Undergraduate Teacher Education Course Research Articles

Experiential Learning in Teacher Education

Sixty-four years after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Educationdecision, schools, neighborhoods, and communities in the United States re-main largely segregated by race and class. As a result, many incoming studentsarrive on college and university campuses with limited exposure to people froma wide array of backgrounds and identities. In this article, we examine howstudents enrolled in an undergraduate teacher education course, Multicultur-alism and Education, learned from and reflected on an experiential learningassignment. The assignment, called “Immersion Experience,” required them tohave a brief experience in a cultural context that is different from their own.Through the assignment, students reflected on their own identities, values, andupbringing; learned about their stereotypes and beliefs about discrimination;and began to appreciate experience as a way of deepening their understandingof diversity. In an era in which undergraduates spend more of their time on-line, self-segregated and fractured by political beliefs and social identities andexperiences, assignments such as the “Immersion Experience” help to createthe physical, human encounters with difference that are vital for communityand democracy.

Academic reading as a social practice in higher education

In this study, an undergraduate teacher education course is used to explore whether and how academic reading seminars reflect the theoretical notion of academic literacies and provide a learning environment for developing academic and professional learning and engagement. The data analyzed in this article are transcribed recordings of small group activities where students discuss scientific articles based on a template. First, our empirical analysis shows that the use of the template facilitated dialogical discussions and the development of a cognitive skillset and disciplinary categories when used in a social setting. Second, we found that the most challenging part of designing a reading practice related to the academic literacies tradition was fostering a dialogical environment for discussing the validity of findings across different contexts and provide for discussions encompassing complexity, nuances, and meaning making. We found traces of such discussions in all the transcripts; however, many examples were in a premature stage. The paper concludes with a discussion on, and some suggestions for, further development of the template used in the reading seminars.

Using Book Clubs to Support Inquiry in Teacher Education

The bombardment of information on students in higher education has created a need for not only information processing skills but improved communicative competence and interpersonal relationship skills. In an attempt to address this, we have implemented book clubs in our undergraduate teacher education courses. In these book clubs, we facilitate students in both critique and analysis of perspectives at difference with one another as well as the process of communicating on a professional level. The results have been students who feel more confident in evaluating literature and hosting conversations with critical elements.

We can’t always measure what matters: revealing opportunities to enhance online student engagement through pedagogical care

ABSTRACT Online learning was initially introduced to support face-to-face learning, but now represents a dominant pedagogical approach in Higher Education. The rapid shift from face-to-face learning to online platforms has left many academics feeling pedagogically unprepared. In this research, we initially sought to understand and enhance online student engagement in three undergraduate teacher education courses through the mapping of ‘pedagogical touchpoints’ – encounters students had with their online learning environment – to better understand their needs, preferences and behaviours as online learners, with a focus on recognising what students valued and identified as ‘engaging’. While seeking insight into the student experience through a range of data, including course feedback, survey data, interviews and researcher critical reflections, we noted that they approached their studies with a diverse range of needs and preferences for engaging in online learning, and that some aspects that were valued most highly were not necessarily identifiable or ‘measurable’, but represented less definable, but importantly – engaging qualities that students highly valued. These ‘unmeasurable’ elements were found to be related to the exercising of pedagogical care, not just in interactions between teacher and students, but an overall online pedagogy of care that permeated all aspects of course design and delivery. The research thus contributes an important insight into effective and engaging online pedagogy that forefronts the value of pedagogical care, and what this may look like when facilitating online learning.

Learning by Design

This article reports on an application of a SoTL research process for two teacher education instructors in an undergraduate teacher education course, Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age. After engaging in content analysis of student work samples derived from a Digital Sabbath assignment, the instructors asked more questions about how well the assignment aligned to course objectives and intended learning outcomes. Collaboratively, they determined how the Digital Sabbath assignment could be revised to better meet the stated course objective. The authors anticipate that assignment revisions could result in improved student learning outcomes for the teacher education students. Insights from the student responses and course materials are discussed as well as implications for teaching and learning in a teacher education program.

Teaching about and for social justice in teacher education in Hong Kong

This paper analyses the learning impacts of a social justice learning unit, which was implemented through three lectures in each of two undergraduate teacher education courses in 2017/18 across two semesters. The design of the unit allows for social inquiry and experiential learning in the undergraduate curriculum. A sequential mixed-methods design was adopted, with pre and post questionnaire and interview data gathered from undergraduate students. We argue that learning and applying social justice concepts through group inquiry and other learning activities on social justice related issues, together with an experiential learning site visit, can facilitate the development of understanding of both the concept and application of social justice, a positive perception towards ethnic minorities and a desire for further learning and engagement in the community. This study would be useful for any university educators who want to teach about and for social justice in ways that may help students to develop an increased willingness for community service.

