Teacher Educator Identity in a Culture of Iterative Teacher Education Program Design: A Collaborative Self-Study

Faculty in the School of Education have collaborated to re-envision teacher education at our university. A complex, dynamic, time-consuming and sometimes painstaking process, redesigning a teacher education program from a traditional approach (i.e. where courses focus primarily on theoretical principles of practice through textbooks and university-based classroom discussions) to a model of teacher education that embraces teaching, learning and leading with schools and in communities is challenging, yet exciting work. Little is known about teacher educators’ experiences as they either design or deliver collaborative field-based models of teacher education. In this article, we examine our experiences in the second implementation year of our redesigned teacher education program, Teaching, Learning, and Leading with Schools and Communities (TLLSC) and how these unique experiences inform our teacher educator identities. Through a collaborative self-study, we sought to make meaning of our transformation from a faculty delivering a traditional model to educators collectively implementing a field-based model, by analyzing the diverse perspectives of faculty at different entry points in the TLLSC development and implementation process. We found that our participation in an intensive field-based teacher preparation model challenged our notions of teacher educator identity. In a culture of iterative program design, this study documents the personal and professional shifts in identity required to accomplish this collaborative and dynamic change in approach to teacher education.     

The how and why of academic collaboration: disciplinary differences and policy implications

This paper examines how and why academics in different parts of the academy collaborate. In this paper we argue that: (1) There is a useful analytical distinction to be made between collaboration (fluid and expressive) and Collaboration (concrete and instrumental); (2) These two are not mutually exclusive and their use varies between disciplines; and (3) This distinction is an informative one for policy making that aims to encourage collaboration. Two interview based studies were used to explore the differences in collaborative practices across disciplines. The first was small and confined to a single university (n = 36) and the second was a larger study conducted in three countries (n = 274). Cross tabulations and analysis of open ended questions demonstrated many differences across the humanities, sciences and social sciences in collaboration. The C/collaboration distinction proves useful in understanding different disciplinary approaches to research, and in pointing to implications for research policy and funding. Attempts to increase collaborative research through Collaboration only, may well have deleterious effects on both collaboration and Collaboration. Research policy and funding should bear these differences in mind when seeking to stimulate collaborative research, so as to gain better outcomes across a range of disciplines.     

Partnership as cultural practice in the face of neoliberal reform

This article examines the nature of an on-going educational partnership between a Higher Education institution and a number of Further Education (FE) colleges in the West Midlands region of England, forged against the backdrop of sectoral marketisation and neoliberal reform. The partnership originates in the organisation and administration of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses for FE student-teachers across a range of sites. These collaborative ITE programmes prepare students to teach in FE settings and conceptualise the FE teacher as a critically informed practitioner, equipped to engage with research and knowledge production practices in the sector. The permeable grouping of teacher educators that has emerged identifies itself as a ‘community of practice’ and uses this concept in the development of a pattern of cultural interaction that scaffolds the continuing professional development of practitioners across the region. This article outlines the underpinning values of the Higher Education (HE)/FE partnership and explores how the partnership has responded to the neoliberal policyscape. Through a number of examples, the authors illustrate how this community seeks to translate shared beliefs into everyday practice, not least through a critical and participatory approach to practitioner research activities which challenges the performative practices that have come to dominate FE in England.     

Communication in Mind,Brain, and Education: Making Disciplinary Differences Explicit

Difficulties in communication within Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) can arise from several sources. One source is differences in orientation among the areas of research, policy, and practice. Another source is lack of understanding of the entrenched and unspoken differences across research disciplines in MBE—that is, recognition that research in MBE comes from many diverse disciplines, rather than some monolithic entity. A third challenge to communication in MBE arises from the nature of studying the mind and brain; we address the different levels of analysis in mind–brain research. Throughout our article, we emphasize that recognizing these differences—across areas (research, practice, and policy), disciplines, and levels of analysis—and making them explicit can facilitate effective communication in MBE. We illustrate these concepts with examples from the study of reading disorders across several disciplines.     

How clicker use facilitates existing pedagogical practices in higher education: data from interdisciplinary research on student response systems

This article identifies how clicker use can support or augment existing principles of good teaching across different disciplines in higher education. While many of these principles will be familiar to instructors, the link between student response system (SRS) use and existing pedagogical methods is still often unclear, even for scholars who are well read in the literature. Functioning as a resource for both novices and instructors who have already incorporated clickers into their courses, this article synthesizes existing literature and offers empirical data from five courses in three disciplines to show how SRSs can be used to support contemporary pedagogical goals. The authors discuss five exemplary practices, providing sample clicker questions along the way, to show how clickers can be used to facilitate active learning in large courses.     

