Writing Ireland: The Historiography of Irish Education

This special issue of the Journal of Education for Teaching focuses on the practical activities and material conditions of higher education-based teacher educators’ work. The articles address questions of concept and practice, discourse and labour and the ways in which teacher education as an activity of higher education is related to the institutional contexts within which the activity is located. The material conditions of academic work have become the focus of much renewed interest in higher education as a series of intellectual, cultural and economic trends (Hartley 2009) have converged so as to question the roles and responsibilities of teacher educators as a category of academic workers. Generally, research suggests that partnership teacher education, in which universities and colleges work with schools to train teachers, is highly successful and there is plentiful evidence in support of this fact (e.g. Iven 1994; Christie et al 2004; Ellis et al. 2011). However, concerns about changes to initial teacher education towards more school-led approaches persist internationally. Much contemporary policy discourse has been framed around the belief that schools are best placed to train teachers and, while there may be an implied consensus of intention to support beginners in their learning during practice, the discussions do little to suggest that the notion of a research-informed teaching profession is an aim worth addressing. Troublingly, as Christie et al. (2012) recognise, the erosion of the role of higher education in teacher education may not only lead to volatility and reductions in funding and employment opportunities in education departments but is likely, by extension, to impact adversely on research capacity in teacher education institutions. Clearly, research which explores the activities and perspectives of teacher educators, their expertise and yet their increasingly difficult positioning within higher education more generally, has the potential to inform the development of the profession from within and, importantly, the strengthening of an academic culture of teacher education.

Stage 1: Survival During Stage 1, which may last throughout the first full year of teaching, the teacher's main concern is whether she can survive. This preoccupation with survival may be expressed in questions the teacher asks: "Can I get through the day in one piece? Without losing a child? Can I make it until the end of the week? Until the next vacation? Can I really do this kind of work day after day? Will I be accepted by my colleagues?" Such questions are well expressed in Ryan's enlightening collection of accounts of first-year teaching experiences (3).

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. …

The Influence of Experience on the Beginning Teacher

When the societies are worried about their educative process and they consider get it better, they are planning the progress in all their dimensions. There is the importance to set up politics that tend to have a high quality education. Nevertheless, the efforts in the Soledad township are not enough. In the development plan SOLEDAD CONFIABLE 2016-2019, the community indicated as a main problem the low quality education in the township. That is reflected in the performance levels measured by the ISCE. Hence, the investigation ́s objective is to analyze the continuous improvement processes of the educative quality in the successful schools of Soledad township. In other matters, this investigation used the paradigm quali- quantitative with a descriptive design to explain the academic process and the description of the factors that have influenced on this continuous process. With the help of four tools: documentary review rubric, semi-structured interview script and two questionnaires; it was achieved determine the specific practices that are using the principals and teachers to support the improvement of learnings and the integral development of the students.

This paper presents comparative research which examines issues in teaching Indigenous primary school students in Australia and the USA. It portrays the dilemmas for teachers and students when the curriculum is dominated by a monocultural, Eurocentric ethos. It then describes schools that have moved towards an alternative curriculum. In discussing postcolonial challenges for teacher educators and education policy makers arising out of these issues, the paper continues the debate about postcolonial approaches to cross-cultural and anti-racist education for Indigenous children in their community contexts. It argues that elements for significant educational change exist in both countries, and discusses how these changes need to be expanded and systematised to achieve a culturally powerful curriculum in Indigenous schools.

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. …

Teacher education’s primary goal is to train prospective teachers, which differs from study programmes, such as philosophy or mathematics, that do not cater to defined professions. This traditional understanding of the teaching profession becomes apparent when students ask: ‘How is this content, topic, method, task, or question relevant to school work?’ It is also reflected in the inclusion of practical school training in teacher education curricula. In Austria’s teacher training, these practical elements are accompanied by theoretical and methodological teaching foundations. However, students often question the applicability of theoretical knowledge to the teaching profession, which creates tension between the academic and pedagogical orientations. This paper discusses these very theory-practice tensions in teacher education based on findings from the project Habitus. Power.Education, which involved student teachers at an Austrian university. We argue that teacher training at universities is neither merely a place for producing a future workforce nor a self-growth space without purpose. Teacher training, rather, combines both (sometimes ambivalent) elements: education in its broadest sense and professional training. Using our empirical material, we show that the theory-praxis gap manifests in the tension between academic and pedagogical orientation. To address and mediate this tension, we propose the concept of habitus reflexivity. Promoting such a form of reflexivity among students makes it possible to bridge the gap between the different logics of university and school. Furthermore, it helps to comprehend inequality and power imbalances in the education system and develop agency, which is essential for navigating the ever-changing and complex world of modern schools.

