Pedagogy Of Teacher Education Research Articles

‘Weak’ physical education teacher education practice: co-constructing features of meaningful physical education with pre-service teachers

ABSTRACT While the meaningful physical education approach serves as a unifying and focused framework for both physical education teachers and teacher educators, it is focused on teaching physical education and not how teacher educators can teach pre-service teachers (PSTs) how to teach using meaningful physical education. Consequently, Learning about Meaningful Physical Education (LAMPE) has emerged as a comprehensive pedagogical approach designed to support teacher educators in their decision making to educate PSTs about meaningful physical education. However more work is needed to exemplify PETE practices when enacting the LAMPE pedagogical principles and explain their effectiveness in preparing PSTs to learn about meaningful physical education. This research aims to address the knowledge gap in answering: What are the realities of enacting principle four of the LAMPE principles (i.e. Teacher educators should frame learning activities using features of meaningful participation) in PETE? Rather than providing the already agreed critical features of meaningful physical education (i.e. social interaction, challenge, motor competence, fun, and personally relevant learning), and reproducing what is already known, Dylan engaged in a self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP) methodology to inductively co-construct a shared language with his PSTs. Data was collected through different sources: (i) Four community of learners meetings; (ii) 11 reflective journal entries; (iii) Critical friends interrogation on such reflections; and (iv) the teaching artefacts. Through data analysis, three categories were constructed: (1) Inductive disruption encouraging co-construction of meaningful physical education features; (2) Tensions in developing a shared language through identification, exploration, experience, and reflection; (3) An uncomfortable space of ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’. The inductive analysis led us to make connections to Biesta, G.’s [2014. The Beautiful Risk of Education. Paradigm Publishers] notion of ‘weak education’. Informed by this, this research advocates for ‘weak practice’, the development of a pedagogy of teacher education, and a principle zero.

“It makes you nervous when you start talking about racism”: Shining light on teacher educators’ experiences of anti-racist pedagogy in Australian teacher education

ABSTRACT Teacher educators have a significant responsibility in promoting anti-racist pedagogy and guiding preservice teachers to engage in critical self-examination regarding dominant narratives. However, many teacher education programmes fall short of adequately equipping aspiring teachers for diverse classrooms as they often perpetuate a predominantly white system and curricula. Informed by Critical Pedagogy and underpinned by a lens of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, this paper discusses the experiences of teacher educators facilitating anti-racist pedagogy within teacher education programmes at Australian universities. Semi-structured interviews were held with 23 experienced teacher educators employed at universities across Australia. Data reveal teacher educators’ efforts to promote anti-racist pedagogy are fraught with challenges when attempting to break the silence surrounding racism, with support for anti-racist pedagogy inconsistent amongst colleagues and within institutional structures. Teacher educators who actively embrace anti-racist pedagogy require resilience and a strong dedication to ongoing critical reflection. The findings have relevance for teacher education efforts not only in Australia, but also in countries where teacher education programmes continue to be predominantly centred on whiteness.

Rethinking and redrawing teaching and learning: Latinx preservice teachers documenting their pedagogies of the home through comic strips

The purpose of this study is to understand how Latinx preservice teachers (LPSTs) engage their multimodal and multilingual literacies to create comic strips about the knowledge and pedagogies found within their homes located within with U.S.‐Mexico borderlands. Drawing on pedagogies of the home and Chicanx/Latinx multimodality, the findings illustrate how the LPSTs used comic creation to document teaching and learning practices of biculturalism, cultural preservation, spirituality, remedios, and the importance of education. This study has implications for developing teacher education pedagogies that are reflective of the linguistic and cultural diversity of LPSTs.

Exploring teacher educator pedagogical decision-making about a combined pedagogy of social justice and meaningful physical education

