Are Educational Sciences useful in Teacher Education?

Abstract

This paper deals with the question: are Educational Sciences (ES) useful in teacher education (TE)? The question draws its legitimacy from two facts. The first is of a historical nature: in Greece, ES found their institutional expression with the establishment of the University Departments of Pedagogy (UDP), whereby ES were integrated into initial TE. The second concerns the actual questioning of the value of ES in initial TE by students. The text attempts furthermore to investigate if the gap between theory and practice could be filled in the case of ES in the context of TE. To achieve this, we present an experimentation conducted in the European Educational Policy course of a UDP in the academic year 2019-2020. The experimentation seems to have been well received by the students, indicating that it is not impossible to fill this gap.