Teacher educators' reflections on moments in a secondary teacher education course: thinking forward by challenging our teaching practices

In this paper the authors explore two pedagogical moments that occurred within a diversity‐focused secondary teacher education course, giving specific attention to Genevieve's and Debra's reflections as course instructors. We explore the ways in which instructors find themselves challenged, engaged and provoked to rethink taken for granted ideas and beliefs about their pedagogies as teacher educators. We conclude the paper by ‘thinking forward’: challenging teacher educators to be responsible and to be vulnerable with respect to their own teaching stances and to take the time to critically examine their own lived experiences in order to connect with their students' emergent understandings.     

The Influences on Educational Management Learning

This paper draws on findings from a research study in which educational managers at different career stages were interviewed about their conceptions and experiences of educational‐management learning. The study highlighted the diverse and individual influences on the process of learning to become an educational manager and indicated that teachers acquire managerial expertise by a variety of means. The seven most common opportunities through which educational‐management learning was gained have been identified, and they are analysed from the point of view of the learner in terms of: (i) their relative importance to the learning process, (ii) how (and if) they affect practice or thinking, (iii) when (at what points in the learning curve) they are effective. This study suggested that the value and effectiveness of the different developmental processes may reflect some of the personal characteristics peculiar to the individual educational manager. These significant characteristics are also discussed.     

Only STEM Can Save Us? Examining Race,Place, and STEM Education as Property

The rhetoric about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in urban schools reflects a desire to imagine a new city that is poised to compete in a STEM-centered future. Therefore, STEM has been positioned as a critical part of urban education reform efforts. In various US cities, schools labeled as failing are being repurposed as selective STEM-intensive academies to build a STEM education infrastructure. In Memphis, Tennessee, this process makes visible issues with educational inequity, exacerbated by school choice and gentrification processes. In this article, I use whiteness as property, a tenet of critical race theory, to examine STEM education in Memphis as a case of urban STEM-based education reform in the United States. I describe claiming STEM education as property as a 2-phase process in which middle-class Whites in urban areas participate to secure STEM education by repurposing failed Black schools and to maintain it by institutionalizing selective admissions strategies.     

INTERGENERATIONAL PROGRAMMING IN ACTION: BEFRIENDERS

This article describes the development of an intergenerational program in a rural community. The Befrienders program was developed to aid homebound and isolated seniors who desired companionship and assistance in their homes. Young adults from the community and the local university were recruited to visit, actively interact with, and assist the seniors on a weekly basis. The collaborative work and processes are presented along with evaluation data from participants.