Pre-service Teacher Education Curriculum Research Articles

Perceptions of teacher candidates concerning ethically suitable behaviours for teaching profession

Identifying the perceptions of teacher candidates regarding effective teacher charactheristics and teaching is necessary for knowing their program experiences to consider the appropriateness of those perceptions in terms of professional purposes and practices. Moreover, professional ethics determined for teaching profession enable teachers to make decisions easily at any difficult situations in education. Purpose of this study is to describe perceptions of teacher candidates working for secondary schools concerning ethically suitable behaviors for teaching profession. Participants of this study includes graduates of Mathematics, Nursing, Sociology, Turkish Language Literature Departments. Of those participants (n=163), 42 are graduates of Mathematics, 35 are Nursing, 45 are Sociology, 41 are Turkish Language Literature Departments and completed preservice teacher education curriculum (pedagogical education program) at Education Faculty of Kirikkale University in 2014–2015 academic calender. According to the results of this study most of the participants are aware of ethically suitable behaviors for teaching profession.

A partnership aimed at improving Health and Physical Education at a rural school: Impacts on pupils, university students, teachers and academics.

Challenges and benefits arose when a rural school and a neighbouring university formed a partnership with the aim of improving the school’s Health and Physical Education (HPE) program. The HPE programs were enhanced through two joint research projects. The first research project had two facets, including an evidence-based curriculum for Physical Education in the school, and a remediation program for children identified through the coordination testing process. The second research project was designed to investigate students’ Health Education knowledge and explore any behavioural changes in and around nutritional choices. Both the projects were conducted as mutually productive partnerships within the school, resulting in beneficial changes for the school, the university and for the multiple participants. For the school, the Physical Education curriculum and pedagogies were modified and for students identified as requiring remediation, a multi-partnered intervention program was implemented. Students, teachers, parents and pre-service teacher education students benefited from the movement intervention program. The health education curriculum was enhanced when the school developed a social marketing approach to facilitate health-related decisions for pupils, teachers and ancillary staff. The university changed their pre-service teacher education curriculum, teaching methods, and achieved stronger research based outcomes by partnering with the school across both projects.

Pre-service Teachers’ Perception of using Mobile Devices in Teaching Climate Change in Primary Schools

The realitiesof climate change are gradually dawning on everyone including children. The need for a disaster reduction education requires the use of mobile technologies to identify some of the impact of climate change within an environment and create awareness on the dangers associated with climate change. Since the pre-service teachers will teach the primary school pupils, it is aptthat the use of mobile technologies should constitute part of their preparation while in training. This paper examined pre-service teachers’ perception of using mobile technologies in teaching climate change in the primary school. One hundred and fifty (150) pre-service teachers in two Colleges of Education in the erosion disaster zones of Anambra and Imo States in the south eastern state of Nigeria were used for the study. Three research questions guided the study. The study utilized a survey approach to collect and analyze the data. The results from the study show that the pre-service teachers were confident that the use of mobile devices will createsignificant climate change awareness.However, the pre-service teachers saw the need for using mobile devices fin their preparation.Suggestions were made towards ensuring the integration of mobile technology literacy in the pre-service teacher education curriculum.

The Introduction of Cultural Education in Initial and Continuous Teacher Training Programmes in Romania. Operational Perspectives

The current article deals with the issue of intercultural education and teacher training programmes in Romania, which need to include intercultural elements into primary and secondary education. An incursion into the definitions and concepts of culture and interculturality is made to get a better insight into the background of intercultural education. The philosophy of designing teacher education programmes according to the principles and fundamentals of intercultural education is outlined. A possible syllabus contents, as well as training activities are suggested. In conclusion, there is a real need to introduce intercultural education courses within the pre-service and in-service teacher education curriculum.

Everyday life and everyday learning: the ways in which pre-service teacher education curriculum can encourage personal dimensions of teacher identity

This article presents and discusses the findings of a research project, the main objective of which is to identify curriculum components that promote personal development as a nuclear part of teacher professional identity formation through pre-service teacher education. Curriculum is viewed as an ecological scenario with different subsystems and both as formal and informal. Identity formation is conceived as an ever-provisional result of a double transaction: the biographical one and the relational one. The curricula of four different historical periods of pre-service teacher education in Portugal and the professional identity of teachers trained within them were characterised through collection and analysis of documents and biographical narratives. Crossing results from the four periods, the quality of school climate emerges as an important variable to the quality of the teachers’ identity. The lifelong learning ethos seems to emerge when the training curriculum connects everyday learning with everyday life, namely by urging the students’ involvement in school life, peer learning activities and peer and teacher educators’ informal learning activities.

Assessing primary school student-teachers’ pedagogic implementations in child sexual abuse protection education

Teacher-educators need ways of assessing the adequacy of university curriculum and the extent to which student-teachers meet learning objectives. One potentially useful tool is Anderson and Krathwohl’s (Addison Wesley Longman, New York, 2001) theoretical framework, which can be applied to assess student-teachers’ knowledge types and their cognitive processes in critical pre-service curriculum areas such as child sexual abuse and personal safety. This study aims to illustrate the use of Anderson and Krathwohl’s framework in assessing student-teachers’ learning of pedagogies in relation to child sexual abuse and personal safety. Participants were a final year cohort of 122 Bachelor of Education (Primary School) students at an Australian university. Student-teachers’ essays regarding the pedagogical practices that they would implement in teaching about child sexual abuse and personal safety were content analysed using Anderson and Krathwohl’s framework. Pedagogies identified by the student-teachers were unevenly distributed across the cells within the theoretical framework. Well-represented pedagogies tended to reflect mid-level cognitive processes (those of understand, apply, and analyse), and low to mid-level knowledge types (those of factual, conceptual, and procedural). Under-represented were pedagogies reflecting higher-level cognition such as creating (in all four knowledge types) and evaluation (of factual and conceptual knowledge). The findings provide a basis for assessing the adequacy of current university teacher-education curriculum structures. Student-teachers’ understandings of under-used theoretical and pedagogical strategies can be identified as a guide to enhance their cognitive processes and knowledge dimensions. This study illustrates a method that has applicability as a diagnostic and assessment tool across a wide range of pre-service teacher education curriculum areas.

