Pedagogy Of Teacher Education Research Articles

Confessions of a teacher with two left feet: using self-study to examine the challenges of teaching dance in PETE

This self-study provides insights into my experiences as a learner and teacher of dance education. The purpose of the research is to consider ways physical education (PE) teacher educators can reconsider and recontextualise their students' perspectives about learning PE subject content through the lens of dance education. Data consisted of multiple qualitative sources such as reflective teacher journals, lesson plans and yearly block plans, and student feedback. The main finding revealed that understanding one's teacher socialisation can be used to inform pedagogies of teacher education (e.g. articulating the how and why of teaching practice, making implicit knowledge of teaching explicit, prioritising community building and inclusion). As well, this research revealed the possibility that some students' perceptions and perspectives around offering dance as part of a comprehensive curriculum can be positively influenced during a relatively short 13-week course, despite negative socialising experiences with dance.

ARTICLE WITHDRAWN: Teacher Educators as Cultural Workers: Problematizing Teacher Education Pedagogies

"ARTICLE WITHDRAWN: Teacher Educators as Cultural Workers: Problematizing Teacher Education Pedagogies." Studying Teacher Education, 11(3), pp. 272–293

Teacher education in further education 2000–2010: Subversion, avoidance and compliance

This article explores the impact of key teacher education policies created between 2000 and 2010 on further education teacher educators. Data was collected from a group of experienced teacher educators in the Midlands through a series of semi-structured interviews. This article argues that the reforms were driven by too great a concern for political ideology and established overly restrictive control mechanisms to ensure compliance. Although the need for standardisation was acknowledged, the use of competency-based standards was seen as detrimental to meaningful teacher education pedagogy. It was perceived that the policies were being implemented in a managerial manner that strove for compliance. However, where compliance was at odds with their own personal and democratic professional stance, the teacher educators used a range of strategies to subvert or avoid implementing policy in order to try to stay true to their philosophical values. Nevertheless, positive aspects did emanate from the teacher education reforms, which included a drive for professional status and a recognised level 5 qualification. These positive features now appear to have been abandoned following the Lingfield Report and a different ideological thrust to deregulate the sector.

Teacher education pedagogy: disrupting the apprenticeship of observation

Teacher educators are challenged to enact a pedagogy that helps facilitate conceptual transitions in preservice teachers away from the naïve notions formed during their long apprenticeships of observation. This study examines one ‘educative experience purposefully embedded in meaningful pedagogical experiences’ using the three-level model of teacher learning. Findings indicate preservice teachers derived a range of learning from the educative experience, and most were found to be surfacing, confronting, and beginning to replace naïve notions of teaching, learning, and assessment. Findings also suggest several characteristics of teacher education pedagogy that disrupt the apprenticeship of observation, including the presentation of dramatically new ideas to elicit the awareness of unexamined assumptions about teaching and learning; the usefulness of affect in awakening that awareness; and opportunities to develop metacognition and process reactions through writing that surfaces prior ideas and articulates new understandings.

Preparing Novice Teacher Educators in the Pedagogy of Teacher Education

In this article, the author provides a conceptual framework to guide the design of coursework to prepare teacher educators. Given the absence of a stronger research base to inform the preparation of novice teacher educators, the author argues that theoretical perspectives focused on K-12 preservice teacher learning can be a useful heuristic for decision making in a course for novice teacher educators. To illustrate the application of this framework, the author provides examples from a course on the pedagogy of teacher education oriented toward critical, social justice–oriented pedagogies that the author created and taught to a group of doctoral students who were learning to become teacher educators. By illustrating how the preservice teacher learning framework she proposes guided her own course decision making, the author aims to provide others with a guiding framework for facilitating the learning of novice teacher educators.