Professional knowledge building in teacher education: some reflections based on Gur-Ze’ev

Abstract This article critically discusses the topic of professional knowledge in teacher education through the lenses of Ilan Gur-Ze'ev's counter-education. It is based on a study investigating how professional knowledge building evolves through written reflections, examining the development of professional identity in the context of a course in an undergraduate teacher education course in Brazil. The research’s findings demonstrate that students gained an awareness of the potential that teaching and learning activities have for the development of concepts about the teaching profession, leading to the strengthening of their professional identity as future teachers and as what Gur-Ze'ev called 'improviser-teacher'.

“Speaking properly”: language conceptions problematized in English lessons of an undergraduate teacher education course in Brazil

This qualitative research was done in a class of English Oral Practice 2 in an undergraduate English teacher education course in Brazil. Grounded on the conception of language as practice, the first author of this article developed a problematizing pedagogy focusing on race/racism and language as space of power. Resorting to class activities (a question of a written test, an oral test, and a feedback session) and the professor’s diary, we analyzed the students’ accounts about the course and the meanings they constructed about language. Their accounts indicate that, when evaluating the course, most of them highlighted the relevance of content, showing that they started conceptualizing language beyond form. Their accounts also suggest they were not using language, but making it.

After the education disciplines:Teaching theory on-line

Like all social theorising, the academic study of education is 'reflexive'- complicated hy the fact of our immersion in it. This paper discusses an on-line version of an undergraduate teacher-education course, 'Social Issues in New Zealand Education,' that is designed to teach its students how to do such 'situated' educational theorising. Consistent with this theme, the paper is written as a stream-of-consciousness narrative. In an attempt to fix in print the 'counterpoint' of pedagicical theorising in general, as well as more specifically in an on-line setting, it is episodic in structure - more like the lateral leaps oj^ hypertext than the disciplined hierarchies of headings characteristic of the linearity of conventional academic argument. It falls into three parts. The first introduces the on- line virtual classroom environment in which the teaching takes place. Part two locates the course within more general epistemological issues confronting designers of education (foundations) courses in pre-service teaching degrees in the twenty-first century. In Part three, the syllabus of the course is outlined. The paper concludes with examples ?f students doing 'situated' educational theorising as they engage with course readings and assignments. Through this multi-layered account, I raise for discussion some broad questions about pedagogy in educational foundations courses in today's environment,

Career Motivations, Role Expectations and Curriculum Knowledge of Prospective Secondary English Teachers in Western Australia

Teacher quality, teaching standards, and entry criteria for teacher education courses are currently subjects of intense national debate and policy development in Australia. As tertiary institutions respond to calls for a review of standards, there is a need for more data on the characteristics of entrants to teacher education and the factors that are likely to influence their performance as teachers. This survey-based study investigated the entry characteristics of four cohorts of secondary English majors at one institution. Prior studies have focussed on graduate-level students in one-year preparation courses, and addressed fewer factors. This study surveyed undergraduate students embarking on a four-year degree, and included a wider survey of motivations, perceptions and abilities. The findings indicate participants had strong emotional investments but modest past achievement in secondary school English. They rated affective factors as more important for teaching than academic performance or intellectual ability; and they rated their own knowledge and skills in some key curriculum areas as marginal. These results are considered in relation to the debate on teaching standards and the capacity of undergraduate teacher education courses to prepare high quality teachers.

Thinking together through pictures: The community of philosophical enquiry and visual analysis as a transformative pedagogy

This qualitative study explores how a community of enquiry pedagogy in combination with a social semiotic approach to visual analysis influenced the changing knowledge and concepts of knowledge experienced by students in an undergraduate teacher education course. The art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa was the focus of our study and students developed structured and logical frameworks for analysing artworks as well as playing with laterally extending concepts such as art, justice, equality and humanity. The findings suggest that the dialogical and embodied practice of a community of enquiry pedagogy and the meaning-making strategies offered by a social semiotic approach to visual analysis strongly influenced my students’ and my own awareness of knowledge as a creative and experiential opening up and as a companion to the equally valuable experience of not knowing. Visual and embodied forms of knowledge explored through artworks forged a link between ‘self’ and ‘learning self’. These findings have implications for the selection of appropriate teacher education pedagogies.

