Teacher Education Literature Research Articles

Linking Contemporary Research on Youth, Literacy, and Popular Culture With Literacy Teacher Education

The aim of this article is to expand the dialogue about how contemporary scholarship on the intersections between youth, literacy, and popular culture might inform literacy teacher education. Specifically, this article is designed to (a) orient literacy teacher educators who may be somewhat unfamiliar with this particular line of scholarship to a few of its major concepts and K-12 classroom implications and (b) propose several ways this line of scholarship might open up possibilities for literacy teacher educators to help pre-service literacy teachers develop culturally responsive teaching practices. To address these goals, this article first provides an introduction to several common ways popular culture has been theorized. From this introduction, the article explains the following three concepts within contemporary scholarship that investigates youth engagement with popular culture: (a) popular culture as a site of identity formation for youth; (b) popular culture as a context for literacy development; and (c) popular culture as a vehicle for sociopolitical critique and action. In addition, this article illustrates pedagogical implications these concepts have for K-12 literacy education, including how literacy instructors adopt ethnographic stances toward youth engagement with popular culture to reposition youth and ascertain their popular culture funds of knowledge, bridge standard literacy curricula to students’ popular culture funds of knowledge, and develop literacy curricula to facilitate students’ sociopolitical critique and action. Finally, this article explores how this line of scholarship may open up spaces within literacy teacher education for K-12 pre-service literacy teachers to grapple with the politics of literacy pedagogy.

Examining Service-Learning Literature in Physical Education Teacher Education: Recommendations for Practice and Research

Service-learning is a teaching strategy designed to provide learners opportunities to transfer theory to practice in an authentic environment while concurrently meeting genuine needs in the community. The reciprocal nature of service-learning differentiates this pedagogy from other learning venues including field experiences, internships, and student teaching. Recently the interest surrounding, as well as the utilization of service-learning, has grown in numerous academic disciplines including physical education teacher education (PETE). PETE research investigating the impact of service-learning in regards to student and community outcomes is also emerging. The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the current PETE service-learning literature. Components of the review include examination of theoretical frameworks, exploration of the impact of service-learning on PETE students and community participants, and recommendations for practice and future research.

Everyone Sees Color

This article builds a rationale for using the transformative pedagogy of critical race theory (CRT) to reframe early literacy teacher education and create counternarratives to address pervasive issues of inequity among minoritized students. This article also highlights the tensions that resulted from the author’s use of such a framework: Preservice teachers enrolled in the author’s early literacy methods course expressed feelings that focusing on issues of race and racism was at the expense of their “literacy training,” problems accepting the idea that they could be personally biased, and notions that the CRT frame was inapplicable to them because they were at White schools. This article makes practical suggestions for teacher educators’ efforts to counter such tensions and use CRT in order to address inequitable practices and meet the needs of minoritized students.

(Re)Considerations of Ignorance and Resistance in Teacher Education

This article questions the status of two recurring concepts in teacher preparation: resistance and ignorance. Both of these terms have significant presence within the teacher education literature. Because both of these terms often occur in relation to a particular topic, that of race and multicultural education, we also utilize race as the discourse that frames our consideration of these two important issues. To reframe and reorient our attention to the processes of ignorance and resistance, we turn to psychoanalytic considerations of those terms and consider what such a turn can offer teacher educators as they engage teacher candidates with issues of race.

Pre-service Teachers’ Preferred Methods of Assessment: A Perspective from Saudi Arabia

Teacher-candidate course assessment is one topic that has not been adequately explored in teacher education literature where pre-service teachers’ voices are rarely heard. Assessment methods in pre-service teacher programs across the world, including in Saudi Arabia, have received little exploration in the literature. This mixed-methods study explored a group of female pre-service teachers (n = 83) enrolled in a Diploma of Education program to identify their preferred method of assessment for their learning. The results showed that these individuals preferred a group assignment, consisting of a written report and an oral presentation, over an individual assignment, consisting of an individual essay, because the group assignment helped them to break through the boundary of facing an audience and encouraged them to exchange knowledge with their counterparts.

