Reflecting on CLIL innovation. An interview with Do Coyle and Elisabet Pladevall

The authors reflect on the role of CLIL in experimental teaching, teacher education and university research, from discussions with Prof. Do Coyle (University of Aberdeen, Scotland) and Dr. Elisabet Pladevall (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Catalonia), in the framework of the Masters in Advanced English Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (January 2014). They give a brief but significant outlook on needs in the context of university studies and highlight the urgency of conducting a review of CLIL for the plurilingual Digital Age, as well of focusing on cross-curricular and transmedia exchanges in the multiple scenarios of university education.

At the EUROCALL conference 2009 in Gandia we, the editors of this special issue decided to blow a breath of fresh air into the Special Interest Group for Teacher Education and were overwhelmed by the response we received during the initial meeting. One of the outcomes was the decision to organise a smaller, in between type of research seminar for those among us who are involved – both as practitioners as well as researchers – in CALL and CMC-based language teaching. Another decision was that the event should have a narrower focus than the much wider themes of the annual EUROCALL conferences. In May 2010, then, the “European workshop on teacher education in CALL: towards a research agenda”, a 2 ½ day event, took place at the Institut National de Recherche Pedagogique (INRP) in Lyon. It provided the opportunity to exchange experiences and catch up with developments in the field in a convivial atmosphere and served as a springboard for setting up new research partnerships among participants. The workshop was followed by a call for contributions to an issue of ReCALL on “CALL and CMC Teacher Education research: enduring questions, emerging methodologies”. Four out of the six contributions in this issue are from colleagues who gave presentations in Lyon, and two were selected from other submissions that were received. We hope that you will find the articles as insightful and thought-provoking as the reviewers and we did and would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the scientific committee for their support. Most of them also served as reviewers for this special issue. While the use of digital technologies in language education has been growing over the last 15 years, pedagogical developments and methodological reflection have hardly kept pace. Unsurprisingly, teacher training continues to feature high on the CALL research agenda and there is increasing interest in dedicated events such as the Lyon workshop, or the one held this year in collaboration with EUROCALL’s CMC SIG at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. The ensuing publications such as this collection as well as other recent volumes and articles (see, for example, Dooly, 2009; Guichon, 2009; Hampel, 2009; Hauck & Stickler 2006; Hong 2010; Hubbard & Levy, 2006; Kassen et al. 2008; Stockwell, 2009) bear witness to this development. As Stockwell (2009: 1) observes and Cutrim Schmid (this issue) quite rightly reminds us “[t]his attention is indicative of greater recognition of the importance of CALL practitioners having sufficient grounding in CALL theory and practice, as well as knowledge of what technologies are available to them in order to be able to effectively implement CALL in their specific language learning environments”. In what follows we attempt to address enduring questions in research on teacher education for CALL and CMC-based language learning and a variety of methodological approaches, both traditional and emerging. The contributions explore issues relevant for both novice and experienced colleagues when embarking on teaching languages with information and communication technologies (ICTs) both in more traditional classroom settings as well as in online only contexts. We believe that insights gained from both these perspectives can inform and enrich current and future research endeavours and teaching practice. For the sake of clarity, we will use teacher to refer to classroom teaching and tutor to refer to online teaching even though this distinction poses epistemological issues.

In September 2014, university professors from UAB (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) and teacher educators from CESIRE (Centre for Support of Educational Innovation and Research) started to collaborate in the design of a primary teacher development program called “IBS and English learning in primary education”. One of the goals of this program was to create a sustainable triadic partnership (Primary school teachers/UAB university professors, researchers, and primary student teachers/CESIRE’s teacher educators) which fosters educational innovations and research in the integration of Inquiry based science and English in primary education in Catalan schools. The triadic partnership, piloted for the first aim in the academic year 2014–2015, has provided a scenario for successful collaborative and innovative teacher development processes. The first strength of the teacher preparation model has been the explicit theoretical support provided by university and teacher educators from both science and foreign language education. The theory acted as an arena where to create a boundary object that was shared and negotiated among all participants. The boundary object was supported by the theoretical framework of the program and by the development of a tool used by all participants. This tool was designed to guide the planning of the Inquiry Based Science instructional unit in English and it will be refined in the next future theoretically and practically. The second strength of the program has been the composition of the learning community including school teachers, student teachers, university professors and teacher educators from both science and language education disciplines.

