Rural Teachers’ Informal Learning Reform Path:a Case Study

Under the background of the new era,with the rapid development of science and information technology,the concept of teachers’ learning has changed in the post-modern vision,and the concept of lifelong learning goes deeply into the hearts of teachers.Formal learning is difficult to meet the needs of teachers’ individual learning.At the same time,teachers should constantly pursue their own professional development.In addition,under the context of urbanization,the loss of students from rural schools,together with the relocation and merging of schools,has led to the transfer of remote rural students to the nine-year system schools around the county.Although these schools are short from the county,they still belong to the rural schools from the perspective of their composition of students.Therefore,teachers need to understand the importance of informal learning and integrate it into their daily teaching work in rural schools with relatively biased geographical location.With this background,this paper conducts a case study on teachers’ informal learning in the T rural nine-year consistent school in H country by means of observation,interview and object collection methods.This study describes the characteristics of informal learning of rural teachers’ informal learning in the case school from three aspects: informal learning content,informal learning method and informal learning effect.The content of rural teachers’ informal learning includes subject knowledge,curricular knowledge,subject teaching knowledge and related content of interest;the informal learning styles of rural teachers’ include interactive learning,inquiry learning,reflective learning and online learning;the effect of rural teachers’ informal learning is reflected in “what they learn is not what they need”,“what they learn is not what they teach ” and “low feedback input”.This study further found that there are some problems in the informal learning of the case school teachers,such as fuzzy learning objectives,lack of planning,monotonous informal learning content and the disconnection with the actual teaching,single informal learning style,and the low-level cycle of informal learning.On this basis,the researcher analyzes the factors that affect the informal learning of rural teachers in the case school,mainly from three aspects: the internal reasons of rural teachers themselves,the “hard culture” factors and the “soft culture” factors that affect their informal learning.The internal factors that affect rural teachers’ informal learning include: rural Teachers’ individual learning view,rural teachers’ individual learning ability and rural teachers’ individual time and energy.Rural teachers’ professional development process,individual knowledge capital,individual personality characteristics and teaching age differences are the factors that affect rural teachers’ learning view.Rural teachers’ learning ability is embodied in cognitive and planning ability,action and reflection ability,creation and development ability.The “hard culture” factors that affect their informal learning include school office environment,school teaching auxiliary facilities and the school living conditions of teachers.The“soft culture” factors that affect their informal learning include the overall learning atmosphere of the school,the existing evaluation and incentive mechanism,the rural regional culture,and the existing family school cooperation culture.This study puts forward localized reform path for rural teachers’ informal learning in T school.First,through improving the rural teachers’ self-efficacy and changing the rural teachers’ education concept,so as to change the rural teachers’ learning concept.The second is to enhance rural teachers’ learning ability by strengthening their theoretical learning,enhancing their practical learning,properly boosting and creating development conditions.The third is to pay attention to the construction of campus and office cultural environment to create informal learning atmosphere for rural teachers,which can be started from the construction of informal learning community for teachers and the creation of teachers’ informal learning cultural environment.Fourth,we should improve the school-based incentive system to stimulate the occurrence of rural teachers’ informal learning.Fifthly,through strengthening home-school cooperation to help rural teachers’ informal learning.