Teacher Educators' Readiness, Preparation, and Perceptions of Preparing Preservice Teachers in a Fully Online Environment: An Exploratory Study

With a view to attracting more students and offering flexible learning opportunities, online teaching and learning is becoming increasingly widespread across the higher education sector. It is now found across a wide range of disciplines (e.g., business, health, psychology, accounting, information technology) and program levels (e.g., from associate degrees to doctorate degrees). Online delivery is also strongly represented in the teacher education sector at many universities. Research of online delivery in higher education generally and teacher education specifically has pointed to a range of benefits and challenges associated with this mode of learning. Within the teacher education literature, many aspects of the online preparation of teachers remain poorly understood. More specifically, there is scant literature on the experiences and beliefs of teacher educators in relation to their readiness and preparation for online teaching as well as their beliefs in relation to the appropriateness of online education for preservice teachers. This article responds to this gap in the literature and reports on an exploratory study that worked with academic staff, teaching in a fully online teacher education course, at a mid-size Australian university. Twenty-seven teacher educators completed a 34-item questionnaire that consisted of closed and open-ended questions. With regards to readiness and preparation for teaching online, the majority of teacher educators reported lacking confidence and competence in the technological and pedagogical skills required to teach online. By and large, the study participants were welcoming of individualized “at-elbow” support that seemed to abate some of their fears of online teaching. The teacher educators were generally divided on whether the online classroom was an appropriate method for preparing preservice teachers. This article concludes with several recommendations for consideration by teacher educators who work in an online environment and sets the stage for a more ambitious study.

(Re)designing literacy teacher education: a call for change

The article features a graduate literacy teacher education course that compelled students to think in terms of design and multimodality. In an effort to innovate our own literacy teacher education work, we came together to devise a course that encouraged students to adopt a design lens to their thinking, planning, and assessing of literacy learning. We saw this qualitative case study as a way to understand the interrelationships of learning processes, principles of design and multimodal texts, and how these might inform pedagogy. Building on years of work in the areas of multimodality and multiliteracies, we observed how eight teachers with varying degrees of comfort with multimodality moved into a design-oriented approach to literacy education. The article presents our research on design-oriented teacher education work, but the findings illuminate how the adoption and inhabiting of different mindsets and metalanguage can make a difference.

Studying Agency in Literacy Teacher Education: A Layered Approach to Positive Discourse Analysis

Critically oriented forms of discourse analysis have focused largely on oppression and injustice. Signaling a new turn in the field, scholars have called for an analytic focus on moments of liberation and agency, referring to this orientation as “positive discourse analysis” (PDA). In this research, we turn our attention to a case study of agency and leadership in teacher education. We analyze the discursive contours of a workshop designed and presented at an Educating for Change Curriculum Fair by a preservice teacher, whom we refer to as Leslie, about culturally relevant teaching. Arguing that PDA is not a new approach but a shift in analytic focus, we draw on the tools of narrative analysis, critical discourse analysis, and multimodal analysis. This turn toward the “positive” provided us with insight into the discourses processes associated with agency: how Leslie accepts and extends invitations for agency, uses problems to extend learning, uses narratives and counter-narratives and creates multiple storylines for herself and others. We call for further research that considers agency across contexts so that we might be better able to identify agentic stances and deepen such acts.

Dispositional development as a form of continuous professional development: centre-based reflective practices with teachers of (very) young children

The nature of professional development in early childhood education has recently been reconceptualised, with accompanying changes in policy and practice. This paper draws from teacher education literature to define the components of continuing professional development practices in the context of early childhood education practice. By relating these components to one another, the authors describe a central concept for the growth of early childhood educators: dispositional development, the process by which teachers develop professional dispositions that are intertwined with their daily practices. Analysis, reflection and documentation of teacher work within the sociocultural context of children and families they work with shape these dispositions. The paper provides two detailed examples of the dispositional development practices the authors participated in as early childhood faculty within a university-centre partnership in the Midwestern US. The authors envisage that dispositional development responds to the concerns of early childhood teachers and orients them in a professional and conceptual process for growth.

Beyond disbelief: A confession of religion, technology and academic conceit

My professional life has been built on taking a position of apostasy, or the rejection of belief, toward many if not all of the major articles of faith within the fields of literacy studies, teacher education, and instructional technology. I justified my stance and my research practices through my reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the relation between belief and practice, and was successful for many years in getting published in top academic journals. My disbelief was shaken, however, after a trip to a university in Morocco and subsequent efforts to bring students in the US and myself into direct exchange with Arab/Islamic culture. These experiences provide the basis for re-examining the efficacy of apostasy as an epistemological stance, and through the critique of Jacques Rancière speak to the power of intimacy, empathy, and redefined forms of believing and belonging as paths of insight into one’s own and others’ cultures.