The Faculty of Education at the University of Glasgow's reform of initial teacher education was undertaken on the basis of current research within a mature educational infrastructure. Within the university research knowledge was utilized in two ways: research on teacher education indicated that enquiry could become a key aspect of teacher identity; and it indicated the need for a curriculum for pre-service teachers in schools. Thus enquiry learning was embedded in schools and the new school-based curriculum had three elements: seminars; peer learning through learning rounds; joint-assessed visits. These innovations were positively reinforced by Teaching Scotland's Future (Donaldson, 2011). This series of reforms has implications for Wales and can be usefully analysed against the binary thinking which dominates discourses in teacher education; and Williams's thought on the vulnerability of emergent culture. Four binaries are identified and re-conceptualised: binaries of time, space, content and persons. The binary of time (initial and continuing teacher education is conceptualised a career-long process; the binary of space (school and university) is recast as a third space; the binary of content (theory and practice) is recast as different forms of knowledge permeating space and time; and the binary of persons is recast as a (university-based teacher educator and pre-service teacher) is recast as a triad which sets all three in dialogue. Implications include the deeper consideration of career-long teacher learning; and the role of the teacher educator. This emergent practice may be vulnerable to dominant practice.

Similar to our predecessors and those before them for the past decade, our editorial team has assumed leadership of the Journal of Education (JTE) in times of extreme criticism of educational research and of both preservice and inservice teacher education. Critics from within like Arthur Levine proclaim that everything is broken (Levine, 2011), that there is research into what kind of training produces successful teachers (Levine, 2011), and that schools of education lack both rigor and relevance (Levine, 2006). Headlines from The New York Times proclaim of Teachers is Flawed ... (Lewin, 20l 1) or Teacher Training Termed Mediocre (Medina, 2009). One article features anecdotal in support of an alternative teacher education program while citing an economist who claims no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, 'you could be throwing your money away'? (Green, 2010). Educational research, and particularly research in teacher education, clearly is in crisis. The refrains of no conclusive evidence and little research exists ... are all too common in our handbooks and research reports (see, for example, Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001). This criticism influenced our vision for the journal as JTE is in a unique position to shape how teacher education, and more specifically how research in teacher education, is viewed both within and outside the profession. The journal has a well-deserved reputation of publishing quality scholarship in teacher education, with a standing of 18 out of 177 education and education research journals based on impact in the field of education (Thompson Reuters, 2011). Our challenge is to build on this foundation with the ultimate goal of publishing quality research that points the way to excellent teacher education practice and constructive policies. If we make progress in attaining this critical goal, we would also make great strides toward establishing teacher education as a distinct field with knowledge, histories, research methodologies, and practices that are recognized and recognizable. Reaching the goal requires a balance of a range of content and topics; diversity of voices represented by teacher education researchers, practitioners, and policy makers; attention to both preservice and inservice teacher education; and sensitivity to providing an outlet for beginning authors as well as for those who have a long history of publishing in teacher education. We hope to bring together the three dimensions of teacher education--practice, policy, and research--in challenging and productive ways so that considerations of issues or challenges in teacher education are enriched by careful attention from these multiple frames of reference. Our audience consists largely of teacher education practitioners, researchers, and policy makers in national and international contexts. For teacher education practitioners who do not do research, or for teacher education researchers who do not engage in the practice of teacher education, the connections may sometimes be weak. When teacher education researchers are also practitioners, the connection between research and practice may be strong but may lack a policy perspective. Policy makers, however, may lack a concrete grounding in the everyday realities of practice. We need all three perspectives to address the complex problems facing teacher education today. JTE provides a forum to highlight relationships among all three perspectives. We are particularly aware of the power of policy as the bridge that links research and practice in teacher education. Although we are separate and independent from our parent organization, the American Association of Colleges of Education (AACTE), in our ability to manage the direction and focus of the content of the journal through the use of the double-blind, peer-review process and our selection of themes and special issues, we recognize the power of collaborating with AACTE in matters related to policy. …

This book, an inaugural publication from the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA), Teacher Education: Innovation, Intervention and Impact is both a product of, and seeks to contribute to, the changing global and political times in teacher education research. This book marks an historically significant shift in the collective work and outreach of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) as it endeavours to become an even more active contributor to a research-rich foundation for initial teacher education and to a research-informed teaching profession. The book showcases teacher education research and scholarship from a wide range of institutional collaborations across Australia. Studies highlight the multiple ways in which teacher education researchers are engaging with students, teachers, schools and communities to best prepare future teachers. It informs both teacher education policy and practice and is ‘a must read’ for those engaged in the education community. Above all it marks a shift for teacher educators to build a research rich teaching profession.