Understanding gaps in research networks: using “spatial reasoning” as a window into the importance of networked educational research

This paper finds its origins in a multidisciplinary research group’s efforts to assemble a review of research in order to better appreciate how “spatial reasoning” is understood and investigated across academic disciplines. We first collaborated to create a historical map of the development of spatial reasoning across key disciplines over the last century. The map informed the structure of our citation search and oriented an examination of connection across disciplines. Next, we undertook a network analysis that was based on highly cited articles in a broad range of domains. Several connection gaps—that is, apparent blockages, one-way flows, and other limitations on communications among disciplines—were identified in our network analysis, and it was apparent that these connection gaps may be frustrating efforts to understand the conceptual complexity and the educational significance of spatial reasoning. While these gaps occur between the academic disciplines that we evaluated, we selected a few examples for closer analysis. To illustrate how this lack of flow can limit development of the field of mathematics education, we selected cases where it is evident that researchers in mathematics education are not incorporating the important work of mathematicians, psychologists, and neuroscientists—and vice versa. Ultimately, we argue, a more pronounced emphasis on transdisciplinary (versus multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary) research might be timely, and perhaps even necessary, in the evolution of educational research.     

Adult learners’ social connectedness and online participation: the importance of online interaction quality

ABSTRACT

Online interaction has been associated with positive outcomes, academically and psychologically. Regarding the latter, social connectedness has been recognised as an important outcome on the basis of its link to subjective well-being and course satisfaction. In adult educational settings, how online interaction can foster social connectedness has not been widely examined. The study investigates how (1) adult learners’ online participation operationalised as discussion contribution, collaborative facilitation, and social interaction, and (2) their perceived online interaction quality are related to their feeling of social connectedness. The role of online interaction quality related to the three types of online participation and social connectedness is also examined. A questionnaire was developed to collect data from adult learner participants in Belgium (N?=?170). Multiple regressions and mediation analysis were conducted. The result shows that collaborative facilitation and online interaction quality significantly contribute to adult learners’ perceptions of social connectedness. Furthermore, the finding reveals that online interaction quality fully mediates the relationship between discussion contribution, social interaction, and social connectedness. Thus, the implications for research and instructional design are discussed.     

Collaborative approaches in initial teacher education: lessons from approaches to developing student teachers’ use of the Internet in science teaching

In many countries, governments are keen to persuade teachers at all levels to seek to enhance the learning of their students by incorporating information and communication technologies within their classrooms. This paper reports on the development of collaborative approaches to supporting use of the Internet by Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) science students on initial teacher education (ITE) courses in England, drawing on data from five higher education institution (HEI)–school partnerships across four years. A mixed-method approach was used, involving questionnaires, structured interviews, lesson observations and case studies. The outcomes of the first three years identified barriers to practice and suggested the need to develop more collaborative approaches to development. The focus of this paper is on examining ways in which university faculty tutors and mentors or cooperating teachers can work together with students on PGCE courses in developing practice. The lessons from this focus on the Internet, no longer a new technology, have enabled us to identify implications for HEI partnerships in ITE and suggest a need for further collaborative structures in order to support and develop practices, including those involving the innovative use of new technologies in the post-industrial society.     

New Community Schools and the measurement of transformation

The New Community Schools initiative was introduced in Scotland in 1998 with the aims of improving participation, raising achievement, improving health and transforming communities. The success of the initiative was evaluated in terms of the stated aims. In relation to improving participation and raising achievement, this was straightforward: improved participation was measured by the number of community activities and the number of individuals who became involved in these activities, whilst raised achievement was measured against tangible targets such as educational attainment and school attendance. The third outcome, the transformation of communities, was more complex: what was meant by transformation and how could it be evaluated? This paper draws on research undertaken by the Institute of Education, University of Stirling, UK, during a 2‐year evaluation period. During this period, the researchers found that individuals were developing more than just a means of communicating across different boundaries; individuals were acquiring a connectedness between one another and that this connectedness was crucial to the success of the subsequent communication and to the initiative more generally. In exploring this concept of connectedness, we consider the literature on social capital. We then consider how issues of trust and inter‐subjectivity underpin connectedness and highlight the evidence from our work that appears to correspond with these elements of connectedness. It is argued that connectedness may not only mediate outcomes such as improving participation, but also that they can be seen as valuable outcomes in themselves. Our final thoughts in this paper consider the kind of research that might be useful to explore the role of connectedness in relation to studying contexts in which individuals may have competing agendas.     

Applying activity theory to computer-supported collaborative learning and work-based activities in corporate settings

Business needs in many corporations call for learning outcomes that involve problem solutions, and creating and sharing new knowledge within worksplace situation that may involve collaboration among members of a team. We argue that work-based activities (WBA) and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) are appropriate components for courses in such learning situations. Via this approach, collaborative work situations become the core of a course. We further describe how activity theory can provide a framework for the design of courses that involve WBA and CSCL as part of a workplace-oriented activity system for learning. The use of this design approach for courses offered by the Learning and Leadership Development organization of Shell International Exploration and Production is described and an example is elaborated. Finally, we identify four main issues and challenges that arose during the use of the design approach.     

