A transpersonal model for teacher reflectivity

The past decade has witnessed a dramatic increase in scholarship relating to teacher reflectivity. Typically, 'reflectivity', in this context, refers to teachers' critical examination of the political and biographical factors that have led them to teaching and have been instrumental in defining their internal models of what defines good practice. However, the literature on reflective teacher education rarely delves into what may be called 'spiritual reflectivity' - or the exploration of deeper ontological commitments and constructs regarding teaching. In this essay, I discuss how, as a teacher educator, I have drawn from a Buddhist developmental model to deepen my spiritual reflectivity as a teacher.     

Developing holistic practice through reflection,action and theorising

This article outlines how I, as a primary teacher engaging with a self-study action research process, have come to a deeper understanding of my practice. It explains how I have also come to an understanding of why I work in the way I do; of how this understanding influences my work, and the significance of this new understanding. My work as a teacher frequently includes doing collaborative digital projects with my class. As I engaged in research on my practice, I initially experienced difficulties problematising this work. I struggled to achieve clarity not only with engaging in critical thinking but also with articulating my educational values. I found Mellor’s idea about ‘the struggle’ helpful as he explains how ‘the struggle’ is at the heart of the research process. My new understanding around these collaborative projects emerged in terms of holistic practice; clarifying my ontological values and learning to think critically. I am now generating an educational theory from my practice as I see my work as a process for developing spiritual and holistic approaches to learning and teaching. I conclude by outlining what I perceive to be the significance of my work and its potential implications for education.     

A Poetics of Teaching

In this article, I elucidate the idea of a poetics of teaching and outline its value to scholars and teachers who seek a deeper understanding of the practice. A poetics of teaching draws together aesthetic, intellectual, and moral dimensions of the work that are often treated separately, if treated at all, in both research and in the classroom. In so doing, a poetics clarifies our picture of what the work offers to the men and women who take up the role. A poetics of teaching calls attention to how teaching can enrich the life of the teacher, even as he or she seeks to deepen and to broaden students' knowledge, understandings, and outlooks. I draw upon aspects of art, of inquiry, and of metaphor to help illuminate these educational values.     

Critically Teaching Criticality?: Modeling Social and Pedagogical Inquiry with Literary Texts

Within US teacher preparation programs, critical pedagogy and a desire for social change can lead teacher educators to prioritize transformation of prospective teachers’ beliefs through self-reflection. In pursuit of effective critical pedagogies, teacher educators also need to examine their own practices and beliefs. This self-study, a manifestation of teaching as inquiry, reframes evaluations of teaching away from what students do toward what teachers do. Here I undertake a reflexive examination of my own recursive practice as a teacher educator in children’s literature. Drawing upon a complex notion of teaching and learning, I argue that student learning outcomes are unpredictable, and as a result, successful teacher education should model self-inquiry as a vital part of teaching. Findings show that teaching choices (and omissions) in response to students’ responses led to unintended outcomes that undermined my motivations. I conclude that teacher educators’ self-inquiry and reflection in broader social contexts offers access to critical ways of thinking that underlie their work toward developing similar capacities among their prospective teacher students.     

Becoming a Teacher of Mathematics

For many years I have engaged future mathematics teachers in activities that focus on emotional dimensions of their learning. Even those teachers who were able to reconstruct themselves as learners of mathematics had difficulties with changing their practice. Through a series of autobiographical stories, I examine my own experiences as a teacher and a learner. These stories—one from a computer class, one from a workshop for elementary teachers, one from college, and one from eighth grade—serve as data from which I draw themes that capture the tensions that I experience as I teach. Sharing these tensions with mathematics teachers has had an impact on the way the teachers talk about their teaching and promises to change how they teach. The paper is written to encourage teacher educators to adopt the practice of sharing teaching and learning stories with their students.     

A comparison of student teacher learning from practice in university-affiliated schools in Helsinki and Johannesburg

In a comparative study of student teachers in Finland and South Africa, the researchers aimed to capture students’ views of how and what they had learned from practice in two university-affiliated primary schools. With data from survey questionnaires, we found that students in the two customized programmes accentuated different domains of teacher knowledge. The newly established teaching practice school in Johannesburg afforded closer integration of university and school practicum experiences for students than the well-established school in Helsinki. The authors conclude that an innovative teacher education model can be re-invented in a significantly different context and also add new dimensions to the original.     

