Strong back,legs, feet,and a good pair of shoes: Connecting stories of inspiring teachers to coursework in teacher education

Abstract

Because of their belief in the social interactionist model of teacher education, the authors read aloud to various undergraduate and graduate classes excerpts from published teacher stories, either vignettes or opinion pieces. Their immediate goals were to help build class community, advertise books that the students might then return to on their own, personalize discussion topics, and inspire continuing reflection and pride in the chosen profession. A more long‐term goal was to get students to internalize stories that would help guide their actions in the classroom. This article describes their use of teacher stories and includes some of the readings as well as a comprehensive list of teacher stories consulted. Student reactions were varied depending on the stories and the contexts of the readings. Reactions included apathy, evaluation of the teacher, self‐reflective journal entries, and a refusal to pass a book on to peers without the promise of being able to take it home. The authors are reading/language arts educators, who recommend the use of teacher stories for teacher education in all fields.     

Writing Workshops in Teacher Education: Making a space for feeling and diversity

Telling and writing personal stories is a powerful means of fostering teachers' professional growth. However, little attention has been paid to the professional and personal growth of teacher educators/researchers who engage with students and research participants in personal storytelling and autobiographical writing. This article explores the contribution of writing to the development of personal narratives of practice among teacher educators/researchers, and considers the potential of the writing workshop as a space where diverse voices can find expression. Drawing on phenomenological and narrative methods, we examine work with both pre-service and experienced teachers, describing the ways that space was created for a 'dialogue within difference' where participants could express themselves fully. The main questions addressed are: how does personal writing enable teacher educators to understand the experience of students; how do we as teacher educators/researchers learn about ourselves through the mirror of our students' writing and our response to it; and how do the institutional contexts of university and college affect the processes by which stories are told, reflected on and re-storied?     

Understanding the role of students’ reflections in their uptake of teacher written feedback

This study reports on the role of students’ reflections in their teacher written feedback. Informed by a qualitative case study approach, this study collected data from 18 students across a semester of an English-as-a-foreign language writing course at a university in China. In the course, teacher written feedback and students’ reflections were both informed by writing as a meaning-making process. The data sources included 72 pieces of student essays, 144 pieces of reflection written by the students, and post-semester interviews with the students. The study showed that engaging students in writing reflections was helpful for developing their knowledge of writing, although the process somewhat followed a zigzag trajectory. The exercise helped them transcend their previous knowledge repertoires, thereby assisting them in critically understanding their revision process and refining their knowledge of writing in response to the teacher’s written feedback. In particular, the students felt that the meaning-making-based reflections provided clear and accessible layers for them to understand the close relationship between language and content. As such, the students felt that they were able to harness their reflections as a written venue through which they could critically digest the teacher’s written feedback and develop their knowledge of writing as a meaning-making process while dialoguing with their instructor.     

Bridging the Gap from Teacher to Teacher Educator: The Role of a Teaching Portfolio

This article explores the role of a teaching portfolio in supporting the transition from teacher to teacher educator. It uses aspects of self-study to catalogue the challenges and successes during this transition. Despite well-documented acknowledgement of the differing demands of teaching when compared to teaching how to teach, little is written about potential supports during transition to teacher education. This article cites benefits associated with developing a teaching portfolio during this period of transition. The process of reflecting on a teaching philosophy, interrogating pedagogy and developing a personal and professional development plan facilitate the formation of an adapted teacher identity. In addition, the scholarly, evidence-based process of portfolio writing acts as a bridge into the research and writing world of an academic. The portfolio writing process this researcher engaged in was based on iterative feedback from more experienced colleagues internal to the institution and from external panels. This led to a supportive and collaborative induction to the role of teacher educator from a number of perspectives. The researching of my self enabled deep reflection on my teaching philosophy, supported early academic writing and facilitated relationships with staff who acted as critical friends and mentors. This promoted the implementation of an effective teacher education pedagogy through structured, reflective, and evidence-led modifications to practice. This article creates awareness of the broader role of a teaching portfolio for teachers and teacher educators, in creating rich learning experiences for the pre-service teachers we teach.     

Conversations with Technical Writing Teachers: Defining a Problem

This article brings to light a topic that surfaces regularly among technical writing practitioners and theorists but is rarely addressed in the literature of the field. Stuart Selber deals with it in his 1997 essay “Hypertext Spheres of Influence” (see especially page 30), but a check of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (ATTW) Bibliography for the last two years produced only one recent article obviously devoted to it (see Mitra). The topic centers around this question: Is teaching technology problematic for technical writing instructors? Voices are heard here of 64 ATTW members who were queried on their roles as teachers of technical writing in relation to the demands made upon them to also be teachers of technology skills. Answers are presented and examined in terms of “teacher lore”, the informal sharing of teacher experiences and opinion/feeling about those experiences. The article concludes with a call for more research to clarify the roles teachers of technical writing should be playing in an age where technological determinism—shown by a tendency to turn a technical communication course into a software tools course—can be seen as a threat to effective teaching of complex workplace rhetoric.     