Background/Context This article introduces the special issue on reimagining research and practice at the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. The authors provide an overview of previous research at this “crossroads” and describe how the special issue collaborators have sought to chart fresh ground in light of current practical and policy challenges that teachers and teacher educators face. Purpose/Focus of Study The project that gave rise to the special issue emerged from a self-study, conducted by the first two authors, of the Program in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. They have been rethinking the place of philosophy in teaching and teacher education, while also re-examining the place of teaching and teacher education in philosophy. They see opportunities for creative work at the “crossroads” of these fields of practice and inquiry, while also appreciating the numerous pressures in our era on educators to adopt an unnecessarily narrow, economics-driven agenda. To pursue this interest, they organized a conference whose participants are the authors of what follows in this issue. Setting/participants The organizers invited six graduates of their program, who focus on teaching and teacher education, to participate in an intensive, two-day conference that would address prospects for re-envisioning generative work at the “crossroads.” They asked each graduate (now a tenure-track or tenured professor) to invite a colleague rooted in other disciplinary configurations—but also invested in teaching and teacher education—to collaborate with them. The conference featured six presentations by these teams of colleagues, who are, in turn, the co-authors of the six core articles included in this special issue of the journal. The faculty organizers also invited two senior scholars steeped in teaching and teacher education to work with them as commentators before, during, and after the conference. Project Design In preparation for the conference, held at Teachers College on November 9–11, 2017, the 17 participants devoted approximately eight months to extensive collaborate work, including the construction of a conference bibliography that would inform their work. During this time, each team of future co-presenters/ co-authors (a) conceived a topic they would examine together, (b) prepared an initial outline of their planned inquiry, and (c) composed a draft of their forthcoming co-presentation at the conference. At each of these stages, the two senior faculty in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, and the two invited senior faculty, provided critical commentary. After the conference, the co-presenters transformed their work into articles. This process included several pre-established rounds of critical commentary on drafts by the senior faculty. The upshot of this collaborative endeavor are the studies presented in this issue: (1) a philosophical perspective on what are called “core practices” in teaching, (2) the philosophical underpinnings of an approach in teacher education entitled “Interruptions,” (3) what it means to think of teachers as “handlers” of student and community memory, (4) reimagining childhood, and what it means to work with children, through the fused lens of philosophy and practice, (5) teaching and teacher education understood as racialized pedagogies, and (6) how educators can expand conceptions of what it means to succeed in society. Conclusions/Recommendations The authors elucidate ramifications for research and practice of our collaborative work at the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. They address why ethical insight is as vital an outcome of research at this crossroads as is newly minted knowledge. They spotlight philosophy's dynamic place in the practices of teaching and teacher education, including how it can help us reconceive the very idea of “good” practice. The authors suggest that philosophy need not be “applied” to education, as if philosophy and action inhabit different worlds, because educational work is always already saturated with philosophical questions and considerations, whether practitioners identify them in such terms or not. Put another way, the authors show how educational practice can transform philosophers’ understanding of the purposes and scope of their field. They argue that philosophers, scholars of teaching, teacher educators, and teachers all have an indispensable custodial or stewardship role to play in education. They are the people best positioned to care for both the practice of teaching and its practitioners. As such, it is important for them to sustain a meaningful, collaborative conversation, especially in the present context of worrisome political trends and continued pressure on educators to narrow their remit in the face of economic and other non-educational considerations.

The Elementary School Journal Volume 82, Number 5 o 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0013-5984/82/8205-0006$01.00 For the past two weeks, Mr. Davis has been teaching his fifth-grade class how to add, subtract, and multiply fractions with like and unlike denominators. Each day he teaches the lesson by explaining the key concepts and skills to the class, working example problems on the board, and providingfeedback and positive reinforcement to the students. He then has students work practice problems at their seats. Mr. Davis has just completed teaching the lesson and is presently passing out the seatwork problems. Before instructing the students to begin work, he reviews the general problem-solving procedures with the students. For instance, he tells the students: "When adding fractions with unlike denominators, first you must find a common denominator. Then for each fraction, form an equivalent fraction using the common denominator. After you have done this you can add the fractions." When Mr. Davis has finished explaining, Jani begins working immediately and spends the rest of the class completing the problems. While she is working, Mr. Davis stops by her desk and notices that she is working the problems correctly. He then tells her she is doing the problems right and adds "Great job, Jani. Keep up the good work!" Depending on their particular theoretical orientations, educational psychologists would differ in their descriptions and explanations of Jani's successful performance of seatwork problems. Some psychologists would focus on the amount of time that Jani spent working on them. These psychologists would assert that Jani obtained a higher score than other students because she was on task more than the other students (see, e.g., Rosenshine 1979; Fisher et al. 1980).

Based on a study at two Swedish universities, this article aimed to identify teacher educators' use of digital tools and subsequent need for digital competence in higher education. Methodically, a digital survey was distributed via e-mail to 405 teacher educators representing two faculties at the two universities; in total, 105 teacher educators responded. The survey included 16 questions, with closed- and open-ended varieties. Two theoretical foundations were used: the TPACK model and, as a complement, computer self-efficacy. Through analysis of self-reported use, competence, and need for professional training in digitalization in teaching, results show that teacher educators do not use digital tools primarily for pedagogical purposes. Thus, they need extensive pedagogical support in creating digital teaching. Further, teacher educators need to identify the pedagogical surplus value in their own teaching and learning context with digital tools to increase motivation for concrete, effective, and subject-oriented successful examples as presented by experienced teachers.

Teacher education in New Zealand for the school sector began as the British colonists started a formal schooling system in the late 19th century. Teacher preparation for early childhood educators followed in 1988. Beginning with a pupil–teaching apprenticeship model, teacher education for the school sector in New Zealand has shifted from schools to tertiary institutions, and then from stand-alone colleges of education to mostly to faculties and departments in universities following deregulation and the opening of a “market” for teacher education in 1989. Teacher education today also happens in institutes of technology and through private providers. Teacher education is now provided for people who want to teach in early childhood, primary, and secondary settings. Early childhood and primary teachers can undertake a three-year degree or a one-year diploma if they already hold a degree qualification. Secondary school teachers must hold a degree in a subject taught in secondary schools and then complete a one-year diploma in teaching. In 2015 post-graduate teacher education was introduced in the form of one-year Masters degrees. Teacher education in New Zealand has been subject to continual review and reform proposals since its inception. These reviews, coupled with periodic teacher supply crises, make teacher education unstable and problematic. In particular, the shift into universities caused a significant shift in the work of teacher educators. Research imperatives have caused changes in who teacher educators are and what they do, but have also focused attention on scholarship in teacher education.

A litany of literature exists on teacher preparation programs, known as teacher education, and whiteness, which is the historical, systematic, and structural processes that maintain the race-based superiority of white people over people of color. The theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) are used to explore whiteness and teacher education separately; whiteness within teacher education; the impact of teacher education and whiteness on white educators, educators of Color, and their students; and cautions and recommendations for teacher education and whiteness. Although teacher education and whiteness are situated within the current US sociopolitical context, the historical colonial contexts of other countries may find parallel examples of whiteness. Within this context, the historical purposes behind teacher education and the need for quality teachers in an increasingly diverse student population are identified using transdisciplinary approaches in CRT and CWS to define and describe operations of whiteness in teacher education. Particularly, race education scholars entertain the psychoanalytic, philosophical, and sociological ruminations of race, racism, and white supremacy in society and education to understand more fully how whiteness operates within teacher education. For example, an analysis of psychological attachments found in racial identities, particularly between whiteness and Blackness, helps to fully comprehend racial dynamics between teachers, who are overwhelmingly racially identified as white, and students, who are predominantly racially identified as of Color. Whiteness in teacher education, left intact, ultimately affects K-12 schooling and students, particularly students of Color, in ways that recycle institutionalized white supremacy in schooling practices. Acknowledging how reinforcing hegemonic whiteness in teacher education ultimately reifies institutional white supremacy in education altogether; implications and cautions as well as recommendations are offered to debunk the hegemonic whiteness that inoculates teacher education. Note: To symbolically reverse the racial hierarchy in our research, the authors opt to use lowercase lettering for white and whiteness, and to capitalize “people of Color” to recognize it as a proper noun along with Black and Brown.

The question I address in this article is how we might understand the role of the teacher in education that seeks to promote emancipation. I take up this question in conversation with German and North-American versions of critical pedagogy with, the works of Paulo Freire and with that of Jacques Rancière. I show that in each case we find not only a strong argument for emancipatory education but also a distinct view about the role of the teacher. My aim is partly to show the different ways in which the role of the teacher in emancipatory education can be conceived and to make clear how this role is related to the different understandings of emancipation and the dynamics of emancipatory education. The motivation for writing this article also stems from what I see as a rather problematic interpretation of the work of Rancière in recent educational scholarship, one where the key message of his 1991 book The Ignorant Schoolmaster is taken to be that anyone can learn without a teacher and that this alleged ‘freedom to learn’ would constitute emancipation. I challenge such a constructivist interpretation of Rancière’s work and argue that the key message of The Ignorant Schoolmaster is that emancipatory education is not a matter of transfer of knowledge from a teacher who knows to a student who does not (yet) know, but nonetheless is a process in which teachers and their teaching are indispensable. This will allow me to argue why and how teaching remains essential for emancipatory education and why we should therefore not be fooled into thinking that ignorant schoolmasters, because they have no knowledge to give, have nothing to teach and can be done away with.

The Elementary School Journal Volume 83, Number 2 ? 1982 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 001 3-5984183/8302-0009$01o.00 Teachers approach their instructional tasks with a variety of perspectives and strategies that emphasize certain aspects of teaching and deemphasize others. For example, some teachers teach language skills using organized games, while other teachers teach the same skills by direct instruction. Teachers adopt different approaches to the same subject matter partly because their teaching situations differ. Their students may have different learning problems or their classrooms may have varied resources and facilities. Even in the