Teacher educators assume that the teacher education programs in their own countries provide a comprehensive scope of possible selections. Nevertheless, how teacher education is planned and implemented differs in each country. They have different practices in both early childhood education and teacher preparation programs, even though American early childhood education theories and practices have guided them. In addition, countries differ in their early childhood education teacher qualifications. Teacher education programs have been attempting to prepare global-minded early childhood teachers who can function in other countries. Teachers who are prepared with global perspectives are able to help students succeed in the interconnected world where they encounter challenges throughout their lives.
The globalization of early childhood education and the preparation of teachers in the United States and other countries appear ultimately to be achieving importance, respectability, acknowledgment, and wisdom. Several countries have engaged in transforming early childhood teachers through educational reform, which calls upon countries to expand and improve early childhood care and education. Educational reform has intermittently been a main topic of discourse and seldom an emphasis of commitment in countries around the world. Frequently these reform attempts have emphasized the necessity to advance children’s knowledge, abilities, and views to help them become good citizens and productive adults. Whereas developments may not be equivalent from country to country, the movement is continuous. It is encouraging to see countries functioning to advance programs to prepare teachers of young children and to cope with the demanding difficulties and concerns of early childhood education and the preparation of early childhood teachers.
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Early Childhood Teacher Education in Global Perspective
Olivia N. Saracho
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Earth Education
Bruce Johnson and Constantinos Manoli
Earth education is an alternative approach to environmental learning, which has been developed as a potential serious response to the environmental crises we face. With roots in frustrations with traditional nature education that led to the innovative Acclimatization program, earth education has grown into a more comprehensive approach to environmental learning. The early work of Acclimatization led to earth education. The programmatic approach used in earth education, with its components of ecological understandings, feelings, and processing, have led to innovative aspects such as the I-A-A (Inform-Assimilate-Apply) learning model and the inclusion of “magic.” The Institute for Earth Education is the non-profit organization leading this approach and its work under the leadership of Steve Van Matre helps to propel these ideas.
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Educational Biopolitics
Gregory Bourassa
Educational biopolitics is a growing field of study that explores the intersections of education, life, and power. A central question this literature has formed is a powerful, albeit familiar one: what types of life do schools validate, and what types of life do schools attempt to negate? Given this focus, the concept of educational life has emerged as one of the key units of analysis that informs inquiries in this field. There are two predominant modes of engagement that characterize studies in educational biopolitics: (a) analytical endeavors that seek to understand the operation of contemporary logics of biopower (a power over life) in schools and (b) affirmative educational endeavors that seek to highlight the potential of life to create power. Each approach begins with an understanding that schools do more than transmit knowledge; they are sites of struggle over the production, reproduction, and management of subjectivity. These approaches have led to unique inquiries that explore a number of tangentially related themes and make use of various concepts, including disposability, extractive schooling, and the common.
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Educational Policy and Curriculum Studies
Pamela J. Konkol, Peter C. Renn, and Sophia Rodriguez
Since 1978, the Committee on Academic Standards and Accreditation (CASA, a standing committee of the American Educational Studies Association) has maintained the Standards for Academic and Professional Instruction in Foundations of Education, Educational Studies, and Educational Policy Studies. The Standards are a policy document intended as a powerful curriculum policy tool for faculty and higher education administrators across North America to use to develop foundations and educator preparation programming with disciplinary integrity and to maintain said programs with fidelity. As pressures to provide accountability and improvement measures or attach outcomes to disciplines in education increase, especially teacher education, foundations faculty and programs are challenged in their efforts to both build strong foundations programming and resist the push to dilute or otherwise embed the intellectual and practical work of the discipline into other, mostly unrelated, courses. The Standards provide language and support for foundations scholars housed in teacher education departments to hone their craft, generate good programming, and develop good scholars and P–12 practitioners.
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Educational Strategies for Museums
Elena Polyudova
In the rapidly changing world of the internet environment and social media expansion, the role of museum education has been revised and reformed to respond to the new digital and interconnected environment. In addition to academic publications, museum activities, and web and video materials, modern museums are developing new ways to meet current demands, including interactive exhibitions, integration with other disciplines, and virtual expositions. Museum professionals are encountering unprecedented challenges in engaging a diverse audience in vital and meaningful learning experiences. Executing new tasks in the achievement of the museum’s education mission takes interdepartmental teamwork and use of new technologies. It also requires new approaches to rigorous planning, implementation, and assessment. New terminology and strategies have been developed to substantiate new approaches to museums’ activities and reflect what is transpiring in modern museum studies and educational experiments. The focus is on integrative and communicative approaches rather than preservation of collections of artifacts. Modern museum curators are actively engaging in dialogue with educational practitioners and specialists at conferences, in academic publications, and through other forums. Museum education is evolving from a source of sacred knowledge to an open source for diversity and personal development.