“I was made to feel very discriminated against as an anglo-saxon”

Purpose – Critical discussion of the social conditions that shape educational thinking and practice is now embedded in accredited teacher education programmes. Beneath beliefs that critique of educational inequality is desirable, however, lie more problematic questions around critical pedagogies, ethics and power. Emotional investments can work to protect habituated ways of thinking, despite attempts to move students beyond their comfort zone. This strategic process can shift attitudes and promote intellectual and emotional growth, but can also produce defensive reactions. This paper, a self-study in relation to an incident in a tertiary education programme, examines how student feedback on content and pedagogy positions teachers and learners. The purpose of this paper is to frame and reframe ways in which learner feedback to critical approaches might be read. The argument examines, through dialogue, the potential of disruptive teaching approaches for recontextualising both learner and teacher response. Such exploration articulates particular tensions and challenges inherent in critical teacher education pedagogies. Design/methodology/approach – This is a reflective practitioner piece – involving journaling and the use of dialogue – to explore a critical incident. Findings – This is an exploratory piece – the authors explore the workings of tension in critical/poststructural pedagogical work. Originality/value – The deployment of dialogue as a method and as a way of presenting key issues is somewhat novel. The paper works through quite complex terrain in an accessible and reasonably clear fashion.

Adapting ‘lesson study’ to investigate classroom pedagogy in initial teacher education: what student-teachers think

This paper reports findings from a project that explored the use of a modified form of ‘lesson study’ in a one-year programme of secondary school initial teacher education (ITE). Twelve mentors and student-teachers worked in pairs to design and teach two ‘research lessons’ in the course of two eight-week teaching practice placements as part of a university–school partnership for the preparation of new teachers. Participating student-teachers reported that engagement in this form of lesson study with a mentor was an effective way to help them grow individual teaching skills, knowledge and confidence in teaching placements. In addition, in most cases, it enabled active and creative participation in a community of teacher learners. However, engagement in lesson study not only supported student-teachers to meet ‘qualifying to teach’ standards, but also offered opportunities for holistic study of teaching and learning, leading to growth in what we characterise as ‘pedagogic literacy’.

Developing pedagogical judgment in novice teachers: mediated field experience as a pedagogy for teacher education

A common critique of teacher education centres on the gap between coursework and schools, with ample evidence that novice teachers seldom bring ambitious forms of instruction into classroom placements. We describe a 6-year design experiment conducted in a university teacher education program secondary mathematics methods course focused squarely on this issue. Using the framework of hybridity, or the merging of two contexts to make a third that has elements of the originals, we developed a pedagogy we call the mediated field experience (MFE). We present our design framework and describe the MFE cycle, where novices learned a concept in course activities, followed by guided classroom observations and facilitated debriefs with partner teachers. We highlight how this pedagogy facilitated connections across coursework and classrooms through narrative cases of novices’ learning. We argue that their learning provided the basis for a complex form of teacher thinking, pedagogical judgment. This article offers a proof-of-concept argument that teacher education can support novices’ learning in the service of ambitious practice.

A Content Area Reading Course Re-Imagined: A Situated Case Study of Disciplinary Literacies Pedagogy in Secondary English Teacher Education

This study investigates the experiences of one secondary preservice English teacher facilitating an out-of-school e-book club with urban youth while enrolled in a required course entitled Content Area Reading. Data were generated through field notes, interviews, course assignments, and book club artifacts and narratively analyzed using holistic thematic inductive and deductive coding schemes. Findings show how the participant recruits his experiences and identities as a reader, a former grant writer, and an aspiring English teacher to develop a disciplinary literacies pedagogy informed by his knowledge of disciplinary Discourses and youths’ lives. These findings have implications for how teacher educators prepare secondary English teachers to craft relevant and engaging content literacy instruction.

Roadblocks to Integrating Technology and Reading Pedagogy in Teacher Education

Journal of Anthropology and Archaeology is a peer-reviewed international journal, which publishes original papers promoting theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in the discipline of socio-cultural anthropology.

