Retrospective and Perspective on Policy Governance of Taiwan’s Teacher Education: An Ecological Interaction Perspective

The continuing education of preschool teachers urges for further improvement and promotion. This essay surveys the continuing education of preschool teachers in the perspective of ecology. The current utility and mission oriented preschool teacher continuing education is paying unduly attention to the theoretical knowledge indoctrination and the generality cultivation while neglecting the subject consciousness, practice and personality concern. Neither the trainers nor the trainees can develop in harmony. The continuing education of preschool teachers should build the idea of ecological concern which persists from curriculum design to mode innovation.

Despite significant advances in the epistemological frameworks that guide teacher education in Colombia and elsewhere, it continues to be governed mostly by traditional Eurocentric paradigms. Decolonizing teacher education requires epistemological moves to resignify the plurality of local knowledges and praxis. This article aims at reporting a qualitative research project carried out with three student teachers of a teacher education program with emphasis on English, at a public university in the northeast of Colombia. The main objective was to explore and reflect on how EFL pre-service teachers incorporated knowledge of local communities as resources for language teaching and learning during the practicum. Data were gathered over a three-semester period through pre-service teachers' lesson plans, materials, a final academic report, and a semi-structured interview. Data were analyzed based on the principles of thematic data analysis. Findings revealed that student teachers approached knowledge from an ecological perspective coming from different ways of knowing, seeing, being and living in the world. At the same time, the ecology of knowledges helped them to overcome the challenges they faced during the project.

This article takes stock of the complex scenario of the European education space in its past, present and future developments, which highlights the priorities of the modernisation, improvement and convergence of the goals for education and training systems in the knowledge and learning society. The critical case of teacher education is then analysed within the European Higher Education Area, with its characteristic display of national and cultural features and constraints, often jostling with European recommendations about the competences and preparation of quality European teachers. This results in changes and reforms at a diverse pace, or even with contradictory trends, in different national contexts. An approach for tackling some of these issues has been devised by the European project EMETT (European Master for European Teacher Training), involving an academic network of eight universities within its Lifelong Learning Programme. The outcomes and reflections of this project work are thus reported, concerning the development and implementation of a European teacher education curriculum for a joint Master's degree. The key European priorities of mobility and intercultural, multilingual competences in teacher education have been taken into account within the framework of an integrated, flexible curriculum that can best be described by a fractal metaphor dealing with complexity from an ecological perspective.

Research on identity in teacher education and professionalism has been a significant issue for language teacher educators in terms of their trajectories and career development. Examining identity from contextual perspectives can assist teachers in establishing a professional self in order to facilitate them to better understand and negotiate their roles as both language teachers and language teacher educators. Therefore, it is worth exploring how language teacher educators position themselves through their career trajectories when facing new challenges and revealing various issues regarding disruptions to their identity development. This paper adopts an ecological perspective to investigate the interrelatedness of various environmental systems, ranging from the proximal environment (such as family) to broader societal structures (such as culture). This paper employs a duoethnographic approach to explore the authors' unique struggles and conflicts with their evolving identities as they construct and negotiate professional development within the context of higher education in China, drawing on over 15 years of working experience following the completion of their degrees in the UK. Through this self‐reflective inquiry, the authors aim to comprehend the impact of their identity (re)construction and (re)negotiation shaped by their disparate backgrounds and life experiences. This paper concludes with further insights for language teacher educators on navigating identity reconstruction.

Teacher emotion research is of great significance to teachers’ teaching effectiveness, professional development, and physical and mental health. Taken from an ecological perspective, this narrative case study used purposeful sampling to select two Chinese senior high school English teachers as research participants. Various data collection methods were used, including narrative framework, teacher interview and teacher reflection log, to describe the emotional episodes of Chinese senior high school English teachers before and after collective lesson presentation, trial teaching, and formal teaching in a teaching improvement project. The purpose of this collection of data was to explore the dynamic emotional development process and characteristics of Chinese senior high school English teachers in the interaction with ecological systems and those ecological factors that may influence their emotional development. Results indicated that the two participants developed 68 emotions: 39 positive and 29 negative emotions. At exosystem, they developed the most emotions (28 emotions). Teacher emotion changed with time quite obviously. They evolved from positive to negative and, finally, predominantly positive. Personal antecedents, contextual antecedents, and teachers’ emotional capacity are the main ecological factors that may influence the development of teacher emotion. Based on the research findings, implications for teachers’ professional development and teacher education were also provided.

While teacher identity has been conceptualized in different ways, research in teacher education has shown that the development of self‐understanding about being a teacher is critical to learning how to teach and can be shaped in multiple ways. Etienne Wenger argues that the formation of communities of practice is influenced strongly by the negotiation of identity and thus, to understand learning in relation to identity formation and communities of practice, three modes of belonging should be considered. Using data from a three‐year action research project, the author examines how modes of belonging (engagement, alignment, and imagination) were enacted in teacher‐centred action research communities of practice. As well, an ecological perspective is adopted to provide insight into how teachers' identities are formed and reformed in the context of teacher‐centred action research.

This study explores how the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools into language education can influence language teachers’ identity from an ecological perspective. To do so, 16 teachers were selected based on purposeful sampling and completed a narrative frame. To corroborate data, seven of them (based on the richness of their narrative frames) attended a semi-structured interview in which they discussed the integration of AI in their classes and how it impacted their identity. The semi-structured interviews were translated and transcribed and along with the narrative frames were analyzed by employing thematic analysis. The findings of this study revealed that AI integration in language education had a significant impact on participating teachers’ identity and shaped their identity at different ecological layers of micro-pedagogical, meso-institutional, and macro-societal. These findings may assist teachers and teacher educators in raising awareness about AI integration into language education and how it can construct language teacher identity.