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Education for Sustainable Development and the “Whole Person” Curriculum in Japan
Ian Clark, Niculina Nae, and Masahiro Arimoto
Since the 1970s, Japanese society has endured rapid and confusing socio-economic transformation. These changes brought a sense of decentralization into Japanese life. It was a sense of loss and a sense of reality, as the stable dependencies that had characterized the Japanese way of life for centuries vanished. In the years leading up to the 21st century, this radical departure from tradition meant that the concept of continuity existed only to emphasize its absence. Society goes through a process of rapid change, posing challenges not everyone might be ready to tackle. The unintended, but inevitable, consequence is the social disaffection of Japanese youth, who may be losing their motivation (or focus) at a time of sudden and sustained adversity. The Japanese government is promoting the revitalizing energy of education for sustainable development (ESD), and even publicizes ESD’s potential for giving life a robust meaning. This is by no means an exclusively Japanese problem. In recent years, and with Japanese leadership, other UNESCO nations have integrated ESD into curricula. To fully understand the nature of the Japanese system for sustainable education, scholars need to draw from cultural philosophy, social neuroscience, historical analysis, and the ideas of socio-cognitive and constructivist theorists. Such a mix of methods provides an inter-disciplinary “geometry” of the often deeply inlaid shapes, patterns, and relationships that surround the uniquely cultural, yet highly exportable models for zenjin-education (“whole-person”).
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Education Research Beyond Cyborg Subjectivities
Annette Gough and Noel Gough
The term “cyborg,” as a combination of “cybernetics” and “organism,” was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960 in a paper presented at a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conference on space exploration as a representation of a particular challenge of space travel: physically adapting a human body to survive in a hostile environment rather than modifying the environment. Soon after, NASA commissioned “The Cyborg Study” to investigate the theoretical possibilities of incorporating life support–related technologies into future spacecraft design. From the beginning, cyborgs were seen as the realization of a transhumanist goal—liberating humans from the limitations of the body and its environment by means of mechanization. Outside of space exploration, the term “cyborg” has evolved to encompass an expansive mesh of the mythological, metaphorical, and technical. Initially mainly taken up by science fiction writers to create superhumans, the notion entered cultural studies in the 1980s, particularly through Donna Haraway’s feminist “cyborg manifesto,” which argues that we are all cyborgs. Since then, terminology has shifted, and cyborgs are more likely called “posthumans,” “more-than-humans,” “other-than-humans,” or “companion species.” Discussions of cyborg and posthuman subjectivities in educational research have taken two main directions. The first argues that with equipment like tablets, smartphones, and laptops, students and teachers are already cyborgs—hybrids of human and machine—accessing information, resources, networks, groups, personal relations, libraries, and mass media through the Internet. Other research has investigated how the construction of cyborg and posthuman subjectivities changes the relationships between humans and their surroundings, devising new social, ethical, and discursive ways of thinking and representation.
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Education, Women, and the Politics of Curriculum
Rubina Saigol
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
For decades now, the discourse on women and education by states, governments, non-governmental organizations, and global development agencies has focused overwhelmingly on access. The excessive preoccupation with enrollment rates, dropout rates, and impediments and constraints on women’s access to education has led to a relative neglect of what access is and what kind of access is being provided. Is it benign, empowering, liberating, and emancipating? Or is it rather that the messages transmitted through schooling tend to serve ends other than women’s own agency and empowerment? The case for educating girls and women is often couched in an instrumental vocabulary centered on the idea that it is good for the state, nation, country, motherhood, family, community, economic growth, and development. Such utilitarian arguments overlook the idea that education is a basic human right, and the aim of women’s education should be to empower women themselves, for their own sake, instead of as a means to ends outside of themselves.
The underlying assumption in instrumental and utilitarian arguments is that what is taught in schools—the curriculum—is neutral and objective and empowers all those who are exposed to it. There is little understanding, especially among policymakers and bureaucrats, that curriculum is not neutral or impartial; rather it is a highly contested, contradictory, and conflicted space with various social groups (religious, sectarian, nationalist, ethnic, racist, or other) attempting to gain the inclusion of their own knowledge as the only legitimate one. The old questions in education—whose knowledge is legitimate knowledge, and who decides which knowledge to include from a vast universe of available knowledge—is as relevant today as it was when first posited. In other words, what a society, community, or nation decides to transmit as “the truth” and what it prefers to exclude are highly political decisions steeped in conflicts over hegemony and power.