Getting Ready for the Profession: Prospective Teachers’ Noticing Related to Teacher Actions

The aim of this study was to investigate what the prospective elementary mathematics teachers noticed and how their noticing changed in an environment in which they discuss on video cases. To achieve this aim, we asked senior elementary mathematics prospective teachers to watch and discuss videos depicting real elementary mathematics classrooms. In this qualitative study, the main data sources were the participants' reflection papers and interviews with the focus participants. The online discussions among the focus participants were also analyzed. For the analysis, the Learning to Notice framework (van Es and Sherin, 2002) was used. The findings suggested that prospective teachers noticed several issues related to teacher actions that reflect specific domains of teacher knowledge, and their noticing increased over time. In conclusion, it is suggested that the use of case-based pedagogy in teacher education is an effective way to help future teachers get ready for the profession.

Play in Pre-Service Teacher Education

This paper reports on a research study undertaken with a small group of pre-service teachers enrolled in a one year postgraduate diploma in primary (P-7) education. The project’s aim was to provide a practical framework to investigate the extent to which the use of a play-based pedagogy in pre-service teacher education aids the students. The paper will discuss the students’ self-reported engagement and learning in the subject and how it was enhanced through the active learning approach, specifically play. This study demonstrates the possibilities for a ‘play’ approach in informing teaching and learning practices in pre-service teacher education and the need to more closely align the pedagogical practices utilised with the future classrooms of the students.

Promoting Student Teachers' Reflective Thinking Through a Philosophical Community of Enquiry Approach

This article outlines how student teachers’ experiences of a philosophical community of enquiry (PCoE) facilitated their pedagogical reflections. Although reflection occupies an important place in teacher education curricula and pedagogy, it is a contested and problematic concept. In this study, a group of second year student teachers took part in a module based on Matthew Lipman's Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme, designed to improve children’s thinking through a PCoE. Using data from a series of reflective activities and an in-depth interview, I examined if and how student teachers’ experiences of PCoE facilitated their readiness to reflect on pedagogical concepts such as the role of dialogue and inquiry in learning. The findings show that most had reconsidered/questioned their views, suggesting that giving student teachers experience of PCoE type of learning contexts could open up alternative ways of promoting reflection. The findings from this practitioner enquiry provide teacher educators with useful insights into the potential of a PCoE approach/orientation for promoting student teachers’ reflective thinking.

The Standards Made Me Do It: Reculturing Teacher Education to Redeem the Curriculum

This article discusses a common lament heard from education students: “But that’s what the standards say we have to do!” This paper will address the need to create teacher education pedagogies that help teachers disentangle standards from curriculum. Our students exemplify a technical mindset, one that supposes teaching is primarily the selection and implementation of best practices, therefore reducing curriculum to a synonym for standards. We believe that education pedagogies rooted in the spirit of the liberal arts are needed, instead of those rooted in professional studies. Teacher education must be reimagined, a movement away from training and toward education (Eisner, 2002). The Foundations of Education provide an alternative metaphor: An approach that, “understands education as other than a technical enterprise of means-ends reasoning capable of being packaged as a consumer product” (Quantz, 2013, p. 177). The Foundations provide a conceptual scaffold for teacher education curriculum across disparate courses.

Development and Evaluation of the Teacher Education Teaching Materials for Instruction on Making Thread Knots and French Knots in Elementary School Home Economics Classes

Development and Evaluation of the Teacher Education Teaching Materials for Instruction on Making Thread Knots and French Knots in Elementary School Home Economics Classes

Pedagogies of practice and opportunities to learn about classroom mathematics discussions

In this paper, we argue that to prepare pre-service teachers for doing complex work of teaching like leading classroom mathematics discussions requires an implementation of different pedagogies of teacher education in deliberate ways. In supporting our argument, we use two frameworks: one curricular and one pedagogical. The curricular framework is based on the work of Hammerness et al. (Preparing teachers for a changing world. What teachers should learn and be able to do. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Educational Series, pp 358–388, 2005) outlining four main goals of teacher learning: a vision of practice, knowledge of students and content, dispositions for using this knowledge, and a repertoire of practices and tools. The pedagogical framework is based on the work of Grossman et al. (Teach Teach Theory Pract 15(2):273–289, 2009a; Teach Coll Record 111(9):2055–2100, 2009b) outlining three pedagogies of practice: representations, decompositions, and approximations of practice. We use the curricular framework to examine the opportunities for teacher learning that were afforded by these three different pedagogies of practice in a unit on leading classroom mathematics discussion in a secondary mathematics methods course. We use evidence from our analysis to show how the coordination of those pedagogies of practice is better than any one of them in addressing important goals for teacher learning about classroom discussions.

