Teacher Education Discourse Research Articles

Globalization Viewed from the Periphery: The Dynamics of Teacher Identity in the Republic of Benin

L'auteur tente d'expliquer les differences d'impacts de la mondialisation au niveau local sur les systemes educatifs par les variations de l'identite des enseignants. L'enseignant, considere en tant qu'acteur social, politique et historique d'un pays donne, peut malgre tout aider a apporter des solutions aux politiques reformatrices developpees. En effet, si les pays en voie de developpement ont des besoins similaires qui repondent a des logiques, des priorites et des attentes bien definies, les consequences des reformes engagees different selon les pays.

Globalization Viewed from the Periphery: The Dynamics of Teacher Identity in the Republic of Benin

Globalization Viewed from the Periphery: The Dynamics of Teacher Identity in the Republic of Benin

Why Do Good Art Teachers Find It Hard to Stay in the Public School System?

According to studies in the U.S. and in Israel, a large percentage of new teachers leaves the classroom within 5 years (Faber, 1984; Geva-May, 1995; Sabar, 2001). Those with higher academic degrees are among the first to leave (Amstrong, 1984; Van Manen, 1991). Many that decide to stay resort to overly conservative, unimaginative pedagogy in order to survive (Wittrock, 1986; May, 1995). As part of studying the ways beginning art teachers negotiate their teaching identity and beliefs within the public educational system (Cohen-- Evron, 2001), I collected their tales of the. challenges, problems, and satisfactions they encountered during their everyday work. Their descriptions of negotiations within their marginal place in the schools provide an opportunity to pay close attention to what they portray as the difficulties and conflicts in their practice and why good art teachers find it difficult to stay in the public school system. The Distinction Between Art Teachers' Role and Art Teachers' Identity What disturbs me is that if you are a good teacher you do not use your potential. Because the educational system demand something else it changes you to become mediocre. It isn't just the demand to cover the material, but also the whole attitude... In the first year I felt like a racehorse that cannot run. And [after 5 years of teaching] I still feel so. (Naomi, a high school art teacher, December 17, 1999) Britzman (1991) writes that as teachers we construct not only our teaching practices and all the relationships this entails, but our teaching voices and (p. 1). In the mainstream discourse of teacher education, teacher identity is viewed as synonymous with teacher's (Britzman, 1992). Nevertheless, there is an the important distinction between the terms and identity. Britzman (1992) explains, role speaks to function whereas identity voices investments and commitments. Function, or what one should do, and investments, or what one feels, are often at odds (p. 29). A teacher's is determined by teaching conditions and the formal expectations of the different people involved in schooling (the superintendent, the principal, parents, students, colleagues, the curriculum, the teachers themselves). This often does not coincide with the beliefs and expectations of teachers. Yet teachers' beliefs and the perceptions they hold about the subject matter to be taught, about their students, and about teaching and learning determine the ways they interpret what is desirable or undesirable (Kagan, 1992; Sivertsen, 1994). Thus there is often a conflict between what is expected and what is believed, and teachers must negotiate their identity within these conflicted representations and expectations. According to this distinction between teachers' and identity, art teachers' preparation programs and educational systems that employ art teachers can pre-describe the of desirable art teachers. They can provide a list of preferable teaching outcomes, pedagogical skills, teaching techniques, teaching strategies, and theories. They can train the teachers accordingly while they are planning art lessons or teaching the students. While the of good art teacher can be a fixed description of desired qualities (which change from one paradigm of art education to another), art teachers' identities are constructed through an ongoing process of becoming and making sense of who they are, who they are not, and who they wish to become (Britzman, 1992). This process involves teachers' knowledge and ideals of art and art teaching, all of which are negotiated within specific discourses. These elements of the art teacher's identity are constructed and reconstructed during their work and lives, and create a different image of being a good teacher than any of the given fixed descriptions of a desirable art teacher. This process is described in the following section. The Process of Constructing an Image of a Good Art Teacher Teachers' knowledge1 is different from the written theoretical knowledge encountered in preservice or inservice programs (Fuller, 1994). …

A critical review of gender and teacher education in Europe

This article explores differences and similarities in various European national histories, politics, and traditions relating to gender relationships within and outside teacher education that have impacted on practices within schools and teacher education institutions. One crossnational feature has been the ‘feminisation’ (i.e. increasingly involvement of more women than men) in teaching and teacher education. Another has been the presence and impact of the European Union (EU). Questions explored in the article include the extent to which gender has been a discourse in European teacher education, and the theoretical and strategic approaches that need to be adopted to strengthen its present influence and impact.

Myths in Teacher Education: towards reflectivity

This article discusses three trends in teacher education. The first teacher-education discourse is that of mastery learning, that Is, the discourse that uses the language of productivity, and efficiency. The second is that of strategic teaching, the discourse that targets expertise. The third is that of narrative awakening, the discourse of the enlightened subject. The objective of the article is their deconstruction: Productivity, warfare, and priesthood metaphorically shape three castes in teacher education. Mass educational concepts, even positive ones, can stifle Individual growth. responsibility, and difference. in this line of thought. the article will discuss the future of reflective trends in teacher education.