One of the most dominant and hegemonic discourses, historically and in contemporary times, is patriarchy. The belief that men/masculinity and women/femininity are polar opposites, and that the former category is overall superior to the latter, which is subordinate to it, is a universal ideology that informs the discourses of the nation, state, family, development, and all the institutions of governments, states, and the global community. Patriarchal ideas, values, and practices enter into capitalist, neoliberal, nationalist, religious, and cultural narratives across the globe and adapt to the system in place. Feminism and Women’s Studies have unpacked patriarchal discourses by revealing masculine biases in the very construction, packaging, and distribution of knowledge. However, feminist knowledge is mostly ghettoized in Women’s Studies or Gender Studies Departments, without forming the essential core of the curriculum in all social, humanistic, and hard science disciplinary areas. Under pressure from human rights and women’s rights constituencies, some content may be added or deleted from the curricula and textbooks, but the dominant religious, nationalist, and neoliberal discourses remain devoid of the insights of feminism that have provided new ways of conceptualizing the world and transforming it into a place of greater justice and equality.
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Effective Co-Teaching Practices Within the Inclusive Classroom
Kathleen Magiera
Co-teaching can be defined with a multitude of formats in a variety of educational settings. Its underlying concept is that at least two professionals collaborate during their instruction and strengthen their delivery, resulting in improved student outcomes. Partnerships that can be deemed as co-teaching could include pairing various combinations of university instructors, teachers of English-language learners, special education service providers, and student teachers but the following review of co-teaching targets the special education service model.
In the preschool through high school setting, the continuing trend toward greater inclusion of students with disabilities means that all teachers are faced with teaching their content to increasingly diverse students. A popular service used to accomplish inclusive practices from preschool to high school is co-teaching. Co-teaching is a service by which students with disabilities and their teachers collaborate together for the purpose of providing students with and without disabilities access to the general education curriculum with specially designed instruction. Co-teaching usually occurs for a designated portion of the instructional day.
By carefully planning together, co-teaching pairs provide more intense instruction to the entire class based on the general education content and the learning goals for students with disabilities. While instructing together, both teachers often form smaller instructional groups for more individualized lessons. The co-teachers use their assessment data to inform future instruction within the inclusive classroom. By implementing the effective co-teaching practices of shared planning, instructing, and assessing, teachers become equal partners for the benefit of all students.
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Effective Practices for Helping Students with Neurodiversity Transition to Independent Living
Ngonidzashe Mpofu, Elias M. Machina, Helen Dunbar-Krige, Elias Mpofu, and Timothy Tansey
School-to-community living transition programs aim to support students with neurodiversity to achieve productive community living and participation, including employment, leisure and recreation, learning and knowledge acquisition, interpersonal relationships, and self-care. Neurodiversity refers to variations in ability on the spectrum of human neurocognitive functioning explained by typicality in brain activity and related behavioral predispositions. Students with neurodiversity are three to five times more likely to experience community living and participation disparities as well as lack of social inequity compared to their typically developing peers. School-to-community transition programs for students with neurodiversity are implemented collaboratively by schools, families of students, state and federal agencies, and the students’ allies in the community. Each student with neurodiversity is unique in his or her school-to-community transition support needs. For that reason, school-to-community transition programs for students with neurodiversity should address the student’s unique community living and participation support needs. These programs address modifiable personal factors of the student with neurodiversity important for successful community living, such as communication skills, self-agency, and self-advocacy. They also address environmental barriers to community living and participation premised on disability related differences, including lack of equity in community supports with neurodiversity. The more successful school-to-community living transition programs for students with neurodiversity are those that adopt a social justice approach to full community inclusion.
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Effective Practices for Teaching All Learners in Secondary Classrooms
Kate de Bruin
It is important to consider inclusive and effective teacher practices in secondary classrooms as distinct from other schooling levels and settings. Many years of inclusive education reforms have brought about increases in the numbers of students with disabilities who are educated in the regular school system. However, progress has been slower for secondary school students with disabilities, who remain more likely to be segregated from their peers and to receive a poorer-quality education, when compared to their primary school counterparts. This is because many barriers to student inclusion remain entrenched in the structure and organization of secondary schooling systems. These barriers often arise from seeing difficulties in learning and participating through a medical model and thus requiring diagnostic verification and specialist support, instead of seeing student difficulties in learning as arising from a social model of disability, in which student participation and progress are hampered by poor design or inflexibility in teaching practices and a lack of access to support.