Teacher educators shape curriculum in the pedagogical decisions they make ( Lunenberg et al., 2007 ). Yet, evidence is lacking about how physical education (PE) teacher educators make decisions about what to include in their teacher education pedagogies. Four teacher educators in four different PE teacher education (PETE) programmes collaborated to examine their decision-making as they explored ideas related to Meaningful PE and social justice pedagogies. Insight into how teacher educators make decisions can add nuance to understanding pedagogical decision-making in PETE. A self-study of teacher education practices frame supported collective and individual interrogation of our decision-making processes. Data included planning documentation for each teaching episode ( n = 42), individual reflections ( n = 33), recordings of conversations with critical friends ( n = 15), and recordings of collective meetings ( n = 8). Pedagogical confrontations ( Moran et al., 2019 ) provided a lens for each teacher educator to gain perspective and insight into their decision-making related to Meaningful PE and social justice pedagogies The findings are presented in the form of four individual cases that illustrate the distinct story of each teacher educator’s engagement with Meaningful PE and social justice pedagogies. Teacher educators’ decisions were guided by their purposes and influenced by their contexts. Additionally, peers were an important source of pedagogical confrontations to influence decision-making practices. This research contributes to the understanding of innovation in PETE by illustrating how clarity about priorities promotes deliberate decision-making by teacher educators resulting in adoption or rejection of innovation.

Transforming Rural Teaching

This qualitative study examines preparation of pre-service teachers for altering rural teaching through transformative curriculum and pedagogy. The study gathered the perspectives of 45 participants belonging to two universities in Tanzania, namely University of Dar es Salaam (Dar es Salaam University College of Education) and Sokoine University of Agriculture School of Education. The findings indicate that geographically isolated rural schools are associated with deficits resulting in poor quality of teaching and learning. Further, the findings establish that teacher educators and pre-service teachers are not open to transforming rural teaching. This has implications for the effectiveness of university teacher education provided. To develop pre-service teachers’ openness to transforming rural teaching, there is a need for transformative curriculum and pedagogy in teacher education. A transformative curriculum should include diverse knowledge of teaching contexts and be implemented through critical dialogue and reflective pedagogy.

Could a playful approach to teaching be a path to resonant connections? Experiences from teacher education in Denmark

Creative and playful approaches to teaching in teacher education emerge these years. Due to the increasing focus on performance, pace, visible goals, and efficiency in the educational systems within the Western societies, there seem to be a search for new answers when organising teaching within teacher education—also for the future. Based on empirical material created in a large research project in teacher education in Denmark, this paper analyses how playful approaches can contribute to improving conditions for a holistic approach to education, and how these approaches must be linked to concrete pedagogical actions. By applying a theoretical framework of playful approaches to learning in teacher education based on Rosa, Lennon and Skovbjerg, the main contribution of the paper is to point to both pedagogical directions and clarifications when working with playful approaches in teacher education.

Is meaningful physical education and social justice a complimentary combination? A physical education teacher educator collaborative self-study

ABSTRACT Background Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) programmes are expected to support future teacher learning about contemporary innovations and big ideas for teaching physical education. Teacher educators are challenged to learn about and incorporate contemporary innovations while maintaining programme cohesion. Exploring how teacher educators make sense of and teach about innovations, such as ideas related to meaningfulness, alongside foundational ideas, such as social justice, can provide insight on teacher educator pedagogies and their professional development journeys. Purpose This study explored the concepts of and relationship between Meaningful PE and social justice in our teacher education pedagogies when implemented in combination. We pay particular attention to when ideas of Meaningful PE and social justice were complementary, overlapping and when they were distinctive. Method A self-study of teacher education practices methodology supported four teacher educators to collectively and individually interrogate our evolving understanding, decisions and practices across a 13-month period. [Loughran, J. 2014. “Professionally Developing as a Teacher Educator.” Journal of Teacher Education 65 (4): 271–283] signposts for teacher educator professional development provided theoretical guidance to make sense of our experiences combining the two pedagogies. This paper focuses on the recordings of collective meetings (n = 9, over 12 h) where we shared and analysed experiences, raised questions and formulated developing understandings of the relationship between teaching for meaningfulness and social justice approaches. Data analysis involved thematic analysis methods to review all data and collective identification and refinement of themes through back-and-forth discussion. Findings From the thematic analysis, the following themes were co-created: (a) Meaningful PE can act as social justice but is not social justice per se; and (b) the combination of Meaningful PE and social justice facilitates a dance between ‘the individual’ and ‘the social’ with democratic and reflective practices as the choreography. These features of the relationship provide direction and encouragement to combining Meaningful PE and social justice ideas in teacher education pedagogies. Conclusions Through cycles of experiencing and articulating, we made sense of the relationship between Meaningful PE and social justice. Our story highlights the value of teacher educators engaging with knowledge and practice of teaching about teaching and learning about teaching in the context of innovation.

