Relating Pre-Service Teachers' Approaches to Learning and Preferences for Constructivist Learning Environments

Within two Flemish institutes of pre-service and inservice teacher education, the relationship between the learning styles and preferences for learning environments of pre-service teachers were examined. Results indicate that some components of pre-service teachers' learning approaches (learning conceptions, learning strategies and learning orientations) are predictors for preferences for constructivist learning environments. Differences in learning approaches and preferences for learning environments are also related to the type of teacher education that pre-service teachers followed.     

Alternative Routes into the Teaching Profession

This article examines the ways in which the development of alternative initial teacher education programs in England and Canada over the last two decades serve to challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying established models of initial teacher education in both jurisdictions, and also to broaden the pool of people who have access to the profession. The article offers a brief, initial account of the development of a standard model of initial teacher education in both countries that is characterized as being: university governed and university based; primarily full-time; incorporating a standard curriculum, with admission requirements that generally reflect the traditional academic expectations of the university; and which is funded jointly by the student and the state. Against this standard model the article examines the development of alternative or flexible models in both Canada and England. Three programs are described in some detail – The Brandon University Northern Teacher Education Program, The University of Manitoba’s Weekend College Teacher Education Program, and The University of Nottingham’s Flexible, Modularized Post-Graduate Certificate in Education Program – and each is examined in terms of the ways in which it challenges the assumptions embedded in traditional teacher education programs. At a time when attracting talented and committed teachers constitutes an important issue facing public education systems in both countries, the ability to construct high quality initial teacher education programs that can provide access to the profession to as wide a cross-section of the population as possible will be an important contribution to meeting this challenge.     

Critical Pedagogy for Transformative Optimism

This essay critically highlights the main features of a study that attaches importance to the concepts of time and optimism and their effects on the achievement and goals of high and low achievers in a North American and a Brazilian context. The focus on the time factor that serves as a leitmotif throughout the study gives this work its originality. One of the study's most pleasing aspects is that it draws on Freire's ideas as ducation Secretary in São Paulo to suggest options for future education policy intended to provide more democratic and socially inclusive educational programmes. It is argued that these Freirean ideas should be given greater importance in educational administration worldwide than is the case at present. They can serve as an antidote to the technical rational and managerial approaches that seem to dominate the area.