A large body of research exists to support the case for using a range of school-wide organization as well as classroom-based practices that effectively overcome these barriers, and provide high-quality and equitable academic and social supports to all students in the secondary school classroom. Those that foster collaboration and effective relationships between professionals and students, and that provide access to support on the basis of need rather than diagnosis, have been found to produce supportive environments in which diversity is valued, equity is maximized for all students, and social and academic outcomes are improved for all students.
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Effective Practices for Teaching Writing to Students with Disabilities in the United States
April Camping and Steve Graham
Writing is especially challenging for students with disabilities, as 19 out of every 20 of these students experience difficulty learning to write. In order to maximize writing growth, effective instructional practices need to be applied in the general education classroom where many students with special needs are educated. This should minimize special education referrals and maximize the progress of these students as writers. Evidence-based writing practices for the general education classroom include ensuring that students write frequently for varying purposes; creating a pleasant and motivating writing environment; supporting students as they compose; teaching critical skills, processes, and knowledge; and using 21st-century writing tools.
It is also important to be sure that practices specifically effective for enhancing the writing growth of students with special needs are applied in both general and special education settings (where some students with disabilities may receive part or all of their writing instruction). This includes methods for preventing writing disabilities, tailoring instruction to meet individual student needs, addressing roadblocks that can impede writing growth, and using specialized writing technology that allows these students to circumvent one or more of their writing challenges.
Article
Effective Self-Management Strategies
Lisa A. Rafferty and Kristie Asaro-Saddler
There are many benefits to developing self-management skills in children, especially in inclusive classroom environments; individuals with effective self-management skills who work as part of a larger team can improve not only their own overall performance but also that of the group as a whole—inside and outside of the school setting. Teaching students self-management strategies can free teacher time to focus on other essential tasks, which is especially important when working in a classroom environment with children with a variety of learning strengths and needs. Moreover, such strategies can be used to increase students’ opportunities to practice and respond to knowledge and academic skills in the curriculum, as well as support their behavioral needs.
Although there are many benefits to developing self-management skills, students with and at risk of disabilities often need explicit instruction to learn about and implement specific strategies to help develop these skills. Fortunately, teaching just a small set of strategies can have wide-ranging benefits and help students regulate many behaviors; additionally, research results suggest that people with a variety of learning strengths and needs can learn to implement and benefit from being taught self-management strategies. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to focus on such skills.
Despite these encouraging benefits, however, there are still several areas within self-management research that need to be further explored and discussed. For instance, identifying the appropriate level of teacher involvement in teaching these strategies, determining the potential differential effects of various self-management strategies on the behaviors of students embodying different characteristics, and the potential structural variability and the impact on student outcomes all require further investigation. Given these unresolved questions in the field, it is unclear as to how such variables impact students’ mastery and generalization of self-management strategies. This is especially important since it has been argued that self-management is the most significant goal of education; individuals who can effectively self-manage contribute to society in impactful and meaningful ways.
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Effective Strategies for Improving Reading Comprehension
Meenakshi Gajria and Athena Lentini McAlenney
Reading comprehension, or the ability to extract information accurately from reading narrative or content area textbooks, is critical for school success. Many students identified with learning disabilities struggle with comprehending or acquiring knowledge from text despite adequate word-recognition skills. These students experience greater difficulty as they move from elementary to middle school where the focus shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Although the group of students with learning disabilities vary with respect to their challenges in reading, some general characteristics of this group include problems identifying central ideas of a text, including its relationship to supporting ideas, differentiating between important and unimportant details, asking questions, drawing inferences, creating a summary, and recalling textual ideas. Typically, these students are passive readers that do not spontaneously employ task appropriate cognitive strategies nor monitor their ongoing understanding of the text, resulting in limited understanding of both narrative and expository texts. An evidence-based approach to comprehension instruction is centered on teaching students the cognitive strategies used by proficient readers. Within the framework of reading comprehension, the goal of cognitive strategies is to teach students to actively engage with the text, to make connections with it and their prior knowledge, so that learning becomes more purposeful, deliberate, and self-regulated.
