Working together: strategies that support cross-cultural engagement of Indigenous teacher assistants working in Indigenous contexts

Indigenous teacher assistants (ITAs) are often employed in schools to assist in addressing educational issues relating to Indigenous students. While, this practice has occurred for over 40 years in most Australian states, little has been written about their contribution in assisting Indigenous students to learn. This paper explores the influence of a large longitudinal research project (Representations Oral Language and Engagement in Mathematics) with respect to the role of ITAs in supporting Indigenous students’ to learn mathematics. Data are collected from the perspectives of ITAs, teachers and school principals. In particular, the research proposes that including ITAs in high stakes professional learning, not only changes their confidence and contribution in the classrooms but also allows them and their students to begin to “walk” between the two knowledge worlds, Indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge.     

地方高师高层次教师教育人才培养的机遇与对策

教师教育的变革给地方师范大学发展带来了前所未有的挑战;《国家中长期教育改革和发展规划纲要》颁布及全国教育工作会议的召开,对教师教育提出了新的要求;我国研究生教育结构性调整,为地方师范大学发展提供了新的视角。笔者认为,地方师范大学将挑战与要求转化为发展动力,抓住难得发展机遇,提升教师教育人才培养层次,扩大教育硕士规模,坚持培养原则,创新培养保障措施,确保培养质量,是其充分发挥自身优势与突出办学特色,在激烈市场竞争中谋求长远发展的较佳选择。     

Transformational practice: critical teacher research in pre-service teacher education

This article traces the experiences of three pre-service teachers as they engaged in teacher research as part of their teacher education program and considers how teacher research might disrupt dominant paradigms that aim to de-contextualize teaching and offer one-size-fits-all solutions to address inequities. In particular, the article examines: the role of the teacher’s personal and academic history in the design of their teacher research projects; how their research worked to disrupt and complicate classroom cultures and practices; and the ways in which the pre-service teachers interpreted their research in light of new contexts during their first year of teaching. This work has critical implications in an era when teacher education programs are under attack, including: the value of drawing on pre-service teachers' lived experiences as an entry point into inquiry; creating highly localized inquiries; and positioning novice teachers as knowledgeable practitioners who are able to share research with colleagues.     

关于数学教师教育的若干思考（续）

剖析了当前我国数学教师教育中存在的若干问题,并提出了一些改进的思路与方法．     

Field-based teacher education in literacy: preparing teachers in real classroom contexts

For the past two decades, scholars have advocated for reforms in teacher education that emphasize relevant connections between theory and practice in university coursework and focus on clinical experiences. This paper is based on our experiences in designing and implementing an integrated literacy methods course in a field-based teacher education program. We describe issues involved in helping preservice teachers learn to differentiate literacy instruction for diverse learners in urban schools and describe how we use Grossman’s framework of representation, decomposition, and approximation of practice to connect theory and practice. We offer insights about the importance of using recursive cycles of practice and carefully scaffolded learning through attention to different aspects of practice. Initial successes and challenges in implementing field-based literacy education are discussed.     

Creating frames of practice for teacher education

Conceptualising teacher learning as being immersed in and arising from the totality of professional practice, this paper reports experiences and insights from practice-based teacher education. Initial data are drawn from two sites of seven involved in the federally funded School Centres for Teaching Excellence programme conducted in the state of Victoria, Australia. This programme is arranged as a partnership between the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development and various school clusters and universities. Each university is working with a cluster of primary and secondary schools and with large numbers (20–100) of pre-service teachers allocated to schools across each cluster. In general, PSTs in Victoria University’s two clusters are placed at each school for 2 days per week with some block time throughout the year. Some university units of study are taught on-site by visiting lecturers with a strong emphasis being placed on the mentoring of PSTs by classroom teachers. Interviews with mentors/mentees and teachers, PSTs and principals indicate a particular understanding or approach to an issue of learning or relationship that provides a frame/scaffold of practice. Further practice begins to detail the frame for continuing application. We are considering the notion of frame as a conceptual skeleton of understanding that arises from school and classroom practice and is formatted in practice. Cases of practice have been reported in the paper below that indicate preliminary understandings and engagement with this concept for the learning of teachers.     