The development of reading skills in young partially sighted readers

Young learners with severe visual impairments are restricted in many ways, and psychologists and special needs teachers require information about the nature and extent of the possible educationally handicapping effects. This article, written by Michael Tobin, Emeritus Professor of Special Education within the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, and Eileen Hill, a teacher at Queen Alexandra College, Birmingham, reports the use of a longitudinal approach to measure how reading development is affected in these children and to uncover the relationships with and among other cognitive factors. The 60 participants were part of a larger cohort of children registered as blind or partially sighted, their reading progress being monitored from seven to 12 years of age. While improving in all three skill areas as measured by the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability, there were significant deficits/lags in development as compared with the norms for their fully‐sighted age peers, especially in speed of reading. Even more disturbing was the finding that the deficits increased with age. Significant correlates of reading, changing in importance over time, were intelligence, visual efficiency, phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge and short‐term memory. It is proposed that, if the educationally handicapping effects of the impairment are to be overcome, a formal, regular cycle of testing to monitor progress be instituted by specialist teachers and educational psychologists. together with the design, development and standardisation of a new reading assessment procedure; and that the professionals collaborate in the construction of programmes of continuing structured teaching to improve speed of reading throughout primary and early secondary schooling.     

Re/learning Student Teaching Supervision: A Co/autoethnographic Self-Study

This article documents the critical friendship of an experienced teacher educator and a doctoral student through our joint exploration of student teaching supervision. By adopting a co/autoethnographic approach, we learned from biographical and contemporaneous critical incidents that informed short- and long-term practices. In particular, we learned about supervision from our experiences as student teachers, mentors, and university supervisors. We learned about supervision through experiences and insights as they occurred and from the relational dynamics provided by our critical friendship. We dissect critical moments that resulted in a series of key understandings. Autobiography informs practice: in sharing our biographies, we developed an understanding and vision for the type of supervision practice we wished to enact. Reflection and discussion inform practice: by journaling and discussing the supervision process, we reconsidered and acted upon practice. Finally, critical friends provide transformative insights into practice: we learned from each other through interaction and critique of past actions, current practices and future actions. Our collaboration was instrumental in providing a vision that defined our individual pedagogies of supervision. Consistent with other scholarship on the learning of student teacher supervision, this article promotes the provision of a support space for both novice and experienced supervisors to deconstruct and improve practice.     

Vision and Embodied Knowing: The Making of Floral Design

This article focuses on assessment actions in floristry education, addressing how interaction with flowers influences and mediates vocational knowing. Using video recordings from floristry education for adults, the article explores the interaction between teacher and student when assessing on-going work and performance as a way to frame the teacher’s seeing in situ. Influenced by conversation analysis and moment-by-moment methods ─ including talk, gestures, and flowers as resources ─ the findings contribute to a holistic perspective on vocational floristry knowing. Different features of vocational floristry knowing are detected as part of the content in assessment actions: (i) aesthetic standards reflected in suggestions made by the teacher and student, (ii) financial awareness as a way of seeing flowers, and (iii) the use of context and change of perspective to take the customer into account. The findings demonstrate situated floristry knowing in action, which is displayed when the teacher enables the student to visualise and understand professional vision of flowers, traditions, and standards.     

Somewhere in between Touch and Vision: In Search of a Meaningful Art Education for Blind Individuals

This article offers a theoretical framework of a meaningful art education for blind people. Existing literature focuses on the interaction between the artwork and the blind person. This text describes this aesthetic encounter which is complex due to tactile sensations, individual differences of the non‐sighted viewer and specific features of the art work. The article demonstrates further the importance of thorough reflection on these issues. The paradoxical character of blindness and visual art raises some difficult theoretical problems. Several authors plead for an art education for the blind that emphasises tactile experiences, instead of visual information. The article considers the consequences of such reasoning and stresses the importance of visual information in an art educational setting for blind people. Finally the article considers the roles of the art educator and the museum guide, as moderators in this dichotomy between the tactile elements of an artwork and its visual features.     

The Most Important Thing: Students with Reading and Writing Difficulties Talk About their Experiences of Teachers' Treatment and Guidance

Dyslexia is a well-known phenomenon and help and assistance are offered to pupils and students who experience literacy difficulties on a regular basis. But what help do they need and want? In this article the responses people with reading and writing difficulties/dyslexia give to this question are discussed. What, if we take the student's own viewpoint, is the most important thing the teacher can do? The students never mention any particular teaching methods. What appears as important to them is that the teacher sees them as individuals, not just as dyslectics, understands the special difficulties with which each individual must grapple, and provides the students with suitable tools for their learning as well as necessary time and space.     