Texts differ in the level of challenge that they present to students. Narrative texts are generally simpler to read as these are based on a temporal sequence of events and have a predictable story structure. In contrast, expository texts, such as social studies and science, can be particularly demanding as there are multiple and complex text structures based on the relationship of ideas about a particular concept or topic. Using principles of explicit instruction, all learners, including students with learning disabilities and English language learners, can be taught cognitive strategies that have been proven effective for increasing reading comprehension. Early research focused on the instruction in a single cognitive strategy to promote reading comprehension such as identifying story grammar elements and story mapping for narrative texts and identifying the main idea, summarizing, and text structure for expository texts. Later researchers embedded a metacognitive component, such as self-monitoring with a specific cognitive strategy, and also developed multicomponent reading packages, such as reciprocal teaching, that integrated the use of several cognitive strategies. Instruction in cognitive and metacognitive strategies is a promising approach for students with learning disabilities to support their independent use of reading comprehension strategies and for promoting academic achievement across content areas and grade levels.
Article
The Eight-Year Study and Progressive Education Cooperative Studies
Craig Kridel
During the 1930–1940s, the Progressive Education Association’s Eight-Year Study ushered in an era of secondary school experimentation, establishing an organizational process (the cooperative study) and introducing a research methodology (implementative research) for educational renewal. Cooperative studies embraced a democratic ideal that participants would work together for a greater good and maintained a fundamental belief that a diversity of perspectives, coupled with open discourse, would serve to better develop educational practices. Although no unified theory was established for cooperative study, activities focused on problem-solving were intended to expand teachers’ abilities rather than to establish a single method for the dissemination of educational programs. Implementative research was grounded in a faith in experimentation as an “exploratory process” to include gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and discussing data, and sought to determine the validity (in contrast to reliability) of programmatic interventions. Drawing on 1930s progressive education high school practices, more than a hundred selected secondary and post-secondary schools throughout the United States—public and private, large and small, Black and White, rural and urban—participated in national and regional cooperative studies, funded primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board. Experimental projects included the Progressive Education Association’s Eight-Year Study (1930–1942), consisting of 30 sites with 42 secondary schools (and 26 junior high schools) throughout the United States; the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States’ Southern Study (1938–1945), consisting of 33 White secondary schools in the American Southeast; the American Council of Education’s Cooperative Study in General Education (1938–1947), consisting of 25 colleges throughout the United States; and the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools for Negroes’ Secondary School Study (1940–1946), consisting of 17 Black secondary schools in the American Southeast. These cooperative studies served to explore and further develop progressive education practices at the secondary and post-secondary school level.
The intent of the 1930s–1940s cooperative study projects was to develop school programs that would attend to the interests and needs of adolescents without diminishing students’ chances for further education. Guided by “Eight-Year Study progressivism,” cooperative study staff placed great trust in the ability of teachers to address complex issues, belief in democracy as a guiding social ideal, and faith in thoughtful inquiry to create educational settings that nourished both students and teachers. Based on these fundamental themes, many cooperative study schools adopted what became a distinctive view of progressive education with correlated and fused core curricula, teacher–pupil planning, cumulative student records, and summer professional development workshops. Notions of “success” for these projects prove difficult to ascertain; however, innovative forms of curriculum design, instructional methodology, student assessment instruments, and professional development activities arose from these programs that served to influence educational theory and practice throughout the mid- and late-20th century. Perhaps equally important, cooperative study, along with implementative research, displayed the importance of educational exploration and school experimentation, implicitly asserting that a healthy school was an experimental school.
Article
Elite and Private Education
Catherine Doherty and Megan Pozzi
While meritocratic ideals assume a level playing field for educational competition, those who can may seek to tilt the field in their children’s favor to ensure better educational opportunities and the associated life rewards. A growing body of literature is researching “up” to better understand how advantage for some through the choice of elite or private schooling contributes to the relative disadvantage of others. Institutional claims to offering an “elite” education can rest on different logics such as social selectivity by dint of high fees or academic selectivity by dint of enrollments conditional on academic excellence. Private education provided by a non-government entity serves as an alternative to public sector provision for those who can afford it. The global spread of neoliberal metapolicy has fanned a general trend towards privatization. Such logics of social restriction can distinguish the whole school, niche programs of distinction within a school, or tracking practices that pool advantage in particular classes or subjects. While education policy debates wrestle with how to articulate competing ethics of excellence, inclusivity, and equity, elite branding unapologetically resolves these tensions by conflating excellence and exclusivity. To achieve and sustain elite status, however, relies on the extra work of carefully curating reputations and protecting the brand. Recent research has started to ask more difficult questions of educational privilege. Such research helps to understand: the curricular processes and nature of privilege achieved through elite and private educational choices; how such education harnesses the semblance of meritocratic competition to legitimate its forms of distinction; and the broader impact of these processes.
