Ensuring quality teachers and quality teacher education programmes have been fundamental global concerns over the decades. High quality teachers are critical to the future development of national educational systems and economic vitality. Teachers’ quality and professionalism are closely linked to their professional standards, preparation and development. Teacher education, therefore, plays a central role in preparing quality teacher and also laying foundation for the development of teacher as a professional. Worldwide, professional standards, teacher standards, teaching- leaning standards and teacher education standards are considered instrumental for improving teacher preparation, their quality and professionalism. In this context, it becomes pertinent to deliberate upon the multiple standards frameworks in operation and how these frameworks are informing teacher education programmes for preparing quality teachers.
The discourses on standards and benchmarking provide effective platforms for measuring and improving performance, practice, and knowledge of teachers. Standard framework can be considered a diagnostic approach to the delivery of education which evolves through research and practice to generate new knowledge and to maintain an accountable profession. The analysis of teacher standards in both developed and developing countries clearly indicates that standards contribute to the professionalization of teaching and raise the status of the profession. Therefore standards and quality dimensions form the cornerstone for the teacher education policy, planning, and implementation.
The ideas, concepts, and constructs for standards and benchmarking in teacher education are derived from comparative perspectives and implications on quality dimension processes. The concepts of standards and benchmarks in teacher education around the globe are interpreted and used in diverse ways. The developed countries of the world have specific or explicit teacher education standard frameworks, as per their country-specific expectations and requirements. Countries such as the United States of America, Australia, Canada, Scotland, and Singapore have exclusive standards frameworks for initial teacher education. Singapore and Finland have recognised the implication of teacher education standards and benchmarking on improving teaching profession. The implementation of standards is considered an important part of the solution to the problem of assessment, accreditation, and maintenance of teacher quality by the United States of America and Australia. Acknowledging the potential of standards to raise teacher quality, the East and South Asian countries are using implicit models by drawing essence from teacher, teaching and learning and professional standards frameworks as guiding reference for teacher education .The comparative analysis of standards frameworks across different countries reveals common features such as professional knowledge, professional competencies, professional skills, and professional conduct. Therefore, it can be argued that teaching learning and professional standards make teacher education programmes accountable to deliver quality and to prepare competent teachers.
Though the use of a standards framework is highly acknowledged, it is equally critiqued by many researchers. In order to substantiate the deliberation, the major question of whether standard frameworks are facilitating teacher education or act as a trap can be explored. This question rallies around both the merits and demerits of the multiple use of standards in teacher education. Though explicit and implicit models for teacher education standards are in operation, it is recommended that standard framework should be flexible and dynamic in nature in order to be replicated and adopted by various teacher education programs. Despite the raised criticism, once can argue that standards frameworks are necessary for ensuring teacher education quality. The teacher education framework model necessitates continuous research and innovation support to make it more dynamic and contextual.
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International Perspectives on Standards and Benchmarking in Teacher Education
Pranati Panda
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Qualitative Methodological Considerations for Studying Undocumented Students in the United States
Aurora Chang, Júlia Mendes, and Cinthya Salazar
The study of undocumented students in the United States is critical and growing. As scholars increasingly employ qualitative methodologies and methods in studying undocumented students, it is important to consider the specific challenges, nuances, and benefits of doing so. Undocumented students have a right to a public elementary and secondary education regardless of immigration status, per the 1982 court case Plyler v. Doe. While the stress that undocumented students face during their K-12 years are real and consequential, this stress becomes particularly acute in their postsecondary lives when education is neither guaranteed nor readily accessible. Qualitative research gives insight into the complex obstacles undocumented students face and advocates for the institutional and social change necessary to best support them. Existing qualitative research on undocumented students employs various methodologies and methods including but not limited to narrative inquiry, testimonio, phenomenology, case studies, ethnography, discourse analysis, and grounded theory. Among the salient issues that scholars must take into account when engaging in such research are the ethical, logistical, and relational problems that arise when working with undocumented people; the politicization of researching undocumented students; and the power and privilege that researchers possess in the researcher–participant relationship. Within every stage of the research process, researchers need to take special care when working with undocumented students to ensure their anonymity, respect their lived experiences, and advocate for their human rights. Undocumented research participants are in need of extra protection due to their undocumented status, and this need should not be conflated with weakness. Often, undocumented participants are framed as illegal, powerless, vulnerable, fearful, and in the shadows. While it is true that undocumented people face intense, life-altering, and consequential struggles relative to their undocumented status, it is also true that their intelligence, resilience, and persistence are equally intense. Researchers have an obligation to bring undocumented students’ authentic experiences to the fore in ways that acknowledge their undocumented status and the related struggles while affirming their agency and resistance. How they employ methodological practices is central to this goal.
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Educational Qualitative Research in Colombia
Paula Andrea Echeverri-Sucerquia and Carlos Tobon
The historic agreement signed between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government, as well as the peace talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN), mark the beginning of an end to decades of raw violence in Colombia. Against all odds, Colombia has found ways to survive the pain, to heal, and to begin anew. The Colombian experience mirrors that of many other Latin American nations, as well as others around the world, where a history built in the midst of war, violence, and resilience has shaped people’s ways of interpreting the world and building knowledge. Evidence of this is the focus of conference papers, theses, and dissertations presented at international conferences by and about Latin Americans.