Quality Assurance in Online Content Literacy Methods Courses

As institutions offer more online courses in their teacher certification and literacy master's programs, research is needed to address issues of quality assurance in online instruction. This multicase study analyzes qualitatively elements for addressing quality assurance of the implementation of an online content literacy teacher education course offered at two different universities. Students' online discussion board posts responding to course readings, partner feedback on literacy intervention lessons, and course evaluations were examined using Erickson's (1986) multistage inductive analysis. The analysis made visible opportunities for students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate course materials and activities in relation to their discipline. Some students questioned the textual authority of the course readings, materials, and activities as they related to their disciplines. Student critiques of the online format and insights gained from our qualitative analysis are shared.

Extending the Conversation: English Teacher Education as Literacy Teacher Education

In Mayher's keynote address from the 2011 CEE Summer Conference at Fordham University he challenges us to rethink what we do and how we do it.

Teaching Practitioners about Theory and Practice: A Proposal to Recover Aristotle in Teacher Education

Introduction Discussion of theory-practice relationships is important part of teaching and teacher education. It is especially germane in response to the inevitable concerns that practitioners (1) express when they perceive gap between the two and pronounce: That is alright in theory, but irrelevant in This disconnection between many pre-service teachers' and teacher educators' goals for high quality university course experiences stems from incongruence between pre-service teachers' focus on learning the technical skills required to transmit knowledge competently while efficiently managing the behaviors of the students in their charge and teacher educators' focus on teaching theoretical knowledge and critical skills. This disconnection also stems from candidates' genuine concern to satisfy their primary and immediate needs for professional safety, confidence, and competence in conventional contemporary school setting. Technical is therefore initially parallel to survival skill for the candidate with anxieties about the experience of beginning teaching, and presumably it later on evolves into kind of de-professionalized mindless servitude to procedural efficiency for those in-service teachers who unfortunately continue to see their assignment in merely technical terms. (2) As Virginia Richardson (1996) observes, practitioners are more predisposed toward acquiring and practicing procedural, managerial, and social skills that exhibit at least superficial competence (and which they have seen their own teachers demonstrate) than they are with understanding pedagogical and foundational theory. Teacher education literature shows that this theory-practice gap endures in pre-service teachers' mindsets largely due to the intractability of practitioners' beliefs regarding theory, several shortcomings in theory itself and how it is presented to non-theorists, and the ascendancy of technical-rational paradigm. Through no fault of their own, many candidates begin their professional preparation unaware of and ill-prepared to appreciate the proper scope and role of educational theory and its place in teacher training and the profession generally. These misconceptions are accompanied by narrow views about their own role in receiving, responding to, and using educational theory to inform their practice. In the short term these misconceptions constitute barrier to teacher candidates' learning about theories' underlying practices. Because the habit of ignoring the beliefs and values that ground practices develops early on, the longer term effect is limitation of in-service professionals' abilities to respond adequately to new needs of students because they are accustomed to implementing practices without considering the complex moral, social, and intellectual consequences of their pedagogy. While candidates have responsibility to inform themselves about what educational theory is and what it can do, teacher educators who design teacher education programs have the greater obligation to provide opportunities for candidates to perform this task. Given the importance of making theory-practice relationships clear and relevant to pre-service candidates, how should teacher educators and educational theorists respond? Teacher educators require theoretically and model for situating their work. Theoretically helpful here refers to a rigorous and defensible framework, and practically helpful means an approach to theory that understands and appreciates its role in informing In this article, I provide such model for making theory-practice relationships clear and of heuristic value to pre-service teachers and teacher educators. First, I contend that theorists and practitioners need to move beyond the current perceptual deficiencies that maintain the theory-practice gap, and I therefore begin this article by exposing those deficiencies as common theoretical obstructions which occlude candidates' understanding of theory and practice relationships. …

First year pre-service teachers’ views about literacy: Exploring the breadth and depth of their pedagogical needs

This study investigated first year pre-service teachers’ self-reported views about literacy teaching and learning, and their own personal literacy and communication skills required for teaching English. It responds to the increasing pressure on today’s educators to demonstrate their own English proficiency and to be able to ensure children’s effective literacy learning, particularly in learning to read. Sixtyseven pre-service teachers from one large literacy foundation course completed a survey of their views on literacy. The findings showed that in spite of most participants being first year pre-service teachers the majority believed they had sufficient knowledge of the English language to teach literacy. In raising the importance of knowing how to explicitly teach literacy and engage the learner, participants emphasised the importance of lecturers providing ongoing feedback, encouragement and real-life demonstrations of explicit literacy teaching. Compared with those who entered the program with post-school qualifications, a greater proportion of the group that entered directly from school rated themselves as less confident to teach literacy and held less positive perceptions of their communication skills for teaching. Findings also highlighted that pre-service literacy teacher education courses need to identify and incorporate students’ use of English language and literacy skills for specific pedagogical purposes, including teaching talk and multimediated teaching and learning.

