A Self-Study of a Thai Teacher Educator Developing a Better Understanding of PCK for Teaching about Teaching Science

In this study, I, the first author as a Thai teacher educator employed self-study as a research methodology to investigate my own understandings, questions, and curiosities about pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching science student teachers and the ways I engaged student teachers in a field-based science methods course designed to help them to develop their PCK. Qualitative data gathered included: the syllabi, handouts, work submitted by student teachers, student teachers’ journal entries, my journal entries, and video recordings of my classroom teaching. Data were analysed using an inductive process to identify ways in which I attempted to enhance student teachers’ PCK. The contributions of this study are insights generated to help teacher educators think about how to support and develop student teachers’ PCK. Some of these contributions are enhancing teacher educators’ PCK for teaching science teachers, developing PCK for teaching science, and designing a science methods course in science teacher preparation programmes.     

Multicultural Education for Literacy in the Year 2000: Traversing Comfort Zones and Transforming Knowledge and Action

In this article, I address multicultural issues surrounding literacy at the approach of the new millennium. I begin with a discussion of the roles of societal forces that positively and negatively impact multicultural education in homogeneous enclaves of U.S. society as well as in areas of great diversity. I then proceed through an analysis of current U.S. postures around several educational issues in light of these forces. Finally, I address issues of teacher education and conclude by contextualizing hopes and predictions for multicultural education for literacy in the climate of U.S. society as we approach a new millennium.     

China's Changing Educational System

In light of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling, this article focuses on how the majority opinion in Brown set a precedent for the use of social science research in defining and examining inequity in education. This article argues that following Brown, social science research has gained prominence in its social function in shaping the debate in equal educational opportunity. Whereas Brown introduced racial desegregation in the governmental agenda, social science research since the 1960s has sustained the societal concerns on the challenge of inequality. This article examines how the use of social science research in Equality of Educational Opportunity (J. S. Coleman et al., 1966), an extensive study of schools and schooling under the direction of James Coleman of Johns Hopkins University and Ernest Campbell of Vanderbilt University during the mid 1960s, shaped the course of education research and policy toward the notion of equal educational opportunities. Further, this article discusses the more recent work of William Julius Wilson (1987) that shifts the equality of opportunity debate out of the courts and from individual and group opportunities to the equality of life chances.     

Using Motivational Interviewing Techniques to Address Parallel Process in Supervision

Supervision offers a distinct opportunity to experience the interconnection of counselor–client and counselor–supervisor interactions. One product of this network of interactions is parallel process, a phenomenon by which counselors unconsciously identify with their clients and subsequently present to their supervisors in a similar fashion ( Searles, 1955 ). Addressing parallel process has the potential to be valuable in the advancement of counselor development, but few strategies exist in the literature for working with the phenomenon. The authors describe the use of motivational interviewing as one method for effectively addressing parallel process in supervision.     

Retrospective on educational testing and assessment in the 20th century

Over the last 100 years, the ever-increasing demand for testing as a measure of educational reform has created a very profitable market for the US testing industry. We follow the growth of this market since the 1900s in two different, but related, ways. First, we discuss some of the technical developments that have encouraged the use of standardized testing in general and contributed to the growth of the commercial testing industry. Second, we attempt to quantify the expansion of the testing marketplace during the 20th century by tracking several indirect indices of growth over time. We conclude that although technical innovations may have contributed to the growth of the US testing marketplace, they do not necessarily lead to better tests or better outcomes for those who use them. There is a need to more carefully monitor the effects of these tests on teaching and learning in general, particularly when the tests are used in high-stakes contexts.     

Acknowledgements

We sought to examine empirically the prevailing assumption that changing assessment can leverage curricular reform. This assumption has been significantly confirmed by our research for the case of mandated high-stakes assessment. Two studies were conducted in the two most populous Australian states, New South Wales and Victoria. In the final two years of secondary school in both states, courses of study and assessment arrangements are mandated for all schools, including the private sector, by the state's Board of Studies. Congruence between mandated assessment and schoolwide instructional practice was found in two states whose high-stakes assessment embodied quite contrasting values.     

Chinese whispers? Investigating the consistency of the language of assessment between a distance education institution,its tutors and students

Ensuring the fairness of assessment is important in all areas of higher education. It is particularly so in distance education, where the communication around assessment and feedback is a principal method of supporting learning, and even more so when the students are at the entry point into higher education. This research explores the nature of the language used in explaining the purpose and process of assessment on an access programme at The Open University, UK, from the perspective of the module team, the tutors and the students. It takes a qualitative approach to examine the clarity and consistency of assessment tasks, assessment guidance and TMGs. Analysis revealed inconsistencies in the language used in relation to assessment, which has led to a revision of how assessment tasks and guidance are communicated to students and tutors.     

Knowledge,skills, competence: European divergences in vocational education and training (VET)—the English,German and Dutch cases

Policy debates on employability, lifelong learning and competence‐based approaches suggest a convergence of VET approaches across European countries. Against the background of the creation of a European Qualifications Framework, this paper compares the VET systems of England, Germany and The Netherlands. The analysis reveals the distinct understandings and meanings of outwardly similar terms. These meanings are deeply rooted in the countries’ institutional structures and labour processes and still inform national debates and policies today. The paper identifies a major distinction between a ‘knowledge‐based’ VET model in Germany and The Netherlands and a ‘skills‐based’ model in England. There is a need to develop trans‐national categories that take into account the social construction of terms such as ‘skills’ and ‘qualifications’.     

Professional standards,teacher identities and an ethics of singularity

This paper offers a critical analysis of the education policy move towards teacher professional standards. Drawing on Lacan’s three registers of the psyche (real, imaginary and symbolic), the paper argues that moves towards codification (and domestication) of teachers’ work and identities in standardized (and sanitized) forms, such as the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership professional standards recently adopted in Australia, can be read as a colonization of the Real and the imaginary by (a rather static, mortified form of) the symbolic. The paper argues that in response to such normalizing moves, we need to consider how we might conceptualize the reanimation of what it means to teach and be a teacher, something we attempt in terms of enabling each of the psyche’s registers to inter-animate each other, as a means of engendering teacher identities characterized by criticality, creativity and passion – that is, by an ethics of singularity rather than by standardization.