Conceptualisations of multilingualism in early childhood teacher education: Ideological and implementational spaces in policy texts

This paper explores how multilingualism is conceptualised in teacher education policy texts and discuss the ideological and implementational spaces for multilingual pedagogy in teacher education. The main focus is Norwegian early childhood teacher education curricula, and the qualitative oriented content analysis of teacher education curricula documents follows three steps. The first step provides an overview of how the content in Norwegian early childhood teacher education is regulated compared to Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. The second step takes a historical perspective, examining how the conceptualisations of multilingualism in Norwegian ECTE have changed from 1971–2018. The third step involves a close reading of local course plans from 12 different Norwegian higher education institutions. Findings show how curriculum content in Norwegian early childhood teacher education related to multilingualism is far more regulated than in the other Nordic countries. The historical analysis reveals how the ideological and implementational spaces have changed over the years by defining multilingualism differently, and how the current national guidelines open the ideological and implementation spaces for multilingualism. Furthermore, the analysis of the 12 local teacher education programs illustrates how these open spaces are implemented in different ways, either in narrowing further the spaces or broadening the spaces. The discussion revolves around how these spaces require different kinds of competencies for both practitioners and teacher educators.

Leveraging Indian Knowledge Systems for Holistic Development of Prospective Teachers

The holistic development of prospective teachers is crucial for fostering effective and efficient educators who can nurture the all-round development of their students and contribute to a thriving society. Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), with their rich insights into human development, offer a valuable framework for enhancing teacher education curriculum and pedagogy. By integrating the principles and practices of Indian Knowledge Systems into teacher education programs, we will empower prospective teachers to become holistic educators who embody the values of knowledge, compassion, and well-being. This paper delves into the significance of leveraging IKS for the holistic development of prospective teachers. It explores the multifaceted nature of IKS, highlighting its potential to enrich teacher education curriculum and pedagogy. Additionally, it outlines practical strategies for incorporating IKS into teacher education programs, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, experiential learning, and community engagement. Finally, it underscores the need for promoting IKS research in teacher education to further advance the integration of IKS principles and practices in this field.

Transformation or Indoctrination through Critical Pedagogy: Strategic Planning, Digital Literacy, and Technology Infusion in K-12

The impact of critical theory on students has sparked false accusations, leading to book banning and restrictive policies in the classroom. While some argue that teachers are being radicalized, scholars advocate for integrating critical pedagogy in teacher education to address the influences of media messages on students’ thinking. Critical literacy involves recognizing and challenging societal power structures in media. To support diverse student perspectives, educators must understand social and cultural forces. Digital literacy is crucial for critically evaluating digital content and ensures safety and privacy. The graduate programs emphasize the application of critical pedagogy for infusing technology in schooling to prepare culturally diverse students. The importance of critical media education is emphasized by the essential task of fostering intelligent, critical thinkers among students as they interact with media.

My living-educational-theory of place-based learning as a means to move towards a more socially just pedagogy in teacher education

I researched my practice as a lecturer in a teacher education college in Zimbabwe as I was concerned that my teaching was not assisting students to realise their potential for independent thinking and knowledge creation and preparing them with appropriate skills and knowledge for life and work in the 21stcentury. I believe both aspects of education are essential in teacher preparation. There are injustices in the way the curriculum is enacted. I therefore focussed this research on improving learning to integrate social justice values into my practice and how to liberate my students and myself from traditional didactic pedagogy. I opted for Place-Based Learning as a teaching strategy since it has been shown to promote student engagement, critical thinking, innovation and reflexivity by embedding the learning in the social reality of the students. I collected and analysed data in the form of interviews, reflective diaries, and student assignments to enhance my learning to improve my practice and as evidence to support my knowledge claims that I had enabled students to become producers rather than just consumers of knowledge; fostered inclusion; and enabled transformative learning, all of which heightened student awareness of the need to make their future teaching more socially relevant and just. I conclude by proposing guidelines for professional practitioners in any educational context using Place-Based Learning to facilitate learning intended to promote students’ inclusion, democratic knowledge generation, and active participation.

