Exploring How a Study Abroad and International Service-Learning Project Shaped Preservice Teachers’ Understanding of Humanizing Pedagogy

In an attempt to better prepare future teachers to fight against social injustice, support their culturally and linguistically diverse students and wrestle with social and educational complexities around the globe, many education programs have increased the number of study abroad programs and international service learning projects. In this qualitative study, we explored seven preservice teachers’ experiences related to humanizing pedagogy after participating in a study abroad program combined with an international service-learning project in a South African rural community. Analyzing multiple data sources such as interviews and reflective journals, we discovered that the preservice teachers grappled with the political, social, economic, and educational differences they encountered during the international project and wrestled with conflicting ideas and beliefs about poverty and language. They identified their relationships with students as catalysts to address these educational issues and their need to reverse systemic inequities. They built caring relationships with students in the community and developed additive perspectives the focused on the students’ community cultural capital. The preservice teachers expressed deep critical reflection and a desire to promote a more fully human educational world where students have the opportunities to enact their agency, their creativity, and their language and culture.     

8 Political and financial support for school‐based and child‐centred reforms

This chapter concentrates on the nature and focus of education reform efforts in city school systems during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A thesis is developed that political, and closely related financial, support for continuing efforts to reform or restructure education depends on two primary factors. The degree of agreement about values and goals among stakeholders within and external to school systems appears to influence the likelihood of a given set of reforms. Adoption and implementation of reforms also depend on the level of intensity of action devoted by those groups. This framework is used to examine whether current reform activities in urban environments engender political and financial support that might be essential for future reform initiatives. The paper concludes that future reform initiatives will need to consider changes in the delivery of non‐educational services to garner sufficient political support for meaningful education reform. Yet there must be agreement among values and interests of diverse agencies and sufficient intensity of action of all groups to bring about meaningful change.     

Child Care in Infancy and Cognitive Performance Until Middle Childhood in the Millennium Cohort Study

This study used a British cohort (n = ～13,000) to investigate the association between child care during infancy and later cognition while controlling for social selection and missing data. It was found that attending child care (informal or center based) at 9 months was positively associated with cognitive outcomes at age 3 years, but only for children of mothers with low education. These effects did not persist to ages 5 or 7 years. Early center‐based care was associated with better cognitive outcomes than informal care at ages 3 and 5 years, but not at 7 years. Effect sizes were larger among children whose mother had low education. Propensity score matching and multiple imputation revealed significant findings undetected using regression and complete‐case approaches.     

Effects of Perceptually Rich Manipulatives on Preschoolers' Counting Performance: Established Knowledge Counts

Educators often use concrete objects to help children understand mathematics concepts. However, findings on the effectiveness of concrete objects are mixed. The present study examined how two factors—perceptual richness and established knowledge of the objects—combine to influence children's counting performance. In two experiments, preschoolers (N = 133; M_age = 3;10) were randomly assigned to counting tasks that used one of four types of objects in a 2 (perceptual richness: high or low) × 2 (established knowledge: high or low) factorial design. Findings suggest that perceptually rich objects facilitate children's performance when children have low knowledge of the objects but hinder performance when children have high knowledge of the objects.     

Listening to Student Voices

This study explores the perspectives of rural and suburban adolescents on the nature of schools, teaching, and leadership that influences learning. Middle and high school students with and without disabilities offer relevant insights to educators who are seeking to promote greater engagement, community, and success in their schools. Results suggest that student voices can be a powerful tool for school improvement.     

A Journey Through Justice … Letting Go of the Power

Building on Ball's (2009) Ball, A. 2009. Toward a theory of generative change in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms. American Educational Research Journal, 46(1): 45–72. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] model of generative change, we explored how two experienced literacy teachers, after completing a graduate-level multicultural literacy course, enacted the tenets of critical literacy. Ball defined teachers' generative thinking as “connecting their personal and professional knowledge with the knowledge that they gain from their students to produce or originate knowledge that is useful to them in pedagogical problem solving and in meeting the educational needs of their students” (2009, p. 47). We uncovered how teachers' generative thinking progressed over time; how they sanctioned critical literacy practices in their own classrooms; and how they continued to guide their students to question, dispute, and examine power relations. As the teachers' generative thinking grew over the two years, they continued to express tension and doubt, showing that teacher change is never linear or simple, but often situational and complex.