The ‘first’ educator? Rethinking the ‘teacher’ through luce irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference

This article examines historical imagery of the teacher in relation to a story drawn from ancient Greece: that relating to the teacher of the mythic hero Achilles in The Iliad. The article explores the possibility that this early image of a teacher — the aging warrior Phoenix — could be a source for later representations of the teaching function. In an effort to place this historical image into a larger context of cultural symbolism relating to pedagogy, the article asks, why is this ‘first’ educator a man? By what narrative procedure was a man contrived to assume roles such as nurturing and childrearing that had always been (and continue to be) represented as feminine occupations? Using the work of Luce Irigaray, the article raises issues about the sex of the teacher in order to disrupt the seemingly obvious sex-neutrality of modern images of education, which define teaching and learning as humanistic, as social and cultural practices for which gender is irrelevant, and through which abstract disciplines such as literacy and numeracy are represented as transcending the physicality of the sexed body. It attempts to expose the constant deference modern educators unconsciously pay to patriarchal models of the pedagogical relationship, and to reveal the repression of sexual difference at the core of the mythology from which Western images of education have been generated.     

论培养和提高师范生写作思维能力的环节

本文对如何培养和提高师专中文专业生写作思维能力的问题进行了探讨,主张在写作教学中教师必须把握好四个环节：一是明确思维特点,讲授思维方法;二是抓住写作理论课堂,引导学生走上科学思维轨道;三是加大文章赏析力度,锻炼科学思维能力;四是抓好习作实践,提高学生写作思维能力。     

试论语言学概论教学中文化意识的渗透

一个语言教师同时也应是一个文化教师。语言学概论教学中,教师可以从下面四个方面进行文化意识的渗透,从而达到语言教育、文化教育并重的教学效果:引用现代汉语方言资料;利用历史文化背景;选取具有鲜明时代特色的社会现象;引进早期教育实例。     

Formative assessment and teaching practice: the point of view of Italian teachers

Over the years the debate on the aims, approaches, and impacts of formative assessment has never stopped to grow. Parallel to this growth is the awareness that it is crucial to understand what conceptions teachers have of assessment in order to guarantee more effective teacher education. This paper tries to connect these two fields of research: formative assessment and teacher education through an analysis of teachers’ conceptions: What do teachers think about assessment? What aims do they pursue through it? Do teachers really distinguish between formative and summative assessment? On the backdrop of the formative assessment literature, the article reports on an exploratory research study. Limitations and issues are analysed in order to shed light on teacher education implication and on future educational research paths in the educational assessment field.     

Mixed messages and missed opportunities: Moments of transformation in writing conferences and teacher education

This article describes our challenge as teacher educators interested in helping our students move beyond talk about text that recalls facts to talk that is supportive of the interpretation and crafting of text. This case study describes how one teacher candidate struggled with the question, “When am I teaching?” as she attempted to reconcile what she always thought teaching was with these new ways of talking about text. A sociolinguistic analysis of one of Maureen's writing conferences illustrates the power of traditional classroom talk, the potential for transforming that talk, and ways we as teacher educators can support that transformation.     

大学英语课堂写作教学探析

文章主要从大学英语课堂写作教学法角度提出如何培养学生的写作兴趣和信心,提出来了写作前先采访、看漫画写作、趣味写作三种写作教学策略,提倡教师批改结合小组合作学习评价相结合的作文批改方式。     

The promises and limitations of international comparative research on teacher education

This article revisits methodological perspectives on international comparative research on teacher education (TE). Benefits and problems related to comparative educational research methodology in general are discussed. Further, methodological issues associated with designing and carrying out an international comparative study on TE are addressed using a multi-level study on teacher education in Finland and Norway an as example. Towards the end of the article, the promises and limitations of international comparative research on TE are presented. Important benefits of comparative education on TE include widening the understanding of one’s own and other TE systems as well as gaining an understanding of international trends. However, uncritical use of such research may lead to decontextualised, ahistorical and standardised transfer and development of education and educational policies. The article concludes by urging researchers in the field of international comparative research on teacher education to address the questions: What is being compared? How is context addressed?     

It's all about Baxter: task orientation in the effective teaching of writing

This New Zealand‐based study of the classroom practice of nine exemplary teachers of writing to upper primary‐age students explored the significance of task orientation as a component of effective teacher instruction and the instructional strategies or actions that effective teachers utilise to promote such. Effectiveness pertains to teachers being able to generate a positive impact on learners' engagement and academic outcomes. Particular attention was given to the content and organisation of the tasks and activities that teachers required of their students. Analysis of observed teacher practice in relation to learner gains showed actions associated with task orientation to be strongly associated with student progress in writing. Two indicators linked particularly with learner gains in writing. They relate to teachers being able to select and promote learning tasks that are purposeful and challenging for students and to students being involved in the selection or construction of learning tasks. There were relatively high levels of proficiency with regard to teachers being able to select and promote purposeful and challenging tasks but significant operational variability with regard to teachers involving their students in task selection or construction. Classroom illustrations are provided on how effective teachers promote learner involvement in task selection or construction.