Autonomous Learning In Preservice Teacher Education

Abstract

Teachers and learners are directly connected stakeholders, who work in collaboration to enhance students’ learning. Their roles are of equal importance in learning. However, their roles are viewed differently. Traditionally, teachers used to be believed to have dominant roles in the classroom. But modern education system calls for shifted roles of both participants. To be specific, the semester system is believed to emphasize more active roles of learners along with that of teachers. Therefore, the present research entitled Autonomous Learning in Pre-service Teacher Education was an attempt to find out the roles of teachers and learners in autonomous learning and to find out the challenges faced by teachers and learners in autonomous learning. Survey research design was followed to complete this study. The learner respondents and the teacher respondents for this research work were selected using lottery method under random sampling procedure. The primary data were collected from the thirty five pre service teachers of master level studying in semester system in Tribhuvan University and five teacher educators teaching to them.Questionnaire and interview guidelines were the main tools for data collection. The collected data were analyzed and interpreted descriptively using content analysis approach in qualitative way. The main finding of the study was that there are different roles of teachers like initiator, material developer, resource person, guide, facilitator, in terms of the modes of learning and the resources they use and learners like active participant, risk taker, information hunter, responsible, in autonomous learning. Similarly, this study also found that the learners have dominant roles such as active participant, risk taker, information hunter, responsible as they have to take the risk of their own learning deciding the contents to learn, the way to learn them and the way to use the learnt things in comparison to teachers though their roles are termed differently by the teachers and the learners. The study also revealed that there are many challenges like the lack of teacher training programs, lack of teaching learning materials, challenges in undertaking the roles by the teachers and the learners during autonomous learning. This thesis contains five chapters. The first chapter deals with the background of the study,statement of the problems, objectives of the study, research questions, significance of the study, de-limitations of the study and operational definitions of the key terms. The second chapter comprises review of the related theoretical and empirical studies, implication of the studies and conceptual framework. Likewise, third chapter consists design of the study and method of the study, population, sample and sampling strategies, research tools, sources of data, data collection tools and techniques, data analysis and interpretation procedure and ethical consideration. The fourth chapter includes analysis of data and interpretation of the results. Similarly, the fifth chapter focuses on findings, conclusion and recommendation based on the analysis and interpretation of the study. The references and the appendices have been included in the last part of the thesis.