Decontextualizing Teachers’ Knowledge: Finnish didactics and teacher education curricula during the 1980s and 1990s

The subject of this article is the pedagogical knowledge which is seen as essential and ‘true’ enough to be offered to students in the course of modern, academic class‐teacher training. In the first section, didactics will be analysed as the hard core of Finnish pedagogic discourse. Then the changes in the Finnish state educational discourse will be related to recent developments in department‐level curricula in class‐teacher education at Finnish universities during the 1980s and 1990s. The analysis of changes which have taken place in Finnish teacher education discourse shows clearly that there has been a tendency towards pure didactics, a kind of abstract, non‐historical and decontextualized science of teaching. Although contextual studies have been increasing in some departments since the middle of the 1990s, the historical dimension of schooling in particular still appears to be lacking.

The social construction of pedagogic discourse in physical education teacher education in Australia

AbstractOnce the exclusive domain of teacher education, physical education in Australian tertiary institutions has during the last twenty years evolved into a series of discipline‐based fields concerned with human movement studies, leisure studies and sport science that have begun to feed new vocational opportunities in the sport, exercise and leisure industries. Concomitant with these changes in the social organization of knowledge in tertiary physical education has been a realignment of school physical education programmes, particularly in the senior school curriculum. Inevitably, the once sole focus of physical education in tertiary institutions on teacher education is now being forced to reinvent itself in light of these dynamic changes in the social organization of school and university knowledge. Following the work of Bernstein, Goodson and others, this article analyses current policy and practice in physical education teacher education and identifies several future scenarios. The first part of the article provides an historical overview of the emergence of new forms of tertiary knowledge in physical education from the mid‐1970s until the present. The second part provides a similar overview of developments in school physical education with a focus on senior school and matriculation physical education during the same period. The third part analyses the current state of affairs in the social organization of knowledge for physical education teacher education. In the fourth part, a series of questions is raised concerning relationships between knowledge in physical education teacher education, school physical education and university forms of the field through the presentation of several future scenarios. The article concludes with several proposals for policy development concerned with physical education teacher education programmes.

Decentering Discourses in Teacher Education: Or, The Unleashing of Unpopular Things

There is something fundamentally scary about pedagogy because pedagogy references unknown. Despite our best authorial intentions, no guarantees mediate our private lesson plans or public effects of pedagogical encounter. More often than not, things do not go according to plan: objectives reappear as too simple, too complicated, or get lost; concepts become glossed over, require long detours, or go awry; and evaluation rarely delivers on its promise of closure. In fact, what seems most certain is that after pedagogical encounter we must return to our plans, rethink our expectations, and theorize tensions of multiple performances that compete for our attention. In short, pedagogy is filled with surprises, involuntary returns, and unanticipated twists. For this reason, we can conclude that pedagogy ushers in an intangibility that we can identify as the uncanny. Enlightenment may well be our destination but journey is fraught with creepy detours. Critical and feminist pedagogies can help us return to these tangles in ways that move beyond impulse to manage techniques, discipline bodies, and control outcomes. Such pedagogies are meant to interpellate, or beacon, teachers and students with new discursive practices and new identities. The intent is to decenter obvious and create semiotic space for cultural critique. Given such uncharted terrains, those who advocate, construct, and practice these newer traditions are obligated to analyze discursive moments that mark these pedagogies as both different and desirable. We are also required to grapple with unfinished, puzzling, and awkward. For when powers shift, hierarchies invert, and certainty crumbles, and when boundaries are transgressed in voluntary and involuntary ways, new dilemmas, tensions, and contradictions must be accounted. My purpose is to explore feminist pedagogical experiments of a team of student teachers in a lOth-grade literature class and attend to some of engendered tensions that emerge when decentering pedagogies work to

Beyond the limits of theoretical discourse in teacher education: Towards a critical pedagogy

This paper argues for the development of a critical pedagogy through teacher education. Current theoretical discourse in teacher education, represented by radical, rationalist, and traditionalist perspectives, has failed to provide an adequate rationale for teacher education, given the multi-dimensionality of the teacher's task in contemporary schooling. Teacher education has failed to provide teachers with the critical capacities needed to guard mass schooling against political interference and its use as an agency of control rather than emancipation. The problem in part lies in the limitations of the ideological basis of each perspective, but more significantly in a common failure to account for a number of fundamental structures that constrain and contain teacher education. These structures are identified and discussed with a view to providing the context for an adequate rationale for teacher education. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of key issues, such as the nature of knowledge in teacher education programmes and the ‘problem’ of theory and practice, in an attempt to lay the ground for the development of a critical pedagogy through teacher education.