Teacher as knower and learner: Reflections on situated knowledge in science teaching

I argue from an understanding of current feminist philosophy that a teacher's practice reflects changing experiences, knowledge, values, and identities, and as such can be productively thought of as a site for learning as much as a site for expounding upon what is known. This suggests a vision for what constitutes effective practice different from that commonly held in science. I argue that praxis proceeds from the personal epistemological standpoints of the teacher (defined as standpoint theory). This knowledge is only partially applicable to particular situations in the classroom. The hallmark of feminist pedagogy, if conceptualized as derivative from standpoint theory, is to “take everyday life as problematic” (Smith, 1991, p. 88). Implicit in such a conceptualization is that pedagogy starts from an explicit recognition of everyday life and both builds from and questions that beginning. This is true for students and also for the teacher, and is the root of my claim that through teaching, the teacher becomes a learner. The immediate circumstances in which teaching occurs present different and unique qualities from those in which the teacher's knowledge and value were created. As a teacher, I am therefore continuously confronted with the inadequacy of my knowledge. The circumstances and children's activities tell me that I need to do things differently. In this situation, the act of teaching as an assertion of knowing becomes a recognition of not-knowing. Teaching becomes an occasion for learning about subject matter, children, and self. I recount an example of teaching in a first-grade classroom to give this argument substance. This story is an example from my own teaching in which parallels between scientific theorizing and storytelling are drawn and capitalized upon as a vehicle for critical thinking in science. This became an occasion for reflecting upon the appropriateness of those values because of the multicultural qualities of the classroom. J Res Sci Teach 35: 427–439, 1998.     

Conceptualising Resources as a Theme for Teacher Education

In this report, I examine resources and their use in school mathematics. I do so from the perspective of mathematics teacher education and with a view to the practice of school mathematics. I argue that the effectiveness of resources for mathematical learning lies in their use, that is, in the classroom teaching and learning context. The argument pivots on the concepts of school mathematics as a hybrid practice and on the transparency of resources in use. These concepts are elaborated by examples of resource use within an in-service teacher education research project in South Africa. I propose that mathematics teacher education needs to focus more attention on resources, on what they are and how they work as an extension of the teacher in school mathematics practice. In so doing, the report provides a language with which mathematics teacher educators and mathematics teachers can investigate teachers' use of resources to support mathematical learning in particular and diverse contexts. This revised version was published online in September 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Teaching Nature of Science to Preservice Science Teachers: A Phenomenographic Study of Chinese Teacher Educators’ Conceptions

Drawing from the phenomenographic perspective, this study investigated Chinese science teacher educators’ conceptions of teaching nature of science (NOS) to preservice science teachers through two semi-structured interviews. The subjects were twenty-four science teacher educators in the developed regions in China. Five key dimensions emerged from the data on the conceptions of teaching NOS, including value of teaching NOS, NOS content to be taught, incorporation of NOS instruction in courses, learning of NOS, and role of the teacher. While some of these dimensions share much similarity with those reported in the studies of conceptions of teaching in general, some are distinctively different, which is embedded in some unique features of teaching NOS to preservice science teachers. These key dimensions can constitute the valuable components of the module or course to train science teachers or teacher educators to teach NOS, provide a framework to interpret the practice of teaching NOS, as well as lay a foundation for probing the conceptions of teaching NOS of other groups of subjects (e.g., school teachers’ conceptions of teaching NOS) or in other contexts (e.g., teaching NOS to in-service teacher).     

Effective teaching in elementary mathematics: Identifying classroom practices that support student achievement

Recent investigations into the education production function have moved beyond traditional teacher inputs, such as education, certification, and salary, focusing instead on observational measures of teaching practice. However, challenges to identification mean that this work has yet to coalesce around specific instructional dimensions that increase student achievement. I build on this discussion by exploiting within-school, between-grade, and cross-cohort variation in scores from two observation instruments; further, I condition on a uniquely rich set of teacher characteristics, practices, and skills. Findings indicate that inquiry-oriented instruction positively predicts student achievement. Content errors and imprecisions are negatively related, though these estimates are sensitive to the set of covariates included in the model. Two other dimensions of instruction, classroom emotional support and classroom organization, are not related to this outcome. Findings can inform recruitment and development efforts aimed at improving the quality of the teacher workforce.     

Trainee Change through Teacher Training: A case study in training English language teachers in Spain

In the course of giving greater importance to trainees' previous knowledge about and experience of teaching and learning foreign languages, the role of teacher training courses as agents of change has recently been questioned. Through a research project reported in this article I tried to find out to what extent two teacher training courses I was recently involved in caused trainees to change their points of view in relation to some of the fundamental issues involved in teaching. Special attention was given to the sources of these modifications, particularly to the role that teaching practice plays in them.     

The Place of English Revisited

In this essay I explore the constraints and opportunities confronting me as a newly qualified teacher and how these affect my pedagogy. I have reflected on my own development from beginning to newly qualified teacher and considered how such forces have shaped my identity as a teacher, my values and my approach to the job. As part of my exploration of my practice and the values I hold, I have revisited ‘The Place of English’, an essay I wrote midway through my Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) year; I have reconsidered how the current climate of educational reform and my subsequent experience have altered or strengthened these initial perceptions. In what follows I have reflected critically on two episodes of teaching and learning with my Year 10 class, my most challenging group, in order to further understand the way in which I have responded to the responsibilities and pressures placed on a classroom teacher. These pressures, I suggest, are intensified by the preconceptions of age and gender within my school and implicit more widely in the traditional values of our culture. The fragments of my practice that I have explored reveal tensions that gesture at a gap between educational theory, first-hand professional experience and governmental policy. They present an argument to resist the temptations of oversimplified, linear conceptions of teaching and learning, and maintain the place of English as a subject of creativity, exploration and expression that, at its heart, values both individual and collective student voices and identities.     

