Using modelling to make culturally responsive pedagogy explicit in preservice teacher education in Finland

Despite multiculturalism being discussed in teacher education, teachers still often feel insecure in the classroom around developing meaningful practices. This might be due to several issues about how preservice teachers are taught. In this article, modelling culturally responsive pedagogy is demonstrated as a promising strategy in shaping preservice teachers’ learning experiences and facilitating the finding of pedagogical responses in their future work. The article examines preservice teachers’ awareness of modelling as a teaching strategy in a multicultural education course in Finland, and the ways in which they connected the modelled strategy to their own learning and intentions for future teaching. A total of 246 reflective learning journals were analysed qualitatively, using a constant comparison approach. The results indicate that preservice teachers recognised and reflected on modelling culturally responsive pedagogy. They highlighted several aspects of the culturally responsive activities, environment and teacher educator behaviours modelled for them. For some preservice teachers, this recognition stayed at the level of personal awareness of own learning on the course, but for others these revelations were springboards to start forming ideas about future teaching practice. Preservice teachers articulated their intentions about the kind of teachers they would like to become, their principles in teaching, as well as specific teaching/learning activities. We present how the modelling of culturally responsive pedagogy strategies allowed preservice teachers to self-reflect, critique and connect their own learning experiences to future practice. Therefore, modelling culturally responsive pedagogy is argued to be a fruitful strategy in teacher education.     

Sexuality,schooling, and teacher identity formation: A critical pedagogy for teacher education

Offering an alternative to normative teacher education that excludes meaningful sexuality and gender education from its curriculum, this article presents a critical teacher education multicultural curriculum based in the United States that included an autoethnographic narrative assignment as reflective space for teacher candidates to consider their identities as shaped by lived experiences with gender and sexuality. Using a categorical analysis of a cohort of 38 teacher candidate autoethnographies, discussed are insights revealed about their lived histories. Patterns included gender identification, heteronormativity, patriarchy, sex education, schooling experiences, teacher complicity, and teacher identity effects and sense of agency along with implications for educating future teachers.     

Engaging with theoretical diffraction in teacher education

This article presents a study in which we began with a question ‘how to teach theoretical reflectivity in teacher education’, and ended with a sentence ‘there is theoretical diffraction in teacher education’. The research presented in this paper took place in the context of a university course in which we have been involved for the past two years. During the course we simultaneously aimed to teach theoretical reflection and to analyse what was happening as we taught theoretical reflection. For two years we asked: What are students doing while we are trying to engage them in theoretical reflection? We noted that students are engaged in theory, but not in ways easily readable to the educators, and that the process could be called theoretical diffraction rather than reflection. Theoretical diffraction during the course was patterned by existing discursive practices: (1) disciplining emotions and focusing on control and answers; (2) personalising school as the teacher, and personally defending it; and (3) prioritising practice over theory and seeing both as dogma.     

The promise of experiential education in teacher education: transforming teacher beliefs and practices

Building from the theories of Dewey and Kolb and Fry, we sought to examine the impact of experiential education in teacher education on teacher beliefs and practices. The teacher education model described in this article sets out to challenge the seduction of the apprenticeship of observation and create an opportunity for in-service teachers to re-imagine their teaching in concrete and transformative ways. Immersed in a weeklong experiential residency in either the mountains or at a local environmental education farm, the teachers in the study were challenged physically, intellectually, socially, and emotionally in and through the experience. The experiential work ultimately led to changes in teacher participants’ beliefs and practices related to teacher and student roles and potentialities. Although challenges exist for this type of practice in K-12 classrooms and in teacher education, experiential education has a significant potential to change the way teachers think about and act in their practice.     

Renaming teaching practice through teacher reflection using critical incidents on a virtual training course

This study approaches teacher learning from a dialogical viewpoint where lecturers’ voices used in a training course context reflect how lecturers generated new professional discourse. The design of the training course considered the analysis of several critical incidents (CIs) in online teaching. An analytical framework based on lecturers’ discourse and ways of thinking about teaching was used to identify types of renaming teaching practice. The empirical element of the study analysed the written utterances about teaching provided by 12 online instructors in order to determine what kinds of new discourse emerged during the analysis of 15 CIs in online teaching. Results showed that local discourse is the lecturers’ most commonly used discourse, prototypical incidents generated more professional discourse than personal and real CIs, and professional discourse can be created by means of at least nine different ways of articulating discourse. On the basis of these results, some pedagogical implications for lecturer learning are discussed.     

Service-learning in early childhood teacher education: Using service to put meaning back into learning

Service-learning is defined as a teaching/learning method that connects meaningful community service with academic learning, personal growth, and civic responsibility. In this study, conducted at an American University, we describe a cascading model of integrating early childhood teacher education and service-learning for preservice teachers who then implemented the combined model in their field classrooms with young children. Examples of the projects from the two cohorts of 25 and 26 undergraduate students are provided. We demonstrate that service-learning projects provide an instructional avenue for preservice students to teach in an integrated and/or experiential manner in their field classrooms and discuss why service-learning is an appropriate and meaningful strategy to use with preservice teachers and children.     