Creating Spaces for Arts-Informed Responses in Teacher Education Programs

We address the bene ts and challenges of using an arts-informed response in an undergraduate teacher education course from the perspective of a teacher and two students. Feminist pedagogies provide the theoretical lens through which our experiences are analyzed. From the teacher’s perspective, this arts-informed approach modeled to pre-service teachers how they could use arts-informed inquiry in their future classrooms, to engage in conscious raising about inequality, while meeting di erent learning styles in their classrooms. From the students’ perspective, it was surprising to be invited to do an arts-informed reading response. Acceptance depended on the perception of risk. Our conclusion is that more space should be created for arts-informed approaches in undergraduate teacher education programs.

A Theory-driven Approach to Subject Design in Teacher Education

The intent of this study was to examine how a theoretically-designed subject in an undergraduate teacher education course impacted on the learning and confidence of pre-service teachers in catering for the needs of students with diverse needs. The subject design utilised theoretical principles of self-organisation that were incorporated with the teaching and application of three evidence-based pedagogies of inclusion: explicit teaching, cooperative learning and collaborative practice. The study examined how the principles were enacted throughout the delivery of the subject and sought pre-service teacher reflections after completion. Initial findings suggest that embedding these principles and incorporating practical application throughout the subject assisted pre-service teachers with their learning, the completion of assessment and enhanced their confidence in being able to meet the needs of students with diverse needs.

Critical moments in negotiating authority: grading, accountability, and teacher education

Understanding teacher educators’ reasoning about critical moments in negotiating authority can inform efforts to foster democratic teacher education practices and prepare future teachers to teach democratically. We know very little, however, about critical moments in negotiating authority, particularly in teacher educators’ practices. The purpose of this study was to examine, using self-study methodology, a teacher educator’s assumptions and perspectives about purposefully and explicitly negotiating authority through grading and accountability processes in an undergraduate teacher education course. From a critical pedagogical lens – concerning the intersection of classroom power relations, democratic citizenship, and student growth – the findings suggest that seeking legitimacy through consensual acceptance, responding to students’ expressed interests, and constructing knowledge through continual questioning present potential frameworks for constructing purposeful pedagogical partnerships consistent with democratic aims in teacher education.

Web-Based Case Studies versus Text-Based Case Studies: A Comparative Study of Pre-service Teacher Engagement

The study compares how the format of a text-based case and a web-based case impact students’ engagement and learning; it represents an effort to document a comparative study of different formats of cases and their effectiveness in an undergraduate social studies methods teacher education course at UMCP. Participants are pre-service teachers enrolled in an undergraduate teacher education course. Each participant will experience both formats of a case over two course sessions so as to ensure instructional equity across groups. Overall, this study is an effort by the researchers to (a) document students’ learning and engagement with written cases and web-based cases and (b) to assess students’ own preferences for a case study format in an undergraduate teacher education course.

Teaching Bodies in Place

Background/Context This piece draws on literature in justice-oriented teacher education, feminist pedagogy, and postmodern notions of bodies and place to make sense of data generated from a three-year study of an undergraduate teacher education course. A feminist lens was used to engage a body- and place-focused pedagogy that aimed to engage students in recognizing themselves as full-bodied and cultured beings who can work to better understand and expand their perceptions of themselves and others in place. Purpose The authors argue that postmodern theories of bodies and place can provide complex insights for both theorizing and practicing teacher education. Readers have the opportunity to experience alternative community-based teacher education practice through a graphic presentation and consider both the theoretical and practice implications in the broader field of education. Research Design This three-year study is an arts-based qualitative inquiry into the experiences of a course where feminist and postmodern notions of bodies and place informed the pedagogical decision-making of their professor (Stephanie Jones). Data were generated across three years and those focused specifically on or around the community bus ride were used to ask questions about how bodies and places interact with one another to produce sense-making about people, places, and the purposes of education. As part of the inquiry, Stephanie produced visual images in comics-form presenting pedagogical interactions and experiences that illuminated theoretical insights and then engaged Jim in conversations and sketch-sharing about theory and practice related to the data and how it was experienced in real-time by Stephanie. After numerous conversations looking over each panel and analytical discussions about bodies, place, and pedagogies as they were produced on the page and multiple revisions of both images and print text, Stephanie and Jim settled on the graphic production published here as both a representation of the research and a provocation for reimagining teacher education practice and scholarship. Conclusions The study is an example of how pedagogies informed by theoretical understandings of bodies and place can produce practices that help teacher education students recognize their bodies as central sites for critical change inside and outside institutions. Tending to, documenting, and discussing their bodily-ways-of-being in different places and how bodies/places produce perceptions of others were powerful practices that helped students think deeply about power and their roles as future teachers.