Deliberate practice in teacher education

Deliberate practice is increasingly recognised as necessary for professional development. This paper sets out to explore in what ways student teachers’ learning activities in a teacher education programme can be characterised as deliberate practice. Based on an in-depth exploration of 574 learning activities, our results highlight the different ways in which activities in teacher education programmes can be designed, the different motivations students have to engage in them repetitively, and different ways in which feedback can be organised, within contextual constraints posed by all professional environments. Results also indicate that self-improvement is not the only motivation for engaging in deliberate practice for student teachers, as pupil improvement is also considered important. These results support a context-specific operationalisation of deliberate practice and provide starting points for teacher education programmes to promote deliberate practice in their curriculum.     

Preparing teachers as allies in Indigenous education: benefits of an American Indian content and pedagogy course

The study explores relationship building and improvements in knowledge, skills, and dispositions of pre-service teachers enrolled in an Indigenous education content and pedagogy methods course. The Teaching American Indian Students in the Elementary Classroom course stands alone from other diversity education offerings at the University of Minnesota Duluth and is a required learning experience. Pre-service teachers are provided with essential knowledge and learning opportunities that facilitate success in working with Indigenous students, and helping mainstream students learn about Native history, peoples, and communities. The evaluation study was conducted by an Indigenous faculty member interested in learning how non-Native teacher education students felt they were achieving target knowledge, skills, and dispositional goals. Three separate groups of teacher education students completed both pre and post online surveys as a part of a three-year mixed methods evaluation study. The study shows significant gains made by pre-service teachers in each of the target areas, and affirms that methods coursework in American Indian education can lead to more interculturally competent teacher candidates. Helping teacher education students develop the requisite abilities and dispositions to fulfill Native American education objectives is contributory to developing future teachers as competent professionals and allies in Indigenous and diversity education.     

Science education: innovation in rural and remote Queensland schools

Outside its heavily-populated south-eastern corner, Queensland is a huge administrative area with many small, remote communities that can be separated by hundreds of kilometres of dirt road, or, in other areas, not accessible by road. In this study, parents, students and teachers in nine schools from rural and regional Queensland were interviewed about their perceptions of school science. Teachers, parents and students defined remoteness by reference to their social ties, as well as the social capital and resources they drew on to teach science meaning that not only did different groups differ in their interpretations of remoteness; different teachers in similar circumstances also responded differently. Science teachers’ responses to remoteness were related to their perceptions of school-community communication and their perceptions of their freedom to innovate. Teachers who felt that remoteness gave them more freedom and recognised opportunities to utilise their environment created innovative and relevant science programmes. Teachers who felt their remoteness gave them less freedom felt isolated from the community were less likely to innovate.     

The role of non-formal contexts in teacher education for STEM: the case of horno3 science and technology interactive centre

Abstract

Teacher education can benefit directly from experiences in non-formal settings. This article presents a research study with elementary teachers who were teaching in public schools in the state of Nuevo León, México, and participated in a STEM Continuous Professional Development (CPD) workshop. The workshop provided a platform for teachers to interact with scientists and disseminators of science, allowing the appropriation of scientific knowledge applied to everyday activities and settings. Participants improved the quality of their teaching practices in classrooms and gained a new understanding of STEM subjects, enabling them to promote inspiring learning experiences with their students, where dialogue, experimentation and elucidation became an important part of their lessons. The study was carried out using ethnographic tools for analysing recorded videos, 15 sets of field notes, and 49 questionnaires. The sequential analysis of talk and gestures in their participation in the CPD workshop demonstrated high levels of involvement, creativity, and collaborative solution of STEM problems.     

创新型体育骨干教师培训的理论与实践

骨干教师培训是新一轮课程改革实施过程中的一项重要任务。应以培养创新型教师为目标,培训内容应有前瞻性和可操作性,培训方式应当符合成年学习者的特点,以多元评价方式检验效果。     

Voice over distance: a case of podcasting for learning in online teacher education

This paper reports on a case study of an online pre-service teacher education course in a New Zealand university aimed at exploring the potential of student-generated podcasts as a form of interactive formative assessment at a distance. The study was part of a wider two-year funded project with the overall goal of documenting, developing, and disseminating effective and innovative e-learning practice. Findings from lecturer and tutor interviews, student focus group (FG) discussion, and course evaluations indicate that the podcasting task provided opportunities for the course lecturer, tutors, and students to learn and share ideas with one another. The experience empowered students to develop the skills and confidence to initiate more independent inquiry into technologies to support their pedagogical purposes. The study contributes to a better understanding of the skills, dispositions, and knowledge needed to prepare teacher candidates for teaching-learning contexts where information and communication technologies are increasingly pivotal.     