The primary reference employed in this paper is to view schools as social organizations. Such a perspective calls attention to the structure of the social relations in the school as well as to norms, values, and other orientations shared by school personnel. The present study builds upon earlier research in which pupil control was seen as a central feature of the organizational life of schools.2 A major concern was the socialization of teachers with regard to pupil control ideology. It was hypothesized that as teachers were absorbed into the teacher subculture their pupil control ideology would become more custodial. Cross-sectional data confirmed the prediction that more experienced teachers would be more custodial than less experienced teachers.3 Subsequent longitudinal data on a sample of beginning teachers also showed a significant increase in the custodialism of pupil control ideology both after the student teaching experience and again after the first year of teaching.4 The purpose of this inquiry is to reexamine the pupil control ideology of the same sample of beginning teachers as they acquired their second year of teaching experience. Before the empirical phase of this investigation is reported, it seems appropriate to review the conceptual framework and rationale from which the major hypothesis was developed.

A review of the field of practice-focused research in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) reveals four broad genres of qualitative research: case studies of teacher education programs and developments; research into student teacher experience and learning; inquiry into teacher educators’ own learning, identity, and beliefs; and conceptual or theory-building research. This is an eclectic field that is defined by variation in methodologies rather than by a few clearly identifiable research approaches. What practice-focused research in ITE has in common, though, is a desire on the behalf of teacher educator researchers to understand the complexity of teacher education and contribute to shifts in practice, for the benefit of student teachers and, ultimately, for learners in schools and early childhood education. In this endeavor, teacher educator researchers are presented with a challenge to achieve a balance between goals of local relevance and making a theoretical contribution to the broader field. This is a persistent tension. Notwithstanding the capacity for practice-focused research to achieve a stronger balance and greater relevance beyond the local, key contributions of practice-focused research in ITE include: highlighting the importance of context, questioning what might be understood by “improvement” in teacher education and schooling, and pushing back against research power structures that undervalue practice-focused research. Drawing on a painting metaphor, each genre represents a collection of sketches of practice-focused research in ITE that together provide the viewer with an overview of the field. However, these genres are not mutually exclusive categories as any particular research study (or sketch) might be placed within one or more groupings; for example, inquiry into teacher educators’ own learning often also includes attention to student teachers’ experiences and case studies of teacher education initiatives inevitably draw on theory to frame the research and make sense of findings. Also, overviewing the field and identifying relevant research is not as simple as it might first appear, given challenges in identifying research undertaken by teacher educators, differences in the positioning of teacher educators within different educational systems, and privileging of American (US) views of teacher education in published research, which was counteracted in a small way in this review by explicitly including voices located outside this dominant setting. Examples of different types of qualitative research projects illustrate issues in teacher education that matter to teacher educator researchers globally and locally and how they have sought to use a variety of methodologies to understand them. The examples also show how teacher educators themselves define what is important in teacher education research, often through small-scale studies of context-specific teacher education problems and practices, and how there is value in “smaller story” research that supports understanding of both universals and particularities along with the grand narratives of teacher education.

In this opening chapter of Section 4, which focuses directly on teacher education, I argue that the evolution and development of teacher education itself have made self-study both necessary and inevitable. Teacher education has been slow to come of age – as a “discipline” and as a domain of research. Within the generally low-status domain of education itself, identifying with a recognized discipline such as history, chemistry, or psychology is often a teacher educator’s most direct route to some sense of status. The enterprise of teacher education itself has waited patiently to be noticed. Just as Western societies generally assume that “teaching is easy” because it looked easy to all who remember their own schooling, so it has long been assumed that teacher education – teaching other people how to teach – is “easy.” Preservice teacher education programs are rarely characterized as challenging or demanding, apart from the personally intense and often complex practicum experiences, when the beginning teacher first discoffers that teaching is not as easy as it looks. Although their academic status remains weak and although they are not readily accessible to teachers in schools, teacher education research and practice can meet and interact in self-study. This chapter provides a chronological account of important shifts in perspective with respect to teaching, teacher education, and educational research and practice, with special reference to the appearance of self-study.

Teacher education is a critical component of the Indian education sector; it is a comprehensive system that encompasses pre-service education, in-service education, staff development, and continuing professional development. Teacher education objectives are matched with the country's sustainable development goals, with a special emphasis on contemporary societal, economic, political, and technological achievements. The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020) proposes large and dramatic revisions to the country's education system, its foundation, and its implementation, especially for teacher education (TE). The primary goal of the NEP is to guarantee that teachers receive the best training programmes and to integrate the teacher education into interdisciplinary departments and institutions. This paper reviewed the literature on teacher education reforms and conducts a comprehensive analysis of the initiatives for quality assurance arrangements at national level. This review assisted researchers in gaining a better understanding of major reforms and their current status such as University-school relationships reforms, lengthening of teacher education programmes and research oriented teacher education. The author found the dearth of opportunities for establishing the collaborative relationship among schools and teacher training institutes; insufficiently linkage between teacher education research with teacher preparation programs. Finally, the article concludes by discussing probable prospective improvements and their significance for teacher preparation policies and practices.

