Teachers as informal learners: workplace professional learning in the United States and Lithuania

ENThis study demonstrates the understandings that result from teachers’ explanationsof how they learn when they encounter everyday situations that evoke their learn-ing. The study renders these explanations as a framework for further research onteacher workplace learning in informal settings. The framework emerged from aconstant-comparative analysis of the structure, language and content of journal entrieswritten by 10 teachers in Lithuania and the United States in three primary schools:an established Russian school in Lithuania, a Lithuanian school restructured since thepolitical changeover and a newly built school in the American Midwest. In their jour-nal entries, they represented their learning in five domains: their dispositions towardslearning, their sources of learning, problems as their focus for learning, processes inwhich they engaged in their attempts to solve professional dilemmas and their reactionsto those dilemmas. We incorporated the qualities of these domains into a conceptualframework of learner profiles. The framework represents the dominant qualities of eachteacher, individually, allowing for displays of uniqueness and comparatively to observecommonality and difference. The discussion suggests potential directions and questionsfor research afforded by this framework. Keywords: socio-cultural perspective; informal workplace learning; teacher learning; comparative analysis; discourse analysis. [From the publication]

• Learning in and from practice : opportunities and implications for teachers' informal learning in Lithuania and the United States : disertacija / Elena Jurasaite-Harbison. Ann Arbor, 2008. 1 pdf (225 p.).
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• Teachers' workplace learning within informal contexts of school cultures in the United States and Lithuania / Elena Jurasaite-Harbison. Journal of workplace learning. 2009, Vol. 21, no. 4, p. 299-321.
• Workplace learning in informal contexts : transnational comparison of teacher professional growth in Lithuania and the United States / Elena Jurasaite-Harbison. Preparation, practice and politics of teachers resource : problems and prospects in comparative perspective / edited by Mark Ginsburg. Boston: Sense Publishers, 2012. P. 79-100.