A professora adolescente: um olhar psicanalítico sobre regressão nas profissões

Encounters with adolescence and its quest for truth, beauty and thought can be used as a psychoanalytic framework in understanding the education of the helping professions. A significant conflict resides in the state of professional knowledge toward psychical life that tends to be expressed as alienation between developmental theory and pedagogy. I treat my undergraduate teacher education course, The Adolescent and the Teacher as a psychoanalytic case study on the developing education of adults who grew up within the school system and return to work there. The paper focuses on problems in teacher education, an area hardly considered as affecting the imaginary of school psychology, counseling, and social work, and discussions about the nature of adolescence, yet provides a commentary on the impossible professions dedicated to education. The discussion leans on the psychoanalytic idea that adults working in schools are subject to their adolescence – elemental sets of internal conflicts, phantasies, and defenses – that return in professional knowledge as demands for certainty and as a belief that learning is a tonic to conflict as opposed to conflict’s delegate. Working with Kristeva’s (2007) formulation of “the adolescent syndrome of ideality,” the paper speculates on psychical life as our most radical relation to the self and other. Yet in this meeting a kernel of alienation is carried into responses to conflicts in the structure of schooling, self/other relations, the arrangement of professional knowledge, and reaches into the confusion between phantasies of a profession and the daily imperatives to act with certainty. Key words: education, psychoanalysis, teacher education.

The Adolescent Teacher: A Psychoanalytic Note on Regression in the Professions

Encounters with adolescence and its quest for truth, beauty, and thought can be used as a psychoanalytic framework in understanding the education of the helping professions. A significant conflict resides in the state of professional knowledge toward psychical life that tends to be expressed as alienation between developmental theory and pedagogy. I treat my undergraduate teacher education course The Adolescent and the Teacher as a psychoanalytic case study on the developing education of adults who grew up within the school system and return to work there. The paper focuses on problems in teacher education, an area hardly considered as affecting the imaginary of school psychology, counseling, and social work, and discussions about the nature of adolescence, yet provides a commentary on the impossible professions dedicated to education. The discussion leans on the psychoanalytic idea that adults working in schools are subject to their adolescence—elemental sets of internal conflicts, phantasies, and defenses—that return in professional knowledge as demands for certainty and as a belief that learning is a tonic to conflict as opposed to conflict's delegate. Working with Kristeva's (2007) formulation of “the adolescent syndrome of ideality,” the paper speculates on psychical life as our most radical relation to the self and other. Yet in this meeting a kernel of alienation is carried into responses to conflicts in the structure of schooling, self/other relations, the arrangement of professional knowledge, and reaches into the confusion between phantasies of a profession and the daily imperatives to act with certainty.

Negotiating authority through jointly constructing the course curriculum

Understanding how authority is negotiated in teacher education classrooms can inform efforts to foster democratic teacher education practices and prepare future teachers to teach democratically. We know very little, however, about how authority is negotiated in different classroom contexts, particularly in teacher education settings. This qualitative study examined how authority was negotiated in an undergraduate teacher education course in which I – as the teacher of the course – involved students in actively determining the content, method, and assessment of the course through jointly constructing the course curriculum. Using self-study methodology to understand more deeply the problems embedded in my practice as a beginning teacher-educator, I generated themes from the data using the constant comparative method. The findings suggest that deriving legitimacy from mutually recognized sources, working from shared purposes, and confronting students’ deeply rooted familiarity with authoritarian teaching practices present potential frameworks for negotiating authority in teacher education – while illuminating the challenges of teaching democratically in authoritarian contexts. Such insights are important for helping future teachers experience alternatives to conventional teaching while accounting for the complexity of learning to bring democratic values to life in classrooms at all levels.

Negotiating authority through cultivating a classroom community of inquiry

This qualitative study examines how authority was negotiated in an undergraduate teacher education course. As the teacher of the course, I involved students in on-going processes of collaborative dialogue and deliberation about issues of importance to those involved through cultivating a classroom community of inquiry. The findings suggest that constructing relations of mutual interdependence, deriving legitimacy from mutually recognized sources, and communicating about the problem rather than the people present potential frameworks for negotiating authority in teacher education. Such knowledge is important for informing efforts to foster democratic teacher education practices and prepare future teachers to teach reflectively.