Paying Attention to Bodies in Education: theoretical resources and practical suggestions

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education (ECE) and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education (since 2001). These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary that dominates ECE and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators.     

Missing voices and possible dialogues: problems and possibilities for teacher education

ABSTRACT

Teacher education exists today in a context of rapid globalization, which affects the systems in which future teachers will work, the governance of teachers’ work, the students teachers will be teaching, as well as the policies, programs, curricula and students in teacher education itself. Several ideas recently have gained traction internationally and are shaping the working landscape of teaching and teacher education in many countries. This essay critically examines the circulation of what appear to be a small set of ‘core’ ideas that are influencing national and institutional policies of teacher education. I explore the emergence of new players in teacher education internationally, including individuals, corporations, and international bodies. Using policy documents, influential research studies, university program statements, and interviews, the essay provides a discursive analysis of the contradictory voices in what is becoming a global conversation of teacher education. In many ways, these ideas marginalize the voices of teachers and teacher educators. They tend to narrow the definitions of education and teaching. As a counterpoint to these widely circulating arguments, I explore how reciprocal teacher education exchange programs in China and the US create opportunities for alternative constructions of visions of teaching and teacher learning.     

Using the Nuthall lens on learning to sharpen perceptions of teacher education practice

In this article I consider what teacher educators might learn about our own teaching practice from Nuthall's work on learning in elementary school classrooms. Using key ideas from Nuthall's theory of student learning applied to data from two prior studies of my own teacher education practice, I illustrate how his work might provide a productive way for teacher educators to analyze and critique the tasks they use to promote the learning of prospective teachers.     

Affect: a tool to support pedagogical change

In the early childhood education field, the way children are conceptualised has substantially shifted in recent times. Child development theory has been unsettled as the single canon of early childhood practice. This has in turn challenged constructions of educators as keepers of a universal knowledge base, and as apolitical, non-interventionist facilitators of the natural unfolding development of individuals. While reconceptualising the early childhood knowledge base has oriented theorists and activists towards equity, unsettling educator subjectivities requires careful consideration in a feminised profession such as early childhood education. There is a need for greater discussion about how educators experience the uncertainties that accompany profound changes in teaching practice and identities and how educators can harness these uncertainties in ways that strengthen the profession. In this paper, I offer excerpts from teacher research that show how theories of affect support practitioners to engage productively the reflexivity needed to reconceptualise their roles as educators. I use affect theory to consider how the intra- and inter-personal dimensions of critically reflective practice can bolster the democratic and collectivist orientations in the teaching profession.     

Student teachers’ perceptions of reading and the teaching of reading: the implications for teacher education

This article reports on research which identified perceptions of reading and the teaching of reading held by trainee teachers and the impact on my provision as a teacher educator. It found that students’ past and present experiences of learning to read and being a reader influenced their perceptions of what reading is and of what it means to teach reading. As a teacher educator, I am not able to give students long experience of seeing children becoming readers, but I am able to give them richer experiences of reading in personally and culturally relevant contexts. This has implications for the nature of subject knowledge required by a student teacher of reading and the curriculum and practice of teacher education.     

Validating Teacher Performativity through Lifelong School-University Collaboration

Abstract

The main point of this article is that more credence should be given in teacher education to performative dimensions of teaching. I agree with David Carr (1999) that the requisite capabilities are probably best learned in actual schools. I employ Turnbull’s (2000) conception of performativity, which speaks of tacit cultural learning. Following Wilfred Carr (1987) I go back to Aristotle, and to debate between Gadamer and Habermas, before arriving at the view that expert teaching practice should be in the spirit of phronesis. The article then proposes that school-university collaboration should be the standard motif of teacher preparation, the context within which the spirit of phronesis can be realized and modeled.     

Students' voice on literature teacher excellence. Towards a teacher-organized model of continuing professional development

This study contributes to the development of empirically based, domain-specific teaching standards in upper secondary education. It is part of a Dutch project to develop ecologically valid teaching standards and to find a teacher-organized model for continuing professional development. A previous study about teachers' perceptions of what constitutes an excellent teacher of literature resulted in a set of six domain-specific teaching standards. In this study, an exploratory factor analysis was performed to find out which dimensions or characteristics of an excellent teacher of literature could be gleaned from the students' perspective. We found four similar and two complementary dimensions.     

从翻译的“文化转向”看对外汉语教学的文化自觉

对外汉语教学作为第二语言教学,与第一语言的教学过程最大的不同,就在于第二语言教学和学习需要进行跨文化与跨语际的交流。这一特点决定了对外汉语教学是一种＂翻译＂实践。近年来翻译学科的＂文化转向＂尤其是有关＂翻译政治＂的讨论,势必对对外汉语学科的自我认同与自我理解产生重要的启示。能否在对外汉语教学中形成一种文化自觉,将对外汉语教学理解为一种重要的文化传播手段,已成为决定对外汉语教学——汉语国际推广成败的关键。