Factors relating to regular education teacher burnout in inclusive education

The aims of the research were to identify the environmental factors that relate to the work of regular school teachers who have students with special needs in their classroom, and to find out the correlation between these factors and teacher burnout. A total 330 primary school teachers filled in a questionnaire that had three parts: (1) personal background data; (2) the Friedman’s burnout questionnaire; and (3) environmental features typical of the work of school teachers that include students with special needs in their classroom, in four areas: psychological features, organizational, structural and social. Results show that the background data that related significantly to burnout was teachers’ attitudes towards inclusion. The more positive the attitude was, the more the teacher experienced burnout in the category of self‐fulfilment. This finding was contrary to the hypothesis of the research. Two other background variables were found to relate to the de‐personalization aspect of burnout, teaching higher‐grade students and having an additional administrative role in school. Two other findings that were found to correlate with higher burnout rates were the number of students with special needs in class (more than 20%) and very little assistance provided to the teacher. Three environmental factors were found to have negative correlation with burnout: the organizational factor, the psychological and the social, with the latter being the most significantly negatively correlated with burnout—i.e. the less social support the teacher experienced, the higher was her level of burnout.     

An alternative model of special education teacher education socialization

The process of organizational socialization sheds light on the difficulty of a university program to effectively socialize its special education teacher candidates into believing and acting on theories of inclusion for students with disabilities in public schools. In general, people are socialized by prior experiences, then the university, then the workplace. In this case, the workplace socialization exists prior to participation in the university setting and in conjunction with it potentially complicating traditional university socialization. This study explores how prospective special education teachers in a moderate/severe special education teacher credential program adopt, adapt, and redefine the concept of inclusion. An analysis of their use of the term “inclusion” in semi-structured interviews draws attention to the degree to which they have or have not been socialized into believing and acting on inclusion at their schools.     

从"纸笔"到"博客"——试论教师反思工具的变革

随着教师专业化的推进,教师反思出现从个体走向群体的趋势,客观上要求反思工具发生相应的变化。基于博客的教师反思,就是利用博客工具,将教师反思的内容以日志的形式发布在博客上,这从根本上是对传统的以纸笔为反思工具的一种挑战,通过对基于博客的教师反思情况的研究,明晰了教师利用博客进行反思的现状,指明了博客应用于教师反思的前景。     

Teachers’ professional identity: Contributions of a critical EFL teacher education course in Iran

This paper is a report on contributions of a critical EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher education course to Iranian teachers’ professional identity reconstruction.² Pre-course and post-course interviews with seven teachers, their reflective journals, class discussions, and the teacher educator’s reflective journals were analyzed as guided by grounded theory. Three major shifts were observed in their professional identities: from conformity to and romanticization of dominant ideologies to critical autonomy, from no orientation or an instrumentalist orientation to a critical/transformative orientation of teaching, and from a linguistic and technical view to an educational view of second language education.     

Web-enhanced case-based activity in teacher education: a case study

Recent work in case-based reasoning (CBR) reinforces the importance of situated learning, expert cases, and authentic tasks and activities for novice learners. As novices engage CBR environments, they apprentice in the experts’ practices while developing the understanding, knowledge and skill of a given community. This study examined how prospective teachers, as novices in a semester-long course, engaged and developed expert-like practices using the case knowledge of experienced teachers who teach with technology. By engaging experienced teachers’ knowledge and skill via Web-enhanced cases, prospective teachers refined their understanding of teaching culture and teaching with technology as they transitioned to the teaching community.     

From assistant teacher to teacher: challenges and pathways in situated pre-service teacher education

Vocational pathways to Higher Education have a key role in opening teacher education to under-represented groups but bring with them particular challenges. Teacher educators need to address the challenges faced by these learners, of not only connecting their learning but also challenging their knowledge, and doing so in an invested work environment. This paper shares my experiences as a teacher educator working with two groups of Indigenous and non-Indigenous para-professional pre-service teachers in remote and urban Central Australia. I identify four key role-shifting challenges individuals face in developing their professional practice and locate them in two interdependent areas: social sphere challenges arising out of the situated learning setting of professional experience, and those occurring in the personal sphere of professional identity. I suggest that the new ways of mentoring and the development of student’s reflexive capacity needed to address these challenges can best be mobilised by re-positioning the role of professional identity at the centre of both professional experience and academic learning.     