Accommodating to English‐medium instruction in teacher education in Finland

This study analyses teacher educators' and student teachers' perceptions of teaching and learning situations in an international English as a lingua franca (ELF) context in an English‐medium instruction (EMI) teacher education programme in Finland. The analysis of semi‐structured interviews revealed that the participants perceived a partial reversal of traditional teacher and student roles; students assisted voluntarily and teaching became reciprocal. Some teachers reflected on having used typical strategies in ELF context, such as code‐switching, to further communication and engage students. However, teachers' lack of fluency was sometimes considered causing frustration among students and affected negatively their feeling of being professional teacher educators. Nevertheless, by increasing more learner‐led activities, ELF can positively affect teacher education pedagogy.

Vulnerable practitioners: fictional narratives affecting masculine teacher identity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how fictional narratives help us envision ways of constructing the identity as teaching professionals. Furthermore, how encounters with fictional narratives and the absorption of their structures and ideologies can dictate how the author perceive ourselves, and others. Design/methodology/approach – The pedagogy of teacher education relies heavily on narratised models of instruction such as Critical Reflective Practice (CRP). The purposefully traumatic aspects of CRP are designed to trouble the sense of self. I suggest here that this creates a period of subjective vulnerability in the pre-service teacher practitioner. Findings – This paper examines the response to traumatic learning events focusing on how literary tropes and their encompassing ideologies become a powerful yet regressive force in restabilising the professional identity and galvanising the personal subjectivity. Research limitations/implications – Data for this paper has been drawn from the Teaching Men research project that focused on a cohort of male teachers, from Australia and the UK working within TAFE/FE environments all of whom had recently become teachers. Originality/value – This paper addresses a parallel concern: at a point of subjective vulnerability, a term coined as part of this analysis, how do fictional representations of male teachers impact on the construction and practice of teachers in the development of their professional identities? And how can the author devise a structure with which to interpret such activity?

From initial teacher education through induction and beyond: a longitudinal study of primary teacher beliefs

A better understanding of the relationship between beginning teachers' beliefs and the pedagogies of teacher education (TE) programmes that support their learning across time can enhance TE programme effectiveness. This 6-year longitudinal study examined the development and change of beginning primary classroom teachers' (n = 6) beliefs about learning to teach. Data sources included reflective writings and semi-structured interviews. These data were generated over a 6-year period from the beginning of a 3-year TE programme to 3 years post-graduation. Inductive analyses of the participants' writings illustrate the nature of the change that occurred in their beliefs about their teacher learning and provide insight into the experiences that shaped these changes. The beginning teachers valued practical and applied pedagogies most in supporting their learning to teach. They reflected retrospectively that TE programme pedagogies promoted a prescriptive approach and restricted them in how they directed their learning to teach. Given the rarity of data-set such as that in this study, this paper asserts the importance of incorporating beginning teachers' retrospective beliefs about their learning in TE programmes as a basis for the design of impactful TE programmes and as a guide to support and direct learning in the induction phase.

The passion of teaching at the border of order

In this text, which was originally delivered as a speech, I discuss the massive critique of teachers in the public discourse on education in Sweden over the last decade. I speak in defence of teachers, and since I am a teacher I speak in defence of myself. The critique of teachers, schooling, and teacher education has been so overbearing that a purely rational response is simply not possible. Therefore, my response is rhetorical in tone. In highlighting the passion of teaching, I lift something central for teachers, which is seldom or never taught about teaching in teacher education. Neither is the passion of teaching present in the public discourse on education. Passion, I argue in the article, is that which adds excess or an overflow of meaning that cannot be contained within the order of discourse and which therefore puts this discourse out of balance. Finally, I discuss a new balance beyond this order in the context of a classroom. In a concluding section, I highlight the struggle over borders which define who can speak and think in “good” order and who cannot.