Sociocultural ways of conceptualizing professional vision to support and study novice science teachers’ learning

ABSTRACT Professional Vision (PV) has been used in teacher education to interpret novice teachers’ learning in various educational contexts. To date, research has conceptualized this framework largely from a cognitive perspective of learning, overlooking the affordances of taking a sociocultural perspective. This theoretical paper aims to articulate the affordances of conceptualizing novice science teachers’ PV from a sociocultural perspective of learning, specifically drawing from its foundation (Goodwin, 1994). Four central affordances are considered: (a) teacher education pedagogies as supports for novices to develop their PV, (b) discourses as sources of evidence, (c) discursive practices as analytical lenses to study novices’ PV development, and (d) material representations as both learning and research objects. We ground our articulation of these affordances in examples of our work with novice science teachers when learning to plan modelling-based investigations (MBIs). We provide new insights into the design and study of learning environments that effectively sustain novice science teachers’ professional learning through practice.

Nearby Nature: An Interdisciplinary Science, Literacy, and Technology Project Situated within a Traditional Teacher Preparation Program

ABSTRACT Pre-service teachers often learn to teach in siloed methods courses despite evidence that interdisciplinary pedagogies benefit elementary school students. To address this discrepancy, six teacher educators initiated a two-year self-study to improve their practice. They co-created a shared module to integrate technology, literacy, and science content. The self-study was designed to answer the research question: what are the successes and challenges of implementing an interdisciplinary module within an elementary teacher education program? Findings relate to three main categories: teacher education pedagogies, use of technology tools, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Areas of promise for future integration are discussed.

Affective pedagogy in pre-service teacher education: a twofold approach combining explicit and vicarious learning

What happens when affection and the awareness of affectivity, in the sense of ‘love’ or ‘tenderness’, become the objects of training and evaluation in pre-service teacher education? Our theoretical framework describes the link between positive emotional arousal and learning, the role played by the emotional dimension in the construction of a professional teaching identity, and the relevance of a teacher’s historical-emotional background for the cognitive construction of heuristics. We developed a teaching program designed to energize the experience of pre-service teachers in the university classroom. Through positive emotional arousal, we aimed to provoke a series of creative reflection processes regarding the teaching profession. Our research goal was to describe and interpret the program’s potential effects on the learning process and the construction of these pre-service teachers’ professional identity. The method applied in this paper was action-research carried out during three academic years of fieldwork with a total of 365 students. We coded the students’ narratives regarding their learning process and teaching identity into several conceptual nodes representing their insights and feelings concerning those topics. Our results and discussion highlight the importance of affective teacher education as a means of enhancing pre-service teachers’ learning, contributing toward the growth of their professional identity, and cultivating a culture of care and love in the classroom. Keywords: pre-service teacher training, teacher-student interaction, emotions, cultural models, action-research

Engaged pedagogy in teacher education: A literature review

The structures of North American school systems are often based in what bell hooks called rote, assembly-line teaching that includes top-down instructional practices. As a result, teacher educators often serve in an authoritarian role, making the decisions about what knowledge is important and how it should be learned. By comparison, engaged pedagogy promotes collaboration, whereby teachers and students transgress educational norms and become active participants in learning. The purpose of this review of literature is to understand how researchers in the field of education use engaged pedagogy in their teaching practice. It highlights three themes found throughout the literature: (re)designing courses, critical reflection, and sharing stories. Following each theme, a critical discussion contextualized within related research in music education provides practical implications for how music teacher educators can use engaged pedagogy in the classroom. Finally, the potential for issues of using engaged pedagogy in preservice music teacher education are illuminated for the reader, along with recommendations for future research in music education.

Practice-based coaching for project-based teaching: Understanding relationships between coaching practice and teaching practice

Only a limited amount of scholarship on practice-based teacher education has investigated the relationship between practice-based pedagogies of teacher education and teachers' subsequent classroom practice. This mixed methods study addresses this gap by investigating relationships between how coaches represent, decompose, and approximate practice and how teachers go on to enact those practices in K-12 classrooms. Quantitative findings illustrate that longer episodes of decomposition in teacher coaching sessions are predictive of teachers’ subsequent growth in observation protocol scores. Qualitative analyses reveal that longer episodes of decomposition typically involve opportunities for teacher learners to play a role in the decomposition process. These findings have significant implications for instructional coaches and teacher educators, those designing instructional coach and teacher educator learning opportunities, and future research into the practices of instructional coaches and teacher educators.