This chapter presents data stemming from surveys and interviews of students who have taken part in a teacher education course that consists of project-based collaboration between geographically distant classes (one in the USA, the other in Spain; often known as telecollaboration) as part of the course program. This study has been produced in part under the framework of the PhD program on Education from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. The historical evolution of the course during the 16-year continuous collaboration (since 2004 and ongoing) between the two teacher educators is briefly outlined before presenting the context of the data compilation and the most predominant outcomes from the survey of former students who had graduated between 2004 and 2015. The focus of the analysis is to discern whether the design of the initial teacher education program, which aims to promote a gradual but steady increase in learner autonomy, and exposure to telecollaboration can promote eventual teacher autonomy. It is assumed that these teaching characteristics will be important for student-teachers to implement telecollaboration in their own teaching in the near future.

Key Competences in Europe: Opening Doors for Lifelong Learners Across the School Curriculum and Teacher Education

This paper examines the connections and disconnections between teacher education policy and research, and considers future opportunities for teacher education research by rethinking the notion of evidence as it is conceptualised in current policy debates. Historically, teacher education was positioned as a training issue, then as a learning issue, and more recently it has been framed as a policy problem requiring significant reform. By analysing the influences on current teacher education policy, this paper argues that we are now in a second stage of the ‘teacher education as a policy problem’ phase. Teacher education is now a politically constructed and ideological policy problem and the associated discourses of evidence are contributing to disconnections between teacher education research and policy. Drawing on findings from a large-scale longitudinal study investigating the effectiveness of teacher education that highlighted the complex and non-linear processes of learning teaching and doing teaching, I argue that singular thinking about the purpose of teacher education as only preparing teachers must be problematised. I suggest that calls for evidence, that are so prevalent in current policy, must be interrogated and reframed if compelling and convincing connections between teacher education policy and research are to be realised.

We have just completed 5 years as editors of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE), having published four full volumes (63-66) and part of one (62), and will hand over the privilege and responsibility to a new team from Michigan State University in the next issue. In one of our first editorials (Knight et al., 2012), we reflected on how views of teacher education research from both within and outside the profession influenced our vision for the journal. At that time, we saw our challenge as building on the emerging traditions of diversity and excellence established by previous teams of capable editors with the ultimate goal of further advancing research to establish teacher education as a distinct field with knowledge, histories, research methodologies, and practices that are recognized and recognizable. Furthering the goal would require us to bring together the three dimensions of teacher education--practice, policy, and research--in challenging and productive ways so that considerations of issues or challenges in teacher education would be enriched by careful attention from these multiple frames of reference. We recognized a number of obstacles: the reputation of research in teacher education as lacking rigor and relevance and, relatedly, an incomplete knowledge base that prevents us from connecting findings in meaningful ways to inform practice and policy (e.g., Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Feuer, Towne, & Shavelson, 2002; Kaestle, 1993; Moss et al., 2006; National Research Council, 2002; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001); a lack of a sense of professional identity among teacher educators (Labaree, 2008); and publication of teacher education research in specialized content journals with limited audiences rather than in broader teacher education research journals. In reflecting on our tenure as JTE editors, we see that putting our rhetoric into reality was challenging. The sheer number of manuscripts--more than 700 per year--was overwhelming even for a relatively large editorial team with diverse expertise and interests. We made concerted efforts to address our goal of improving quality; we devoted editorials (e.g., Knight et al., 2012) to the topic of quality and led interactive sessions at the annual meetings of our sponsoring organization, the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), to discuss what constitutes rigor in teacher education research. To address our goal of improving relevance, we sponsored major forums at AACTE meetings on current topics and solicited recommendations from teacher educators for theme issues focusing on emerging areas of interest. Teacher Education Research Quality Based on our review of manuscripts from the first year of our editorship (Volume 63), we identified four areas that authors could target to improve the quality of their research (Knight et al., 2013). The first area that we identified, appropriateness for JTE, involves an explicit connection to an important topic or issue related to research and scholarship in teacher education. We initially rejected a large number of articles prior to external review for two primary reasons: They focused on teachers, teaching, or K-12 students without a clear connection to teacher education or they used teacher education students or faculty as their sample but did not connect to relevant theory and previous methodological and empirical work in teacher education. The second and third areas involve intertwined issues related to the nature of the research design and the samples used in the studies. We received a large number of manuscripts describing studies where the researchers were also the teacher educators or program developers and implementers and the samples were their own students. Whereas this relationship is not problematic in and of itself, the genre of many of the manuscripts often appeared to be program evaluation with program improvement or validation as the primary purpose. …

