Editorial

Abstract

This issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education is diverse. It covers issues such as touching children in primary school settings, how novice teachers reason about educational matters, how outcomes from schooling might be enhanced for boys given the understanding provided by men who become primary teachers, the reality of triadic assessment in early childhood contexts and how the English language needs of non-English language speaking background students might be effectively met within teacher education.In ‘Primary Teacher Trainees: identity formation in an age of anxiety’, Alison Jones examines primary teacher trainees' understandings about touching children in their care in New Zealand. Reading this paper, I was struck by how little had changed since my initial teacher training in the late 1960s. Just as it was for teacher trainees in my time, so Jones reports that the majority of trainees in her study report touching children as a source of ‘regulation’ and ‘anxiety’ for them. Indeed, she tells of one incident in which a teacher trainee spontaneously kissed a child on the head and promptly reported herself to the principal in order to retain ‘safe’ status. Jones suggests that ‘trainees’ insistence on “being aware”, taken together with their failure to name “sexual abuse” as an explicit concern, is unlikely to produce a capacity to engage critically with what is at stake for teachers in an era of heightened anxiety about child vulnerability’.From Israel, Edna Shoham, Sophia Penso and Neomi Shiloah in ‘Novice Teachers’ Reasoning when Analysing Educational Cases' examine novice teachers' reasoning as they analyse cases that took place in their teaching. The study illuminates the way in which ‘fostering teachers’ reasoning as they confront their own dilemmas highlights problems arising from an analysis of their reasoning’. Some interesting trends were revealed at all the three stages on which the authors focused, which were stage 1, the reasoning that underlies the teachers' description of a case that occurred during their teaching; stage 2, the reasoning that underlies the preferred solution; and stage 3, the reasoning that underlies the choice of the preferred solution. Significantly, according to the authors, the trends indicate the significance of the relative isolation of novice teachers in schools, the difficulties novice teachers had in ‘structuring the sources of knowledge at their disposal and using them when confronting learning-teaching problems’ and in ‘reflecting critically [in cases which] call for an open mind, critical investigation, casting doubt on existing knowledge and examining pedagogical alternatives from a moral and ethical point of view’.In ‘Men who become Primary School Teachers: an early portrait’, Judith Mulholland and Paul Hansen in Australia reflect on the issue of the perceived need to attract more males into teaching to enhance outcomes from schooling for boys. They try to provide ‘improved understandings of what motivates young men to choose primary teaching as a career and how they experience their university course’. Interestingly, the authors conclude: