The ideal teacher: orientations of teacher education in Sweden and Finland after the Second World War

There are many similarities between the Nordic countries of Sweden and Finland, but they have made different decisions regarding their teacher-education policies. This article focuses on how the objectives of teacher education, particularly the vision of the ideal teacher, have changed in Sweden and Finland in the period after the Second World War. In Finland, the period since the 1960s can be described as a gradual scientification of teacher education. The image of the ideal teacher has transformed according to a research-based agenda, where teachers are expected to conduct minor-scale research in the classroom. In Sweden since the 1980s, on the other hand, teacher education has oscillated between progressivist and academic orientations, following shifts in government between the Social Democratic Party and the centre-right. Since the turn of the millennium, however, a consensus in favour of a strengthened research base of teacher education has also emerged in Sweden.     

From school teacher to university lecturer: Illuminating the journey from the classroom to the university for two arts educators

This article aims to provide insights into the journey of two artist teachers who currently work as arts educators at the university level. Narrative inquiry has been used to discuss how the arts have informed their identities and subsequent transition into their current roles. The identities of artist, artist teacher and arts educator are considered in relation to how these have informed and continue to inform their teaching. The unique characteristics of those who work in the arts are also explored and provide important understandings in relation to the mentoring and support required for educators who work in this context.     

Personal,professional, political: an exploration of science teacher identity development for teaching climate change

Abstract

Climate change presents societal and environmental challenges, as well as educational ones. Obstacles abound within teaching and learning climate change, related to its complex nature, the proliferation of misinformation, and its absence from many science curricula. Efforts have previously been made to study teacher content knowledge and beliefs on climate change with varying results. This study employed identity as a theoretical framework to examine aspects of climate change teaching. This study followed a reflexively iterative process that enabled the construction of a conceptual model for identity development. This model demonstrates multifaceted influences including personal, professional, and political elements, and the dynamism these elements exhibit over time. This conceptual model is best described via five trends: Personal Valuation of Nature; Experiences in Science Teaching and Learning; Teacher Instructional Support and Agency; Epistemic Evidence-based Instruction; and Civic and Social Awareness via Socioscientific Literacy. The presence and strength of enactment of each trend led to the development of four possible constructions of identity: Passionate Environmentalist, Student Interest Engager, Content First Educator, and Civic and Epistemic Skills Promoter. Most frequently teachers exhibited combinations of identities and often created a unique amalgam of multiple dimensions of identities in action.     

Transcultural teacher development within the dialectic of the global and local: Bridging gaps between East and West

Amid far-reaching global social and economic changes, increasing diversity and growing interdependency, teachers play important roles in creating successful futures for both individuals and society. Within the dialectic of global and local, and with increasing connectivity amongst teachers, opportunities for transformational learning fostering empathy, global citizenship, and social justice are unprecedented. Thus, teacher education reform should facilitate transcultural collaboration, collegiality and critical perspectives to counter Western hegemony of knowledge, Eurocentric education, neo-colonialism, and neoliberal/conservative agendas. This paper investigates these issues and teachers' personal practical and professional knowledge through narratives of West-to-East and East-to-West transcultural journeys as teacher educators.     

Narrative inquiry for teacher education and development: Focus on English as a foreign language in China

Teacher education and development takes place within an encompassing local system of education and ongoing forms of school improvement. Critical to successful teacher development when Western ideas are being adopted in other cultures is narratively linking development programmes to this local education system, such as in China, and to its culturally established ways of knowing and being. This paper presents a narrative inquiry approach to teacher development that builds on the existing educational system, ongoing school reforms, and culturally established ways of knowing and being. The paper concludes with the potential of teacher development to shape global values that may be shared among cultures.     

Narrative construction of teacher identity: positioning and negotiation

This study investigates the ways in which the disciplines of science and literature influence concepts related to thinking among teachers at colleges of education. Tools were developed to distinguish between what teachers declared to be important in the thinking skills necessary for their discipline and the skills the teachers actually used. A quantitative and qualitative analysis was carried out of the findings. Thinking skills unique to each discipline and common thinking skills were found. The study revealed the discrepancy between the declared views of thinking skills held by teachers and their active use. Results of this research can help build an environment that develops a culture of thinking among both teachers and future teachers in educational colleges.     

Narrative construction of professional teacher identity of teachers with dyslexia

This paper considers the development of teachers’ professional identity in the context of educators that have diverse backgrounds. We elucidate how teachers with dyslexia working in tertiary education use narrative resources to construct and negotiate their professional teacher identities. The analysis of narrative interviews, interpreted within the framework of positioning theory and the theories of narrative identity, indicated that the interviewees constructed several professional teacher identities that were closely linked to each teacher’s perception of their dyslexia. The experience of dyslexia was clearly evident as a positive element in each identity. Instead of seeing it as an obstacle it can become a part of the teacher’s own identity and can be used as a tool to thrive in their profession.     