Students currently enrolled in teacher education courses will have a substantial impact on education in the future. It is therefore important to investigate their motivations for entering into teacher education, their perceptions about the teaching profession, and their career aspirations. There are two main problems in Indonesian teacher education: the distribution of teachers across the nation is unequal and the quality of Indonesian teachers needs to be improved (Jalal et al., 2009; World Bank, 2010; Chang et al., 2014). The context of teacher education in Indonesia is different to teacher education in other countries. Teacher education graduates may have opportunities in both teaching and non-teaching occupations; also, cultural values, particularly religion, influence students’ decisions about whether to enter teacher education. Teaching is highly respected as a noble profession; ‘teacher’ is translated in Bahasa Indonesia as guru, a person with knowledge or expertise who is expected to set a good example to society. This study refers to the Factors Influencing Teaching Choice (FIT-Choice; Watt & Richardson, 2007) framework, which was based on the expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation (Eccles [Parsons] et al., 1983; Eccles, 2009; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) and proposes that people’s choices, persistence and performance can be explained by their beliefs about how well they will perform an activity, and the extent to which they value it. Expectancy is defined as people’s beliefs and judgements about their capabilities to perform a task successfully. The theory states that higher expectancies for success are positively connected to a range of behaviours including achievement, choice and persistence (Eccles [Parsons] et al., 1983). Value refers to people’s beliefs about different reasons they regard a task as interesting, important or useful, for example. This study aims to validate the structure of the Factors Influencing Teaching Choice scale (FIT-Choice; Watt & Richardson, 2007), the Professional Engagement and Career Development Aspirations scale (PECDA; Watt & Richardson, 2008), and the Religious Commitment Inventory-10 (RCI-10; Worthington et al. 2003) in the Indonesian context. It also aims to compare the reasons for individuals choosing to enter into teacher education; to explore whether these individuals plan to become a teacher or not upon completion of their studies; and, to identify the main motivations and perception factors that influence their professional engagement and career development aspirations. Participants were 802 fourth-year undergraduate teacher education students at two public and two private universities in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia (M age = 21 years, SD = 2.31, 83.16% women). Following translation, back-translation and piloting, participants completed a questionnaire adapted from the FIT-Choice scale with the following factors added to reflect potentially relevant aspects of the Indonesian setting: religious influences, second job (time for casual work), tuition fee for teacher education (cheaper), admission into teacher education (less competitive), time for teacher education studies (shorter) and media dissuasion. Questions were also adopted from PECDA scale and the RCI-10. Data analyses included Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFAs) using AMOS 20; reliability analyses, one-way multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVAs), and correlations using SPSS 20; and two structural equation models estimated using AMOS 20. The translated instruments proved valid and reliable. From the FIT-Choice scale, social utility values (make social contribution, work with children/adolescents, and enhance social equity) were found to be the main motivations for entering into teacher education, followed by prior teaching and learning experiences and intrinsic value. Five personal utility values (religious influences, job security/career progression prospects, second job, time for family/bludging, job transferability) were also highly rated motivational factors. Most participants perceived teaching as a very demanding and difficult occupation requiring a high level of expertise. Teaching was also perceived to have high social status with a moderate salary. Media dissuasion was rated moderately high, in line with the negative portrayal of the teaching profession in the mass media. The majority of participants (81.92%) planned to become teachers after study completion, 11.72% planned to teach temporarily then switch career, 4.86% intended to pursue non-teaching occupations and 1.50% did not respond. Structural equation models to identify unique predictors for PECDA factors (planned effort, planned persistence, professional development aspirations, and leadership aspirations), revealed that participants’ interests and enjoyment in teaching, their desire to help disadvantaged youth, their religious beliefs, their perceptions about the expertise of the profession and satisfaction with teaching as a career choice positively impacted the effort future teachers planned to put into their teaching. The length of time they planned to stay in teaching was predicted by intrinsic career value, planned effort and satisfaction with choice. Professional development aspirations were predicted by intrinsic value and enhance social equity, religious beliefs, expertise and satisfaction with choice, and professional development aspirations subsequently predicted leadership aspirations. Awards: Winner of the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal for Excellence, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, 2014.