Teacher educators’ views vis-à-vis their practices on facilitating learning to teach

To delineate a clear process for learning to teach and set a standard for effective teaching, detecting the link between teacher educators’ views and their practices on facilitating learning to teach becomes imperative. This study examined this link by employing a qualàquan (exploratory sequential) mixed-methods design. By the instruments of questionnaires (234) and unstructured interviews (five), a total of 239 teacher educators teaching in three colleges participated in the study. Data were analyzed using thematic approaches, descriptive, and inferential techniques. The results revealed that in addition to the teacher educators’ comparable views on learner-centered and teacher-led approaches, they heavily utilized the conventional teacher-led techniques. Furthermore, the significant and positive correlation between the teacher educators’ views and practices were also found. Supplemental recommendations that were meant to aid in the execution of better teacher education pedagogy were made based on the views held and the practices of learning to teach that prevailed.

Using a blended distance pedagogy in teacher education to address challenges in teacher recruitment

ABSTRACT Recruiting high-quality teachers is critical in supporting the delivery of an effective education experience for learners in schools. This paper examines how a new flexible two-year postgraduate teaching qualification is contributing to addressing the challenges of teacher recruitment in Wales. There is a shortage of teachers able to teach mathematics and science. It is also challenging to recruit Welsh-medium teachers, teachers from minority ethnic backgrounds and to fill vacancies in rural schools. To widen access to teacher education and diversify the teaching workforce, individuals with an appropriate undergraduate degree are offered the opportunity to train to teach via a flexible blended distance learning route, which is either part time or salaried. Early indications show that the flexibility of the programme has attracted career changers, who bring important transferable skills to their teaching practice. Although this is a relatively small-scale case study, it is apparent that offering a more flexible opportunity to those wishing to train to teach is of benefit to individuals, schools and the wider education system.

The Intersection of Equity Pedagogy and Technology Integration in Preservice Teacher Education: A Scoping Review

Teacher education programs play a crucial role in developing teachers’ equity/social justice mindsets and technology integration knowledge and expertise. Scholars have advocated for merging these two areas to support common curricular goals and access unique learning benefits. However, little is known about how equity pedagogy and technology integration intersect in preservice teacher (PST) education. This scoping review aims to expand knowledge and understanding at this intersection with the goal of developing a foundation for future research and practice. Findings revealed that relevant studies focused on two main styles of pedagogy: (a) leveraging technology to teach about equity and social justice (i.e., tech-infused equity pedagogy), and (b) adopting a critical stance toward technology’s roles in schools and society (i.e., digital equity pedagogy). We provide a detailed description of these pedagogies and present useful systems of classification for related studies. We also present key implications of this work for PST education practice, policy, and scholarship.

The pedagogy of teacher education in Ethiopia: Reconstructing understandings and practices on teaching about teaching and learning to teach

There is an argument that Marshal McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ adage is more likely to be underpinned in the context of teacher education since pedagogy is not only a means of delivering content in teacher education but also the content (what) in teachers’ professional preparation (Grossman, 2009). The quality of teacher education depends heavily on the practice of teacher educators and the learning experiences of student teachers: Pedagogy of teacher education. The pedagogy of teacher education is conceptualized as teaching about teaching and learning to teach. Using primary data from teacher educators and student teachers and secondary data sources (documents and research studies), the paper examined and reflected on Ethiopian teacher education pedagogy. Questionnaire, interview and observation were used to collect primary data. The findings revealed ingrained assumptions that student teachers learn to teach by learning theories and facts of different courses through lectures, discussions, and group work. Teacher educators in the study characterized their typical classroom as a combination of ‘reviewing of the previous lesson, explanation, discussion, and lesson summary’ which inherently reflects features of a typical classroom in Ethiopian schools. When asked which pedagogies help student teachers to learn to teach, teacher educators mentioned group work, discussion, lecturing, oral questioning and classwork, quiz, and practicum (ordered in terms of frequencies). It is argued that teaching about teaching and learning to teach are customarily reduced to the delivery and learning of course contents rather than the ‘how’ of teaching through teacher educators’ modeling and reflection, student teachers’ school experiences, or other pedagogies that develop learning to teach among student teachers. Teacher educators’ practices, however, in some cases demonstrated elements of active learning techniques aimed at improving mastery of content and practicing teaching skills. However, their interview responses on preparing teachers largely lack pedagogies relevant to learning to teach. Efforts to improve the quality of education in general and teacher education, in particular, should prioritize the critical examination and reform of teacher educators’ preparation, professional development of teacher educators, and pedagogical practices at teacher education colleges and universities.