Research indicates that teachers’ philosophical beliefs have a profound effect on what they teach and how they choose to teach. The purpose of this research study was to explore the beliefs of international schoolteachers and to consider the ways in which their beliefs affect how they see the world, and how they teach. The study focused specifically upon teachers’ views on knowledge (epistemology) and the fundamental nature of reality and being (ontology), given that a combination of these beliefs forms the base of individual worldviews. The participants in the research study were three seasoned International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme teachers at the International School of Amsterdam, who taught Science, English Literature, and Spanish. Within this international teaching environment students and teachers are predominantly multilingual global citizens, and English is the language of instruction. Learning is concept, process, and inquiry-based, and teachers are encouraged to incorporate the design-cycle and constructivist teaching methodologies into their personal pedagogies and the development of curricula. The findings indicated that their ways-of-being, the universal concepts they are drawn to, their impressions of the nature of learners, their unique approaches to constructivism, and their views on emergent learning all seemed to align closely with their personal worldviews.

Speaker: Mary Kelly

Published in: London International Conference on Education (LICE-2022)

• Date of Conference: 14-16 November 2022
• DOI: 10.20533/LICE.2022.0006
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-52-5
• Conference Location: Virtual (London, UK)