Tales out of school: Tracing perspective change through the stories of former teachers

Most public school teachers in the United States now leave the classroom before reaching retirement. This study examined the accounts of certified, experienced teachers who left teaching after making significant investments in the career in order to better understand their exit decisions. Anecdotes told by these invested leavers as they described their career were examined through a narrative lens. The analysis indicated a shift in perspective: as the teachers moved through their career, the primary sources of frustration for these former teachers switched from students to adults.     

Six teaching orientations of Holocaust educators as reflections of teaching perspectives and meaning making processes

This study explored processes of curricular reinterpretation made by teachers who teach about the Holocaust. We conducted holistic narrative analyses of in-depth interviews with 31 American Holocaust educators. Six teaching orientations were identified: passionate historical, mythologizing-transforming, social-contemporizing, empathic-personalizing, riveting-shocking, and pragmatic-socializing. We offer vignettes for each orientation and compare them to other teaching perspective typologies, highlighting the novelty and utility of the presented typology. The findings demonstrate how narrative identity, meaning-making processes and teaching perspectives interconnect and lead teachers to reinterpret the Holocaust in their teaching. These findings have implications for teaching complex and value-laden topics.     

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.     

Tracing one teacher candidate's discursive identity work

Drawing on the work of one teacher candidate, I demonstrate what can be learnt about the process of discursively constructing a teacher identity through the close study of written plans and portfolios. This teacher candidate positioned herself differently over time in relation to discourses from her teacher education programme about the importance of using detailed knowledge of students to guide planning and instruction. In the end, she downplayed specific information about students, arguing students' interests were “worthless.” The findings have implications for the ways teacher educators work with teacher candidates around artefacts of practice.     

Mathematical biography and key rhetoric

The intention of this article is to consider the use of narrative and rhetorical inquiry as research methods. I construct a mathematical biography of one elementary teacher trainee, Sirpa, who had performed well in her advanced mathematics course in upper secondary school. I describe her development as a mathematics teacher during teacher education from her second-year methods course and teaching practice to fourth-year teaching practice. Narrative inquiry is more than a case study: Sirpa’s mathematical biography is a story that describes how she constructs her mathematical identity. I also analysed the key rhetoric that Sirpa used in her talk, key rhetoric here referring to the strategy by which she constructed continuity and coherence.     

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.     

Teacher epistemology and collective narratives: Interrogating teaching and diversity

This action research study interrogates how one teacher educator analyzed her pedagogy and engaged her students in writing narratives about working with children, families, and co-workers who are racially and ethnically different from themselves. Data were collected from a special topic graduate course entitled, Epistemology, Diversity and Teaching, at a large Midwestern university. Issues such as “otherness”, the culture of power, and white privilege were some key concepts addressed in the course. Findings indicated that use of key readings and meaningful discussion on controversial issues enhanced students’ ability to take multiple perspectives, recognize the significance of student epistemology, and acknowledge the importance of culturally relevant pedagogy to meet the needs of a diverse student body.     

Technology use and mathematics teaching: teacher change as discursive identity work

Teacher change towards developing competences for technology use in mathematics teaching has been the focus of current educational reforms worldwide. However, a considerable amount of research denotes the extent to which teachers resist a full integration of technology in mathematics classrooms. The present paper is based on an ethnographic study and focuses on how mathematics teachers – as they participate in an intensive training course – perform identity work whilst collectively articulating meanings concerning the potential of technology-based mathematics learning. By means of discourse theory, we analyse how they try to fix meaning as they engage and interact with varied discourses of ‘change’. Our findings indicate that mathematics teachers' attempts to articulate meaning are organised around discourses that concern directly societal and learning issues of technology use in mathematics teaching.     

Learning and collaboration in pre-service teacher education: Narrative analysis in a service learning experience at Andalusian public schools

In this article we take up the task of presenting and analyzing a Service Learning experience developed in a class of the major in Primary Education Teaching at the University of Malaga, in Andalusia, Spain. It consists of a narrative analysis of autobiographical texts –final reports and online interviews – produced by pre-service teachers. We aimed to understand how participants learned about the teaching profession throughout their trajectory in the project. The results indicate pre-service teachers (1) learn by feeling, (2) learn by belonging, (3) learn by placing action in a social perspective, and (4) learn by sharing experiences with others.     

Now and then,in and out of the classroom: Teachers learning to teach through the experiences of their living curricula

How, when, and where do teachers learn to teach? Guided by this question, this article examines the relationships between teachers' living and teaching experiences. Through narrative inquiry, it stories “curricular currents” of three teachers from different teaching contexts, noting the continuity, interaction, and place of the experiences that comprise these currents. It argues that these teachers have learned to teach through their “living curricula,” across all times and places of their lives, not just classroom moments. It concludes by charging teacher education to attend closely to teachers' exploration and analysis of their lives' experiences, in and out of classrooms.     

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.