Potentialities of a Local Job Shadowing Experience in Initial Science Teachers’ Training

Abstract

This paper describes a “job shadowing” initiative developed in the context of initial teacher education to promote awareness of the different dimensions present in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) relationships. Ten pre-service teachers participated in this initiative, visiting three different contexts: A museum integrated within a school, an oceanarium, and a research center. After each visit, participants completed a learning diary and a checklist, designed to promote participants’ metacognitive thinking about the job they were observing and to identify the experienced utility of each visit. This experience seemed to have promoted a broader, more critical, and more integrated view of education, impacted participants’ motivation, professional awareness, and social commitment, and contributed to the strengthening of the vision of education as dynamic, interdisciplinary, and socially relevant, and of educational careers as flexible, multifaceted, and constantly evolving. This has important implications for STEM teacher education and professional development, highlighting the value of incorporating non-formal and research-based experiences into training programs to better prepare educators for the complexities of contemporary educational landscapes.