data (Dornyei, 2007) the researcher-made questionnaire was administered and a metaphor analysis was employed. The results reveal that although almost all teacher educators agree that teacher metamorphosis is a good entity per se, it needs some prerequisites on the side of teachers and organizations without them this term is a threat more than an opportunity

Keywords:

post-method , teacher education , teacher metamorphosis