Mathematics for teaching and deep subject knowledge: voices of Mathematics Enhancement Course students in England

This article reports an investigation into how students of a mathematics course for prospective secondary mathematics teachers in England talk about the notion of ‘understanding mathematics in depth’, which was an explicit goal of the course. We interviewed eighteen students of the course. Through our social practice frame and in the light of a review of the literature on mathematical knowledge for teaching, we describe three themes that weave through the students’ talk: reasoning, connectedness and being mathematical. We argue that these themes illuminate privileged messages in the course, as well as the boundary and relationship between mathematical and pedagogic content knowledge in secondary mathematics teacher education practice.     

Disciplinary Text-Dependent Questions: Questioning for Learning in the Disciplines. The Challenge of Literacy in the Disciplines

The challenge of reading across disciplines is often not a matter of word recognition or general comprehension instruction; it is a matter of understanding how ideas are represented in the language and conventions of that discipline. In this article we describe a strategy for foregrounding the disciplines in the design and implementation of text-dependent questions in content area courses in order to accomplish a dual focus on content and discourse when using discipline-specific texts.     

How Children Regulate their Own Collaborative Learning

In this article we analyze the dialogic learning of one pair of students in order to investigate how these students cope with a collaborative learning situation in the classroom. Our aim is to substantiate the claims that not only are young students (8 year olds) capable of solving mathematical problems collaboratively, but that they also take an active role in regulating their collaborative learning activities. More specifically, our claim is that children appear to apply constructs of “mathematical level raising”, “social interaction” and “division of time” to steer their own collaborative learning and that they are rather successful in balancing these three aspects. The analysis is exploratory, but this new perspective on collaborative learning is relevant theoretically and consequential for classroom practice.     

The Influence of the Core Practices Movement on the Teaching and Perspectives of Novice Teacher Educators

This collaborative self-study examines the influence of engagement in the core practices movement on the course designs, instruction, and perspectives of three novice teacher educators at a large mid-Atlantic research university. Through core practices work, we integrated repeated cycles of analysis, practice, and reflection into our courses, ultimately becoming more deliberate and responsive in our planning. We engaged in more in-depth inquiry into our teaching as we inquired into the core practices with our teacher candidates and also noticed an enhanced use of shared language. Core practices work influenced our perspectives on the work of teacher educators by reaffirming our belief in the complexity of teaching and teacher education, raising important questions about the relationship between commitments and core practices and underscoring the value of learner-centered practices in teacher education. The finding of this self-study suggest that core practices present an opportunity to engage novice teacher educators in reflection, collaboration, and inquiry central to teacher education.     

On the global knowledge components in an information security curriculum–a multidisciplinary perspective

Because of the borderless feature of the Internet, information security threats could come from anywhere around the globe. In this research, we propose adding global knowledge components in the information security curriculum using a multi-disciplinary approach. We argue that a global perspective has been lacking in the current information security curriculum. We then propose several knowledge components to be added in the curriculum to enhance the global perspective. We also examine how to incorporate knowledge from various related disciplines, including political science, criminal justice, and business administration. Through our empirical study on faculty from various disciplines and the industry practitioners with first-hand information security knowledge, we confirm that the proposed knowledge components are relevant to the information security education and practice. Analyzing the similarities and differences among responses from various disciplines, we also found that albeit different disciplines have slightly different emphases on the curriculum components, they all tend to agree on the importance of adding the global perspectives in information security education. Our research could be of value to the educators in the information security field when considering incorporating a global perspective into the curriculum. It could also shed some lights when examining the relevance of global information security to various disciplines.     

Advantages and Challenges of Using Physics Curricula as a Model for Reforming an Undergraduate Biology Course

We report on the development of a life sciences curriculum, targeted to undergraduate students, which was modeled after a commercially available physics curriculum and based on aspects of how people learn. Our paper describes the collaborative development process and necessary modifications required to apply a physics pedagogical model in a life sciences context. While some approaches were easily adapted, others provided significant challenges. Among these challenges were: representations of energy, introducing definitions, the placement of Scientists’ Ideas, and the replicability of data. In modifying the curriculum to address these challenges, we have come to see them as speaking to deeper differences between the disciplines, namely that introductory physics—for example, Newton''s laws, magnetism, light—is a science of pairwise interaction, while introductory biology—for example, photosynthesis, evolution, cycling of matter in ecosystems—is a science of linked processes, and we suggest that this is how the two disciplines are presented in introductory classes. We illustrate this tension through an analysis of our adaptations of the physics curriculum for instruction on the cycling of matter and energy; we show that modifications of the physics curriculum to address the biological framework promotes strong gains in student understanding of these topics, as evidenced by analysis of student work.     

Improving Teaching Practice Through Interdisciplinary Dialog

This study presents the results of a self-study of interdisciplinary work that has generated profound changes in our teaching practices. The research grew out of an interest in exploring the nature of our work and the practices that contribute to its success. Our self-study revealed that our work process consists of five stages and is the product of careful weaving of our different disciplinary lenses. The five stages are creating a collaborative environment, initial inquiry, shared inquiry, scholarly connection, and in practice and beyond. We describe these stages in detail, illustrating our use of dialog, reflection, and scholarly inquiry across our disciplines to improve our teaching.