Undeniably, in spite of the particularities that describe the Latin American social experience, the hemispheric North has exerted a great epistemological influence in the South. However, Southerners have imprinted their idiosyncrasies, their own ways of understanding, creating, and transforming. A review of educational qualitative research in Colombia illustrates this tension: on the one hand is the focus on evidence-based research, highly influenced by academic work in the North, and, on the other hand, there is a struggle for research that strives for social justice. Such complex tension entails both challenges and opportunities for qualitative research in education.
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The Impact of Educational Neoliberalism on Teachers in Singapore
Jason Loh and Guangwei Hu
Educational neoliberalism has swept the world, and Singapore, with its much-lauded educational system, has not been spared. In fact, it has taken a stranglehold on the system, from its policymakers at the helm to its teachers at the chalkface. The embrace of neoliberal ideas has pervaded Singapore’s short educational history, from its colonial times to the present moment, undergirding various educational reforms intended to ensure economic survival in the global economy and prosperity for the nation. Through a slew of educational policies targeted at and enacted by the state-controlled educational organizations, chief among which are the state schools, these reforms have been promulgated as effective educational initiatives to develop each citizen to the fullest potential. Given its ideological centrality in these reforms, educational neoliberalism has exerted a palpable influence on principals, teachers, and their pedagogical practices through a torrent of various performance appraisal mechanisms meant to ensure accountability to the state and the various stakeholders, and stimulate competition in the form of ever-increasing scores, awards and recognized performances in different educational arenas. Thus, marketization and performance management have become the buzzwords for the education industry. Will Singapore’s educational system be able to survive this onslaught of neoliberal pressure? Can it counter the impact of educational neoliberalism on its teachers and their practices? Will its recent policy announcement of assessment reduction have an impact on this neoliberal discourse, or will the neoliberal juggernaut continue to thunder through the system, albeit with less rolling and clapping? Can the teachers contest and resist this neoliberal discourse, while struggling to stay afloat in the sea of performativity? It is these and other questions that have provided the impetus for the present article.
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Disruptive Classroom Technologies
Anthony J. "Sonny" Magana III
Of the many stated purposes of organized educational systems, one that might meet with general agreement is this: to ensure students build abundant learning capacity, achieve ample academic proficiency, and consolidate the requisite knowledge, skills, and aptitudes to successfully address future learning challenges. As computer technologies have transformed nearly every human endeavor imaginable, future learning challenges that students encounter will almost certainly require facility with digital technologies. In the realm of teaching and learning, the average impact of computer technology on student achievement has been both negligible and unchanged, despite astonishing technological developments since the 1960s.
However, there is cause for renewed optimism about technology use in education. Compounding evidence suggests that large gains in student achievement are possible when digital tools are leveraged to enhance highly reliable instructional and learning strategies. The objective of the author’s investigation efforts is to develop a more precise language and set of ideas to discuss, enact, and evaluate high impact uses of digital tools in education. The result is the T3 Framework for Innovation in Education. The T3 Framework increments the impact of technology use into three hierarchical domains: Translational, Transformational, and Transcendent. Compounding evidence suggests that implementing the strategies in the T3 Framework, with reasonable fidelity, will likely increase the impact of digital technologies to unlock students’ limitless capacities for learning and contribution, and better prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s learning challenges.
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History and Development of Education in Africa
Shoko Yamada
Thanks to the concerted effort of the international community to promote basic education, driven by the Education for All (EFA) goals and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), indices of education in Africa have improved dramatically since the 1990s. Although the access to schooling has improved, there are still issues of quality related to teachers, facilities, teaching and learning materials, and relevance of educational contents. Recently, under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the focuses of educational policies of African countries have been diversified, to concentrate not only on quantitative and qualitative improvement of basic education, but also on secondary, tertiary, and technical and vocational education and training (TVET).
One of the problems which critics point out is that, regardless of the massive expansion of basic education, learning outcomes of school leavers in Africa have not improved. It has also been remarked that school enrolment has not directly led to poverty-reduction or decent employment. Another side-effect of the expansion of basic education has been an increased dependency on aid. So, although there is a constant demand for higher and more education among the general public, aid-dependent expansion of the system is unsustainable.
Before colonization by European powers, many groups in Africa had a tradition of oral transmission of knowledge, although there were some significant exceptions of societies which had formal educational institutions. With or without formal institutions, African traditional societies had their own mechanisms of transmitting knowledge across generations. However, Europeans overwrote such existing modes of education by introducing Western school systems. With the paternalistic conviction of their civilizing mission, they refined traditional cultures and practices which could be maintained and taught in school, while replacing other “barbarous superstitions” with teaching of European subjects. Resistance to such impositions of European education eventually led to nationalism, which accompanied the desire to find a uniquely African epistemology and teaching method. At the same time, the mechanism of recruiting African white-collar workers through schooling, which started during the colonial period, planted a strong hope for social advancement through gaining school certificates deeply in the mind of African people.
