Pixel International Conferences

Teacher education today has taken a new significance since meeting the needs and demands of the changing societies has already become a real educational challenge. The present educational settings welcome the teachers who can go beyond the formal schooling period by taking their own learning responsibilities for professional growth and development. Hence, teaching has been viewed as a profession that requires lifelong learning and professional development, which is a voluntary, ongoing, and bottom-up process ( Richards & Nunan, 1990; Ur, 1997). In addition to the individual determination and attempt which is essential for this process, inspiring and  empowering teachers and teacher candidates to become life long learners must be an academic and institutional objective of teacher educators, other educational bodies and policy makers both in national and international contexts.  The European Council, the body responsible for setting the European Union goals and priorities, chose education and training as one of the most important topics and put a special emphasis on lifelong learning (Figel, 2007). In a similar way, Turkish Ministry of National Education has seen lifelong learning as a  driving force for  creating a better society. In this sense, for teacher educators, it is a contemporary necessity  to set up an agenda for helping candidate teachers recognize the importance of lifelong learning, in other words, continuing professional development. This qualitative study has tried to find out the professional development plans of the candidates in the Department of English Language Teaching at Mersin University.  For data collection, the participants have been asked open-ended questions on their understanding of lifelong learning, their  interest in professional development and their plans as future teachers . The results obtained suggest a number of implications and insights for the teacher educators.

Key words: Lifelong learning, continuing professional development, teacher candidates

References

Figel, J. (2007). Key competences for lifelong learning-European reference framework. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Retrieved May, 25, 2009.

Richards, J.C. & Nunan, D.(eds) (1990) Second Language Teacher Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ur, P. (1997). The English teacher as professional. English teaching professional, (2), 3-7.