Collaborative Teacher Education Research Articles

Online global collaboration

New teaching and learning approaches are emerging through the use of technology including online global collaboration. Educators involved in global collaboration forge external relationships with others beyond their immediate learning environment. They modify and adapt the curriculum to include global learning opportunities for their learners. Global collaboration provides opportunities for rich global, cognitive, social, cultural and life-changing experiences to their students. Online global collaboration broadly refers to geographically dispersed educators that use online technologies to learn with others beyond their immediate environment to support curricular objectives, intercultural understandings, critical thinking, personal, social and ICT capabilities. This paper will report some preliminary findings from an investigation into the perceptions of K-12 educators who facilitate global collaborative learning. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews that were then themed to identify the key affordances and inhibitors to online global collaboration. The paper will provide recommendations for global collaboration in teacher education.

Reflection using mobile portfolios during teaching internships: tracing the influence of mentors and peers on teacher self-efficacy

ABSTRACT Digital portfolios offer opportunities for reflection and collaboration in teacher education. However, the affordances of mobile devices have scarcely been explored in this context. A mixed-methods study was conducted wherein 44 student teachers collaboratively used a mobile portfolio app for reflection with peer students and mentors during teaching internships. The analysis focused on the collaborative content of mobile portfolios and its relationship with self-reported outcomes after the internship. The results showed that portfolios often included multimedia records (i.e. pictures, video and audio) of student activity in the classroom and written reflections on teaching strategies. Mentors recorded more videos in portfolios, while peer records varied and correlated with student teachers’ self-efficacy gains. Cluster analysis showed higher teacher self-efficacy gains when all collaborators actively contributed to the portfolios. These findings highlight the importance of mentors and peers when using mobile devices for reflection during teacher education internships.

Teachers’ Lived Experiences on Collaboration in Online Teacher Education: A Phenomenological Study

This research aimed to explore the English language teachers’ lived experiences of collaboration in teacher education via online mode. This study embraced a phenomenological qualitative research design and involved four English teachers purposively to gather their lived experiences on the phenomena. Informal discussions and semi-structured interviews were used to gather data. Using the Hermeneutic phenomenological method, the data were analyzed. This study used Vygotsky's Social Constructivism as its theoretical foundation (1978). The findings demonstrate that English language teachers have positive perspectives and collaboration experiences in online teacher education. The collaboration develops their confidence, critical analysis, technological skills, and rapport building. The participants expressed that collaboration in teacher education reduces the workload and stress if all the members are equally responsible for the completion of their tasks. However, the division of work constrains the members into their parts only resulting the less exploration and knowledge construction in others’ portions.

Changing teacher educator cognition within a collaborative teacher education programme for CLIL: A case study in China

This study reports on a six-month collaborative teacher education programme designed to support the implementation of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in the Chinese primary education context. ‘Activity theory’ was used as an analytical framework to investigate the changes in cognition regarding CLIL experienced by two teacher educators – one at district level and the other at school level – and the factors that contributed to shifts in their cognition. Thematic analysis was conducted on data consisting of semi-structured interviews, field notes, a reflective report, and project meeting minutes. Results indicate that for both teacher educators, the programme functioned as an activity system that facilitated the emergence of advanced cognition of CLIL over the six months of the project, and did so along two distinct trajectories, one focusing on pedagogical applications of CLIL tenets and the other centring on implementing CLIL as an educational policy. The results also show how the collaborative nature of the teacher education programme fostered the expression of diverse views as well as shared motives through frequent interaction and co-construction of knowledge. As such, it offers a viable alternative to more traditional top-down approaches that are used to foster the professional development of teacher educators.

Advancing a theory of change in a collaborative teacher education program innovation through universal design for learning

This design-based research (DBR) investigates the redesign of a 13-month interdisciplinary teacher preparation program to co-prepare secondary and special education teacher candidates to plan and implement evidence-based practices to meet content and literacy needs of all learners within secondary classrooms. The Theory of Change explores mechanisms for change under the umbrella of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The UDL framework can support teacher candidates in meeting the needs of students with exceptionalities in the general education classroom, yet few studies have explored the in-depth application of UDL in authentic settings across preparation program duration. DBR methods organize study design, iterative data collection, and retrospective analysis of artifacts including candidates' edTPA portfolios and action research papers. Findings revealed strengths and challenges in candidates’ (n = 14) application of components. Results for specific components and various disciplines are discussed. Implications for collaborative preparation of general and special education candidates are identified.

Ascending Critical Consciousness: Designing an Experiential Liberatory Teacher Education Collaborative in Atlanta

The Atlanta Schools Critical Education Network for Distinction (ASCEND) is an ongoing interdisciplinary coalition supporting the critical consciousness of social justice educators. ASCEND partners include: (1) activist faculty from two university departments: Middle and Secondary Education and African American Studies; (2) a justice-oriented community-based organization; and (3) local public middle school faculty. This paper analyzes ASCEND's impact on deepening urban teachers’ awareness of, and attention to, local injustices within their curriculum, and initial application of critical pedagogy. Major findings capture the impact of providing experiential educator learning opportunities outside of schools and the urgency to center community in educator development.

University–school collaboration as an arena for community-building in teacher education

ABSTRACT Background In many settings internationally, initial teacher education (ITE) relies on cooperation between schools and universities. When these institutions collaborate on teacher education, the shared work can form a basis for community building. This article focuses on experiences in Norwegian ITE of the Change Laboratory (CL), a form of participatory data analysis workshop, as an arena for such work, and hence community building, in teacher education. Purpose Contextualised within the framework of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), the research aimed to understand participants’ experiences of collaboration in CLs, and how the CLs functioned as an arena for community building. We asked: in what way was the work in CLs during the first year of an intervention research project in teacher education experienced as community building? Method The research was conducted within a four-year teacher education research and development project involving two ITE institutions. We carried out focus group interviews with three groups engaged together in shared work: teacher educators in university (n = 10), teacher educators in school (n = 5), and student teachers (n = 20). Data were analysed qualitatively. Findings During the project, all participants gradually felt that they had a voice and were listened to. Their mutual engagement on the project work, and the use of CHAT also brought them together. Overall, the findings were encouraging and suggested that a focus on community building in CLs in the start-up phase of a project can lay the foundation for collaboration between teacher education and schools, contributing to the co-construction of knowledge, and to learning and development. However, the challenge of disseminating the work to colleagues in universities and schools was perceived as a hindrance. Conclusions The development and sustaining of collaboration in teacher education is an important goal, ultimately benefitting the entire learning community. Crossing boundaries can lead to joint learning, as in this project, and to further development and learning in teacher education.

Centering Racialized Educators in Collaborative Teacher Education: The Development of the Intersectionally Conscious Collaboration Protocol

The intersectionally conscious collaboration protocol for teacher educators (ICC-TE) expands on existing models of collaboration by drawing from intersectionality as conceptualized by Black feminist theorists, collaborative teacher education, and frameworks for stakeholders to establish and maintain ethical, student-centered relationships. The ICC-TE promotes approaches that honor sociocultural differences, model collaboration, and support the development of these practices in preservice teacher education. The authors analyzed the responses of four Latina teacher educators at a predominately white teacher preparation program and teaching artifacts created while using the ICC-TE as they co-taught a special education course. As a result of this study, the researchers refined the protocol. All participants indicated the need for more training on intersectionality, for both teacher educators of color and their white colleagues. A connecting thread across all sources of data was how institutional culture and faculty morale shaped collegiality.

A Person-Centered Approach for Analyzing Multidimensional Integration in Collaboration Between Educational Researchers and Practitioners

This study was conducted in the context of a development project for teacher education, establishing a collaborative format called Transdisciplinary Development Teams (TDTs). The aim of this study was to investigate (a) how participating TDT members assess focal dimensions of integration characteristics (DICs) with regard to success factors and challenging aspects. DICs are operationalized as (1a) mutual learning and (1b) knowledge integration, (2a) perceived trustworthiness, and (2b) appreciation within the team, and (3a) collective ownership of goals. In addition, they seek to (b) differentiate the types of actors characterized by particular assessment patterns. The study employs a person-centered approach (cluster analysis) and uses a data corpus with 62 response sets. Subsequently, this study offers a genuine conceptual approach to frame interorganizational collaboration in teacher education. On this basis, empirical insights that provide further practical implications to support future collaboration at the boundary of educational research and practice have been generated.

A Journey towards Collaborative Culture Development: How to Be Weightless Despite Academic Gravity

In science, gravity refers to the universal force of attraction acting on and between all matter. No one on earth can escape the force of gravity. In a similar vein, the stringent requirements of publications, research grants, and research output in the academic world can be metaphorically described as “academic gravity,” the force of which pushes university academics to struggle and strive in pursuit of excellence just to survive in the changing landscape of higher education governed by neo-liberalism and managerialism. This article describes the journey of a junior academic staff member in an Asian university as he coped with various difficulties in establishing a collaborative culture in his department (i.e., the Faculty of Education). Working with a senior colleague (Sunshine-mother hereafter) in the same department, Author 1 began to recognize the importance of collegial collaboration in teacher education generally and in his academic life specifically. However, although he tried his utmost to develop a culture of collaboration amongst his colleagues, he struggled to cope with the tension and stress exerted by academic gravity (i.e., publication production and the pursuit of tenure). Drawing on data collected from a teaching development project and adopting a reflective autobiographic approach, this article delineates the collaborative relationship between Author 1 and Sunshine-mother, exemplifying the important roles that coaching and a free rein (i.e., weightlessness) play in the development of junior teacher-educators under the strong pressure of academic gravity.

A transdisciplinary evaluation framework for the assessment of integration in boundary-crossing collaborations in teacher education

This study provides a) an evaluative framework for boundary-crossing collaboration in teacher education which is inspired by the discourse of transdisciplinarity. In addition, it offers b) empirical insights about so-called Transdisciplinary Development Teams, which comprise practitioners, researchers, and student teachers. The framework bases on (1) epistemic, (2) social, and (3) organisational integration characteristics such as (1a) mutual learning, (1b) knowledge integration, (2a) perceived trustworthiness, (2b) appreciation within the team, and (3a) collective ownership of goals. Drawing on a written survey with n = 62 participants, the empirical study provides findings on three research questions. First, all dimensions of integration characteristics have been rated high on average. Second, the results of a one-way ANOVA establish that the main actor groups perceive the work in Transdisciplinary Development Teams as integrative with regard to previously stated characteristics. Third, the analysis of a manifest path model substantiates theoretically assumed effect relationships. Subsequently, transdisciplinary dimensions of integration characteristics appear suitable for assessing boundary-crossing collaboration in teacher education.

Building Collaborative Teacher Education: Integrating UDL through a Faculty Learning Community

Teacher educators have focused reform efforts on preparing graduates to address increasingly diverse K-12 students. Collaboration among general and special education faculty is seen as beneficial for preparing teacher candidates who can teach diverse learners, yet it is not the norm. This practitioner research study explored a curriculum reform effort that employed a faculty learning community (FLC) to engage general and special education faculty to collaboratively integrate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) into two teacher education programs. Faculty perceptions of the collaborative reform process and resulting curriculum enhancements are presented. Findings indicated the process was valued by our faculty, promoted a stronger culture of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and resulted in systematic curriculum improvements coordinated across content and field courses. This study offers guidance to teacher education faculty interested in collaborative curriculum reform.

Transdisciplinary Collaboration in ESD Teacher Education Programs

Putting Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) into effect will become a major task for the 21st century, particularly for future teachers who are expected to participate in ESD but whose studies often do not prepare them for this task. This article responds to the question how collaboration in teacher education can help bridge that gap and how it can contribute to the transdisciplinary demands of ESD. It assumes an essential role in enabling collaborative spaces of dialogue and transfer of knowledge between educators and students of all academic disciplines, schools, universities, local stakeholders, and CSO. This specifically includes perspectives from the Global South.
 Presenting the certificate program “el mundo – ESD in university level teacher education” (LMU Munich) as an example for collaborative ESD practice, the article identifies and presents four central fields of transdisciplinary collaboration in teacher education: content– related, institutional, and biography–affecting collaboration, as well as collaboration in pedagogical–didactic contexts.

Entangling Our Thinking and Practice: A Model for Collaboration in Teacher Education

Collaboration is a key component of our practice as teachers and teacher educators and there is a need to develop generative models for collaboration among teacher educators. We have created and tested a model of collaboration. Data were drawn from: recordings of monthly group meetings; discussion threads and documents on our leaning management site; individual interviews with all members of the group conducted three times across the project; and reflections on these interview transcripts by individual annotation and group discussions. The model includes a collaborative overarching research project and, nested under this mantle, a series of focused research projects conducted by pairs of collaborators, international networking, and enactments of scholarship. A key element of the success of this model was the foundation of this research in arts-based inquiry. The model has enabled rapid and rich development of academic collaboration with flexibility to develop new practices and projects that benefits research and teaching.

Implementing tasks in young learners’ language classrooms: A collaborative teacher education initiative through task evaluation

Despite empirical evidence in support of the effectiveness of using tasks in young learners’ classrooms, task implementation has been repeatedly reported as a thorny problem. An essential but under-researched issue is how in-service teacher education programme can be conducted to facilitate teachers’ implementing tasks in their classrooms. This practitioner research article reports on a researcher and teacher educator’s action research study in which she worked with Lucille (pseudonym), a novice English language teacher, to design and implement two repeated task-based language teaching (TBLT) lessons for Grade 2 students at a Chinese primary school. During a six-week teacher education program consisting of two cycles of TBLT lesson planning, implementation, evaluation, and reflection, the teacher educator provided continuous support to guide and scaffold Lucille’s reflective endeavours at crafting TBLT practices in her classrooms. The teacher educator also conducted student-based, response-based, learning-based, and community-based task evaluations to facilitate the teacher’s reflective practices. The study illustrates how an in-service teacher education program, fuelled by on-going professional support and empirical evaluation, facilitated a practitioner’s task implementation in young learners’ foreign language classrooms.

Collaboration in teacher education: A cross-sectional study on future teachers’ attitudes towards collaboration, their intentions to collaborate and their performance of collaboration

This cross-sectional study (N = 1687, 4 cohorts) investigates future teachers’ intentions to collaborate and their attitude towards collaboration with standardized questionnaires. Two of the cohorts provide additional information about their performance of collaboration in a school setting outside the university. ANOVA and post-hoc analyses are performed to determine group differences. First-year pre-service teachers rate collaboration lower in importance and intend to collaborate less than the other cohorts. Three collaborative actions are examined: exchange, division of work, and co-construction. While exchange is found to be the most popular form of collaboration, student teachers report performing the higher-level forms more frequently.

Special Education Preservice Teachers, Intersectional Diversity, and the Privileging of Emerging Professional Identities

Intersectional competence captures educators’ awareness of how sociocultural markers of difference simultaneously intersect within the P-12 school context. This article presents findings from a larger mixed-methods sequential exploratory study that established, in part, the theoretical and qualitative basis for validating the Intersectional Competence Measure. The questions asked during the qualitative phase were developed after a review of the literature on intersectionality in special education, collaborative teacher education, and existing measures of preservice teachers’ understanding of diversity. This analysis focuses on the responses of 12 culturally and linguistically diverse special education preservice teachers. When speaking about P-12 students, they tended to position themselves as special educators, privileging their emerging professional identities. They expressed the important role that teacher education played in developing an understanding of sociocultural differences. The participants discussed the complexities of intersecting identities when speaking about their own educational experiences and when considering discriminatory attitudes that persist within minoritized communities.

UNLEARNING COLONIAL IDENTITIES WHILE ENGAGING IN RELATIONALITY: SETTLER TEACHERS’ EDUCATION-AS-RECONCILIATION

Before the TRC’s Calls to Action, we were a collaborative teacher-education partnership of Anishinaabekwe and White settler researching and teaching reconciliation as pedagogical practice with five cohorts of settler teacher-candidates. Engaging theories of settler-colonialism, decolonization and Indigenous studies, we outline the obstacles and struggles in settler teacher education, such as exposing the legacies of colonialism in education, cultural harms and systemic racism in curriculum, and ongoing ignorance as entitlement by teachers. In addition, we focus on the complexities of methods for improving respectful relationality with Indigenous students and community as well as our hopes in helping new teachers commit their professional practice to focus on supporting Indigenous children and youth.

Challenging technocratic logics in teacher education: Seeking guidance from Indigenous and Aristotelian traditions

In this article, I argue that technocratic forms of education are miseducational and intricately tied to matters of social inequity and colonialism. Through outlining the epistemic limitations, as well as drawing on decolonial scholarship, I point out that technocratic logics in education intentionally ignore the people, places, and more-than-human beings in educational configurations. In response to these concerns, I engage with Indigenous and Aristotelian scholarship that takes up embodied knowledge making practices that forefront ethics, place, and relations. I conclude by sharing collaborative teacher education practices conceived through being taught by Indigenous and Aristotelian traditions of thought and practice.

The Call for Collaboration in Teacher Education

The Call for Collaboration in Teacher Education