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Neoliberalism and Education
Matt Hastings
Neoliberalism is a political project carried out by the capitalist class to consolidate their ability to generate profits by exercising influence in political processes, such as elections, in order to privatize or direct state institutions and regulatory powers in ways favorable to their interests. These efforts coincide the propagation of a neoliberal common sense that is grounded in an understanding of all aspects of society in economic terms of competition in markets and return on investment. However, in practice, neoliberalism does not promote competitive markets as much as it results in the privatization of public institutions and creation of new sites for private investment through state policies. The field of education, traditionally a site of local democratic control, is increasingly subject to neoliberal governance, as elected school boards are consolidated under appointed leadership, district schools are replaced by charter schools, and school resources, such as curriculum, testing, and even the training of teachers, are provided by private companies. Neoliberalism frames the purpose of education in terms of investments made in the development of students’ human capital. What students should learn and the value of education is relative to their individual prospects for future earnings. This narrowed conception of education raises important questions about the purpose of education and the relationship between schools, democratic life, and state governance. Developing a critical relationship with neoliberal common sense is necessary in order to recognize both how actually existing neoliberal policies primarily serve the interests of capitalists and that there are other, democratic, sources of value and purpose that can ground debates and efforts in the field of education.
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Constructions of Social Justice, Marginalization, and Belonging
Yongjian Li and Fred Dervin
The theme of social justice appears to be central in education research. A polysemic and sometimes empty notion, social justice can be defined, constructed, and used in different ways, which makes it a problematic notion to work with intra- and interculturally. Global education research has often relied on constructions of the notion as they have been “done” in the West, leaving very little space to constructions from peripheries. This problematic and somewhat biased approach often leads to research that ignores local contexts and local ways of “discoursing” about social justice. Although some countries are said to be better at social justice in education (e.g., top performers in the OECD PISA studies), there is a need to examine critically and reflexively how it is “done” in different contexts (“winners” and “losers” of international rankings) on macro- and micro-levels. Two different educational utopias, China and Finland, are used to illustrate the different constructions of social justice, and more specifically marginalization and belonging in relation to migrant students—an omnipresent figure in world education—in the two countries. A call for learning with each other about social justice, and questioning too easily accepted definitions and/or formulas, is made.
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Professional Experience for International Students within the Australian Teacher Education Context
Georgina Barton and Kay Hartwig
The business of international students in the higher education sector is a crucial part of many countries’ economic development and intercultural richness. In fact, in Australia participation of international students in university study accounts for the third highest export industry behind iron ore and coal with similar trends seen in other countries. Given that such a large proportion of students across the globe are international, it is important that higher educators are able to support them appropriately through their study. Research literature has identified a number of issues international students face including homesickness, being away from family and friends, financial hardship, accommodation concerns, and cultural difference including language. Further concerns may arise when international students undertake a professional experience in an authentic workplace such as in a work integrated learning (WIL) experience or practicum or internship. For international students studying teacher education students are expected to complete a number of professional experiences within the schooling sector. Research about teacher education international students’ experience in schools has often focused on negative aspects related to this component of study rather than the success that many students enjoy. In fact, supervisors or the work colleagues who are responsible for assessing international students often report mutual benefits through hosting. International students in teacher education face several difficult issues as well as success, and this includes international students in Australia and domestic students undertaking professional experience overseas. A model of effective practice for all stakeholders in teacher education professional experience can be useful.
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Regional Cooperation in Southeast Asian Higher Education
Yasushi Hirosato
The launch of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Community in December 2015 is expected to accelerate structural transformation in Southeast Asia. It is also an initiative that shifts the landscape of higher education in Southeast Asia, which needs to meet the challenges posed by the process of regionalization of higher education. Based on the review of theoretical and conceptual works on regionalization in higher education, a broader scope of regional cooperation in higher education in Southeast Asia is suggested. Such broader scope is enable to survey the main actors (stakeholders) engaged in regional cooperation in higher education in Southeast Asia at multiple levels of cooperation: universities/higher education institutions (HEIs); government/intergovernmental cooperation; and intra-/interregional cooperation. Furthermore, two priority areas for harmonization in higher education, namely, quality assurance (QA) and credit transfer, are highlighted as particular forms of regional cooperation. Both internal and external QA systems are explained. In particular, the Academic Credit Transfer Framework for Asia (ACTFA) is introduced, which would serve as a main framework for credit transfer for Southeast Asia, by embracing credit transfer system/scheme which exist in Southeast Asia. In lieu of conclusion, main actors (stakeholders) including their mechanisms to engage in regional cooperation in higher education are summarized according to functions such as capacity building, credit transfer, grading, student mobility, mutual recognition, qualification framework, and quality assurance. Future directions in regional cooperation are suggested to pave the way towards the creation of a “common space” in higher education in Southeast Asia, or eventually the Southeast Asian Higher Education Area (SEAHEA), by developing and adapting common rules, standards, guidelines, and frameworks to be applicable to Southeast Asia.
