Changing Pedagogical Practice in Teacher Education: Negotiating the spaces between realism and relativism

This article reports a self-study from a larger research project that explored the impact on pre-service and in-service teacher education of a new national curriculum in New Zealand and the conceptualisations of epistemological shifts signalled by that document. A pedagogical initiative to introduce inquiry-based learning into a graduate diploma course for pre-service primary teachers was the result of and the catalyst for further reflection on my practice and the (mis) alignments between my theoretical understandings and beliefs and my pedagogical choices. In this article I focus on the tensions and contradictions I encountered while attempting to enact, in a tertiary environment, a pedagogy that aligned with the underpinning principles of the new curriculum. I describe the model that I developed to understand those tensions and contradictions, which are characterised as the spaces between realism and relativism. I suggest that negotiating these spaces is part of the process of becoming a teacher and a teacher educator in the twenty-first century.