From Resistance to Advocacy for Math Literacy: One Teacher's Literacy Identity Transformation

AbstractSecondary preservice teachers often articulate the belief that literacy instruction is irrelevant in their future content‐area classrooms. Resistance is not a new concern in literacy teacher education programs, but the longevity of this belief and the absence of content area literacy instruction in the majority of secondary classrooms are distressing realities. This article documents one math teacher's initial negative beliefs about literacy instruction and his teacher literacy identity transformation to openly embrace and advocate for literacy instruction. In order for beliefs to shift regarding content area literacy instruction in secondary social and cultural contexts, teacher educators must focus on the developing teacher literacy identities of the preservice teachers sitting in their classrooms; that is, their conscious and confident view of self as responsible for and in control of improving the literacy learning of self and the competency to enact engagements to guide the literacy learning of students.

What Matters Most in Distinguished Literacy Teacher Education Programs?

This study is a research collaborative conducted with multiple sites to examine the programmatic features within six literacy teacher education programs that have received the Certificate of Distinction of the International Reading Association (IRA). The objectives were to identify the features that were most highly ranked by internal and external experts and to delineate specific examples of how the features were actualized. A classical Delphi method was applied, and participants included leading literacy faculty members at each of the six institutions, the internal experts ( n = 18), and members of program review teams identified by IRA, the external experts ( n = 3). Analyses of results revealed that 14 programmatic features ranked higher in value than others at a statistically significant level. The study found that the internal and external literacy teacher education experts agreed on the most highly valued programmatic factors. These include the importance of relevant field experiences, the development of teacher candidates’ abilities to teach and assess children through a wide variety of instructional strategies and assessment instruments, and ways to integrate literacy and language strategies throughout the curriculum.

Minding the Gate: Challenges of High-Stakes Assessment and Literacy Teacher Education

As four teacher educators teaching a course associated with state-mandated assessment of literacy subject matter knowledge and instructional practices, we conducted a self-study of our experiences. In this article, we describe how high-stakes assessment further compounds the problematic nature of teaching and learning literacy in coursework. We discuss challenges associated with curriculum, instruction, assessment, and the social milieu of the course, as well as the ways that we have dealt with these challenges. Implications for teacher educators are discussed, as we all must deal with important issues in this era of accountability.

Improving Collaborative Teacher Education Research

Although collaborative teacher education programs have grown in number over the past two decades, we still do not understand the ways in which these programs, or the practices in those programs, improve the preparation of inclusive teachers. At a time when teacher education’s viability is being questioned, it is problematic that little information exists about the validity and impact of collaborative programs. To justify collaborative teacher education programs and improve the science of teacher education more broadly, the authors propose a framework for conducting research on collaborative teacher education—one that can be used to analyze current research and inform future efforts. In this article, the authors build a framework for studying collaborative teacher education, emphasizing linkages among theory, innovation, and outcomes. The authors then analyze the collaborative teacher education literature according to this conceptual framework, drawing conclusions about the current state of collaborative teacher education research and making recommendations for the future.

Qualities of Influential Literacy Teacher Educators

An online survey of award-winning literacy teachers was conducted to determine the most influential qualities of literacy teacher educators in teacher preparation programs. Sixty-two recipients of literacy awards participated in the study, representing teachers of excellence from all U.S. geographic regions. Using a backward mapping process, teachers identified a literacy teacher educator who most influenced their own teaching and responded to the online survey (Qualities of Influential Literacy Teacher Educators) about the named educator. Half of the survey participants were interviewed to provide clarification of survey ratings about the influential educator. Findings derived from three triangulated data sources reveal consensus that mentoring is most influential, followed by qualities related to teaching. Research qualities appear to be least influential in teacher preparation.

The Role of Opportunity to Learn in Teacher Preparation: An International Context

This article examines the teacher preparation program learning opportunities afforded future lower secondary mathematics teachers and future elementary teachers who may teach mathematics. Data from U.S. participation in the recent international Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics are explored against international profiles to address a critical issue oft cited in the teacher education literature: Given the finite time available, what sort of balance is provided for course work across the areas of mathematics content, mathematics pedagogy, and general pedagogy? Results demonstrated major differences for lower secondary preparation programs in both the types of topics or courses covered and the relative emphasis across the three areas in those countries statistically outperforming the United States in comparison to U.S. programs. Similar but less striking differences were noted among elementary programs. These results should provide important empirical evidence relevant to the ongoing policy dialog concerning identifying the specific content of a quality teacher preparation program.