Teachers learn about student learning assessment through a teacher education process

This study aims to understand the extent to which university professors adopt new pedagogical voices in their learning assessment practices through a teacher education process. Participants (N = 32) were interviewed before and after the teacher education process, and data were analysed using qualitative and quantitative methods. The results of the study demonstrated, first, that teachers renamed their educational discourse about learning assessment significantly, increasing it in assessment for learning practices, particularly in the themes of timing and agents, and reducing it in all themes referred to the assessment of learning practices. And second, three clusters of faculty were identified, which differed in terms of the way they merge both learning assessment practices: professors with a slight prevalence of the assessment for learning conceptual voice, professors with a slight prevalence of the assessment for learning practical voice, and professors with a strong prevalence of the assessment for learning voice.     

Supporting presence in teacher education: The connection between the personal and professional aspects of teaching

This study follows one individual student teacher during a period of one single school year in which she was supported in developing ‘presence’ while teaching. The notion of ‘presence’ was formulated by the teacher herself, and coincides with the growing interest in this aspect in psychology, and in theories about becoming a teacher. In her supervision, the so-called core reflection approach was used, which strongly builds on the concept of presence and on positive psychology. Based on analyses of audio taped supervisory sessions, six stages were identified in the teacher's development. These stages are described and related to theories about positive psychology and core reflection. The supervisor's interventions leading to the transitions between the stages were identified, analysed, and related to key principles of core reflection. It appeared that the teacher's growth not only led to experiencing ‘presence’ while teaching, but also to a greater use of her personal qualities. Taken together, it appeared that after the supervision the teacher was much more ‘in flow’, and that she was more effective as a teacher. In this article, both the teacher's growth and the supervisor's interventions are described in detail, and illustrated using quotations from supervisory sessions, logbooks, and interviews. A case is made for connecting professional and personal aspects in supervising student teachers.     

A framework for conducting research on collaborative teacher education

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for conducting research on teacher education programmes that practise collaboration between special and general education faculty to advance inclusion. Such a framework can establish a common language for collaborative teacher education and provide a structure for conducting research on individual programmes as well as cross-site comparisons. It is based on the assumption that collaboration represents a robust, systematic integration of special and general education across all aspects of the preservice curriculum. The proposed framework includes three collaborative program models and five programme dimensions.     

教师教育培养模式发展的思考

为适应基础教育改革发展的需要，全国各高等院校开展了教师教育的探索，形成了多样化的教师培养模式，青海师范大学在这一方面也进行了有效的尝试，目前我国在教师教育培养模式方面还面临许多问题和挑战，加强教师培养模式的理论研究，促进教师培养模式的健康发展，将教师培养模式与教师教育改革有机结合，适应基础教育改革发展的需要。     

Using action research in middle level teacher education to evaluate and deepen reflective practice

The study examined the role of action research in promoting critical reflective thinking among twenty preservice teachers engaged in a year-long middle level program. Data from collaborative discussions, final written documents, presentations, and follow-up surveys revealed that conducting action research (a) engaged them in inquiry into their own practice, (b) was a means to reflect upon and determine ways to change their teaching practices, and (c) promoted critical reflection in a collaborative learning environment. Results underscore the importance of preservice teachers critically reflecting to gain insights into teaching and student learning as they are engaged in action research.     

Agency and conformity in school-based teacher training

Concern has been expressed that the current climate in schools militates against trainee teachers’ self-directed development. This article explores the issue of trainees’ capacity for self-direction through the analysis of interviews with 32 trainees, investigating their perceived proactive social strategies. Three proactive strategies were identified: ‘tactical compliance’, personalising advice, and seeking out opportunities to exercise control. It is argued that these strategies are indicative of trainees’ drive to establish a personal teaching identity through self-directed development and the creation of individual development agendas. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of the development of proactive social skills in beginning teachers.     

Speechlessness,anxiety, and confusion in a teacher education student group

The aim of the study was to explore the tensions, as experienced by student teachers, in a teacher education program that is based on psychodynamic theory. Previous research shows that students have had orientation problems in innovative university studies because it involves students having to take steps toward their discomfort zone. It was therefore considered important to study the mismatch or match of the training model and student experiences. The data were gathered through student interviews. The data analysis utilized a case study methodology and proceeded from thematic network analysis toward a deeper interpretation of the data. The analysis shows students struggle to understand the meaning and practices of psychodynamic-oriented pedagogy. The analysis also shows that students were unable and unwilling to share their learning experiences with students outside the new program. This can be understood as a tension between different conceptual understandings of learning.     

Reforming teacher education in Tanzania

It is widely acknowledged that in order to improve the quality of education in primary schools in developing countries there is a need to place pedagogy and its training implications at the centre of teacher education reform. Like many countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, Tanzania has introduced various initiatives and reforms to improve the quality of teacher education at the pre- and in-service stages. Drawing on evidence from a baseline study of primary teacher interactional and discourse practices, and a review of teacher training colleges, this paper explores the training needs of teacher educators in Tanzania who, in the light of recent reforms to teacher education, will be responsible for education and training at the pre and in-service levels.