Becoming Teachers: The Payne Effect

In this qualitative study, the authors explore the connections between a preservice teacher education curriculum and the development of teacher identity. Focus is given to the impact Ruby Payne's (2001) A Framework for Understanding Poverty has on the ideological development of preservice special education teachers embarking on an urban practicum. Implications for teacher education are discussed.

Pre-service teachers’ perceptions about e-democracy: A case in Turkey

This study investigated the perceptions of pre-service teachers concerning e-democracy. These perceptions were studied across individual variables such as: Internet use skills, frequency of Internet use, voting, and civic group membership. A total of 701 randomly selected pre-service teachers from a major research university in Turkey participated in the study completing a fourteen item questionnaire. The overall distribution of the data was examined through the descriptive statistics while the Mann–Whitney U, Kruskall–Wallis H, and Jonckheere–Terpstra tests were employed to determine the differences and trends. The results showed that most of the pre-service teachers believed in e-democracy, while they rarely participated in e-politics. Findings also indicated that Internet use skills, frequency of Internet use, voting, and civic group membership had significant effects on specific components of e-democracy. The impacts of the results were discussed in terms of teacher education. The results highlight the need for integration of e-democracy components into the pre-service teacher education curriculum.

Learner Diversity and Inclusive Education: A New Paradigm for Teacher Education in Malaysia

The separate teacher education programs for regular and special education do not equip teachers with an integrated knowledge of the expected roles, functions and responsibilities to meet the diversity of learning needs in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to argue for a new paradigm for the preparation of teachers particularly in the Malaysian context. The discussion will focus on the need for teacher educators of regular and special education at all levels of teacher education to develop a “whole-faculty approach” in facilitating an inclusive pre-service teacher education curriculum embedded across all discipline areas.

Inquiry on Inquiry: Practitioner Research and Student Learning

In many teacher education programs, some form of inquiry or practitioner research is now included in the preservice teacher education curriculum. The intention is to help teacher candidates become professionals who are lifelong learners who raise questions and research their practice across the professional career. At the same time, teacher education evaluation has shifted from primary emphasis on resources and curriculum to an emphasis on K-12 student learning outcomes. This article speaks to the outcomes focus of teacher education policy and practice and to the agenda to prepare professional teachers who know how to learn from and about teaching in an ongoing way. The article describes an inquiry project carried out by a group of teacher education practitioner-researchers to examine how and what teacher candidates learned when they were required to conduct classroom inquiry focused on student learning outcomes. The purpose of the study was to explore the processes and results of this new focus and to determine whether the strengths of a long-standing emphasis on inquiry as a way of knowing about teaching could be retained when the emphasis was shifted from teacher candidates' learning to that of their students. Based on in-depth content analysis of purposively selected inquiries, the article demonstrates that the quality of candidates' inquiries generally depended on the questions posed, the ways that candidates conceptualized and assessed learning, and the candidates' understanding of the recursive nature of the inquiry process. The article also identifies a number of problems that were created with the new emphasis.

Traditional versus Integrated Preservice Teacher Education Curriculum

This empirical study is intended to assess whether a standards-based integrated teacher preparation curriculum is more beneficial in developing professional competencies than a traditional course-oriented curriculum at a college of education in a state university. Using multivariate analysis of variance, we found that students who went through the new integrated curriculum reported higher levels of professional preparation in all 13 standards and competency areas than those who went through the traditional course-oriented curriculum. This finding remained strong even when the teaching majors were included and controlled as another factor variable. Students in the integrated curriculum and those in the traditional curriculum had comparable characteristics, high school grade point averages (GPAs), and college GPAs. Additional related findings and suggestions for future studies also emerged.

Preparing Teachers for Inclusive Classrooms

Designing preservice teacher education partially around voluntary study groups offers teacher educators a unique chance to examine group members’ perspectives and understandings. This article examines the topics of concern and questions expressed by six general education student teachers in a collaborative dialogue group focused on inclusive classrooms. Culled from seven meeting transcripts over the course of one semester, we extracted the themes of inexperience, equity, levels, normalcy, labels, and belonging as presented by these teachers in their individual inquiries into inclusive education. We consider how useful the themes, tensions, and issues unearthed in this research are for constructing a preservice teacher education curriculum for inclusive teacher preparation.

Intercollegiate collaboration: Reggio Emilia evokes conversations across disciplines

The purpose of this manuscript is to report both the process and outcomes of intercollegiate collaboration among university teacher educators. Having studied in Reggio Emilia, Italy, three new partners from biology, early childhood education, and art came together for the purpose of designing a more integrated preservice teacher education curriculum.

Barriers to Adopting Emerging Technologies in Education

The purpose of this article is to examine barriers to technology adoption based on the literature and on data from two studies (the first with K-12 teachers and the second with higher education faculty in a state system). A product of this examination is a visual representation, a model of the interactions and the interdependence of elements that contribute to the construction of barriers to technology adoption. It is intended that the model will clarify internal and external obstacles, and serve as an aid to pre-service and in-service teacher education curriculum designers and developers as they plan for the successful infusion of newer technologies in the curriculum.