In this paper, I analyse the history of teacher education in Australia from 1974 to the current policy moment in which questions are increasingly being asked about the quality of teaching and teacher education. Teacher education is, and has been, a highly scrutinised domain in Australia. Since the 1970s, we have seen more than 100 reviews of teacher education in Australia, with another one recently announced in 2014. I focus on three phases in the growth and development of teacher education in the past 40 years by considering the ways in which teacher education (and teaching) has been thought about at various points in time and analysing the related policies for funding governance and regulation. I finish by focusing on the current policy moment in Australia which is positioning teacher education as a ‘policy problem’ requiring a national solution and consider the role of research in, on and for, teacher education into the future.

This study examined the kinds of narratives that nine pre-service teachers shared in online collaborative learning discussions about the future of education in relation to global megatrends, namely digitalisation and ecological sustainability. We also analysed how they positioned themselves in the future of education. We used data-driven qualitative analysis and narrative analysis, and we report our findings partly as non-fiction comic strips. We found that the pre-service teachers (1) viewed digitalisation in education through antonyms and ambivalence, (2) emphasised critical media literacy, (3) viewed ecological perspectives through a main and counter-narrative (taking root more deeply vs. not everyone needs to get excited) and (4) emphasised the role of action. In terms of positioning, we found dynamic tensions between passive and active stances. We discuss our findings in light of teacher identity and education for democracy and sustainability. The results can be used as thinking tools in teacher education.

The aim of the present study was to examine factors that affect educational instructors' attitudes toward juvenile inmates in corrective educational facilities. Educational instructors play an important role in the rehabilitation of juvenile inmates, and their attitudes may affect the adolescents' chances of rehabilitation. We adopted an ecological perspective and explored the relationship between instructors' belief in a just world (BJW) and the role of inmates in a criminal event (offender/victim). The study included 196 educational instructors. They answered a questionnaire on their background, BJW levels, and attitudes toward juvenile inmates. Results show that educational instructors perceived "victim" inmates as significantly more delinquent and less treatable than "offender" inmates, and that a BJW affected attitudes toward juvenile inmates. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed in this article.

Contributions of an emotion-oriented professional development course to the ecology of language teacher agency

This study reports on the identity formation of the author as a novice research mentor of an independent research course for TESOL teachers over six months (from the course design to the first research submission). The data is collected from four critical autoethnographic narratives written by the author before, during, and after this period. The narratives were analysed thematically with an eye on the theoretical underpinning of the study, i.e. ecological perspective, in three ecological layers namely micro-, meso-, and macrosystem. The results revealed that the author’s identity construction was influenced by different factors such as ‘autonomy in mentoring’, ‘mediating mentorship’, or ‘academic recognition’ in three levels of educational ecology. The results of this study can motivate research mentors and teacher educators, specifically novice ones, to find some similarities with the ideas discussed in this research and to record their lived experiences as a tool for reflection.

This study aimed to explore the ecology of teacher preparation, specifically focusing on preservice teachers’ development and teaching practices throughout their experience in a physical education teacher education (PETE) program. Using a qualitative case study design, participants included four novice physical education teachers. Data were collected through semistructured interviews, critical incident timelines, structured observations, and artifacts. Results are presented according to the five systems of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, including: PETE coursework as a foundation, the importance of involvement outside of PETE, the crucial links between PETE and community, the negligible influence of negative factors, and the dynamic process of teacher education. The findings of the study demonstrate how various ecological systems within a PETE program contribute to preservice teachers’ development. The study suggests that PETE programs could enhance their curriculum by fostering interactions across different ecological systems to optimize preservice teachers’ learning and professional readiness.

In the past couple of years, the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies has received increasing attention in academic contexts. However, the overall ecological system of GenAI literacy has remained unclear to scholars and educators in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings. To fill the gap, the present study employed Bronfenbrenner's (1977) ecological system theory to evince factors that shape Chinese TESOL teachers' GenAI literacy. A focus group interview and a narrative frame were used to gather the needed data. The results of thematic analysis revealed that a wide range of factors at five layers constitute TESOL teachers' GenAI literacy. In particular, it was found that GenAI literacy is affected by 14 factors at micro, meso, macro, exo, and chrono‐systemic levels. The study highlights the importance of cultivating an atmosphere of GenAI technology acceptance and adoption in EFL settings that strongly fosters GenAI literacy development among educators. Implications at the theoretical and practical levels are further discussed in the study to augment GenAI literacy of TESOL teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers.

This article investigates the curriculum discourses circulating in a TESOL Masters Program for international students at a Canadian university. It focuses on issues around academic and professional identity constructions and language viewed through dialogical (Bakhtinian) and ecological perspectives. The article examines possibilities for agency for the students who accommodate, negotiate and resist identities, practices and program discourses inflected by broader neo-colonial and global/local tensions. The authors, two teacher educators in the program, interrogate their own practices in an attempt to denaturalize and historicize discourses available in the program and in current conditions of internationalization of higher education. The study illuminates the symbiotic relationship that develops between the discourses circulating in an educational setting and the internally persuasive discourses/identities that are available for uptake in this setting. The authors conclude that certain ideologies and discourses in the environment limit the possibilities for students to see themselves as ‘successful’ graduate students in the new for them academic context or, as they complete their degree, to imagine themselves successful within the profession. Other forces afford relations of possibility that yield positive academic and professional identity formation of these students. The curriculum of TESOL programs needs to engage head on with powerful broader discourses which impact the construction of academic and professional identities of international students in these programs in order to align TESOL programming with ethical practice.