From student to teacher: changes in preservice teacher educational beliefs throughout the learning-to-teach journey

Preservice teachers enter programs with beliefs about teaching and learning, constructed from prior schooling experiences. This longitudinal study examines preservice teachers’ K–12 memories, their initial educational beliefs, and the changes in those beliefs over their teacher education program. Analysis of questionnaires, interviews, work samples, and observations from six preservice teachers collected over a two-year period revealed that they initially believed that students were similar to themselves, that teaching was simple and autonomous, that students perform uniformly within grade levels, and that teaching ensures learning. At program’s end, however, they believed that students differ from one another and from themselves, that teaching is complex, that classroom freedom has limits, that differentiation is essential, and that teaching does not ensure learning. The data suggested a common progression from initial idealism, to cognitive dissonance, to a search for an authentic teaching persona, and finally, to confidence in their new role as teacher.     

Narrative inquiry in service learning contexts: Possibilities for learning about diversity in teacher education

This paper explores the experiences of pre- and in-service teachers through intentionally created narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006) spaces within three different service-learning engagements in Canada, Kenya, and Turkey. Because the contexts where our studies were situated were culturally different from participants' backgrounds, narrative inquiry spaces shaped windows in which participants could restory their understandings of others different from themselves. We argue thinking narratively suits the purpose of learning within service learning, highlighting the potential this kind of work holds for pre- and in-service teachers' professional identities in school contexts shaped by diversity.     

Evaluation of reflective practice in teacher education

Teacher education based on ‘reflective practice’ consists of observing, analysing and reflecting on teacher performance in order to improve professional practice. This article presents the results of an evaluation of a programme on mathematics teaching carried out using reflective practice. It was targeted at 284 teachers in various stages of the education system, using an approach that combines quantitative (surveys) and qualitative (interviews and reports) methods. While the study shows that the education programme generates high levels of satisfaction, pedagogical appropriateness and learning, its achievements in effectiveness are moderate. Although, in general, what is learned through teacher education is implemented in the classroom, it is done so in an isolated fashion, in other words, individually and without becoming a part of the culture of the school. The results show little evidence of its impact on student learning. The article offers proposals for improving the education programme, while, at the same time, analysing the usefulness of the approach and evaluation tools employed.     

Collaborative teacher education: forging tangible connections between field and classroom

This paper describes a collaboration between the authors, a university course instructor for an introductory Learning Sciences course in a university-based teacher education program, and a site coordinator for its paired practicum experience. Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the collaborators found that their weekly conversations focused on supporting novice teacher learning had the potential to (1) lead to more strategic support of pre-service teachers, and (2) lend greater insights into the nature of the larger teacher education activity system in which they both worked. They consider the ways the seemingly simple addition of weekly conversations across sites of teacher learning can create spaces that collapse traditional theory/practice divides in teacher education.     

Challenges to prepare pre-service teachers for inclusive education in Bangladesh: beliefs of higher educational institutional heads

This paper reveals the beliefs of higher education institutional heads about the challenges they face in preparing pre-service teachers for inclusive education in Bangladesh. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 institutional heads. Data were analysed by applying thematic analysis procedure. Challenges were found in four theme areas: attitudinal beliefs, academic challenges, challenges in practicum and challenges for beginning teachers. Lack of appropriate information in the teacher preparation curriculum, untrained teacher educators, limited resources, inappropriate teaching-learning approaches, insufficient practicum experiences, and large class sizes were some of the major challenges identified. Participants also identified some useful strategies to address the challenges which ranged from curriculum reform, emphasizing practicum more than theories, human resource development empowering institutional heads to implement inclusion and resource support. Implications of the findings for university educators are discussed.     

Policy interventions in teacher education: sharing the English experience

Over the last 40 years, teacher education in England has been the focus of a stream of ‘reforms’ with the ultimate aim of placing provision into schools, the justification for such a radical policy being that higher education is alleged to be failing to provide good quality teachers thereby compromising the social and economic development of the country. The process whereby these reforms have been introduced is described and then used as a way of comparing and contrasting the way in which similar reforms can be identified in the international teacher education communities represented in this special issue of the Journal of Education for Teaching (JET). The paper closes by identifying lessons that can be learned from international comparators.     

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.