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Embedding Sustainability in Teacher Education in Australia
Lisa D. Ryan and Jo-Anne L. Ferreira
The role of education in addressing environmental and sustainability concerns has been recognized since the 1960s, with contemporary education for sustainable development (ESD) approaches seeking to prepare students to be active citizens with the knowledge, skills, and capacities to successfully address sustainability challenges. Given the focus on education as a key strategy, there have also been numerous international initiatives seeking to reorient teacher education for sustainability (TEfS), including providing curriculum resources for teacher educators, upskilling teacher educators, building communities of practice, and developing ESD competency frameworks. Despite these efforts, few teacher education institutions embed such work, resulting in limited skills and capabilities among teacher educators to teach active citizenship for sustainability. Barriers to effective TEfS include compartmentalization of disciplines and the prioritization of other curriculum areas such as numeracy and literacy, and this has compounded the problem.
A case study of a decade-long project, Embedding Teacher Education for Sustainability in Australia, demonstrates how systems approaches to change that build common visions, identifying and working with all stakeholders within a system, can lead to positive TEfS outcomes. There are key lessons to be learned from this project, which might inform a future model for embedding sustainability in teacher education in other countries. Using a systems approach to change that recognizes key drivers of teacher education, such as governmental policy and teacher accreditation, and that advocates for the inclusion of ESD into teacher standards should be a key priority action if ESD is to be successfully embedded within teacher education.
Article
Embodied Cognition
Sheila L. Macrine and Jennifer M.B. Fugate
Embodied cognition theories are different from traditional theories of cognition in that they specifically focus on the mind–body connection. This shift in our understanding of how knowledge is acquired challenges Cartesian, as well as computational theories of cognition that emphasize the body as a “passive” observer to brain functions, and necessary only in the execution of motor actions. Historically, mental representations within the brain were typically considered abstractions of the original information (i.e., mental representations). Accordingly, these amodal (disembodied) theories provided the knowledge used in cognitive processes, but did not reflect the original sensorimotor states themselves. In contrast, Embodied cognition provides a starting point to advance our understanding of how perceptual, sensorimotor and multisensory approaches facilitate and encourage learning throughout the lifespan. Derived from embodied cognition, embodied learning constitutes a contemporary pedagogical theory of knowing and learning that emphasizes the use of the body in educational practice. Embodied learning approaches scientifically endorse and advance sensorimotor learning, as well as offer potentially useful tools for educators. This article begins with a discussion on the historical progression of embodied understanding in the disciplines of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, with a focus on how embodied cognition differs from traditional models of cognition. Empirical evidence from varied field domains (e.g., reading, handwriting, STEM fields, haptic technology, mixed reality, and special education) are presented that show how embodied learning increases and facilitates learning and memory. Discussions within each content area draw upon embodied principles and show why the reviewed techniques facilitate learning. Also discussed are examples on how these principles can be further integrated into educational curriculum, with an eye toward the learner as a unified whole.
Article
Emotion and Teacher Education
Alberto Bellocchi
Emotion research in teaching and education more generally is a well-developed field of inquiry, offering suggestions for initial teacher education course development and practical suggestions for improving the working lives of teachers and schoolchildren. In contrast, emotion research in teacher education is an emergent and expanding area of inquiry. Preservice teachers, or university teacher education students, have unique emotional demands given that their teacher identities may still be in formative stages and their school-based practicum may not present the full complement of emotional experiences that full-time teachers encounter daily and for extended periods of time. Some specific objectives of past research in teacher education include explorations of preservice teachers’ emotions; preparing preservice teachers for the emotional demands of the job; developing understandings about the interplay between teacher–student relationships or social bonds, emotions, and learning; and addressing the strong emotions associated with practicum for preservice teachers, school-based teacher educators, and university-based teacher educators. A diverse range of theories are available for investigating emotion in preservice teacher education. This range presents different ways of conceptualizing what emotions are considered to be, stemming from disciplines including sociology, philosophy, psychology, critical studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and neuroscience. In addition to canvassing theories and traditions, dominant approaches to the study of preservice teacher emotions are addressed including early investigations, which relied on single self-report research methods to the more complex and dynamic multimethod and multitheoretical studies that have emerged in recent years. Suggestions are made for fruitful future lines of inquiry of preservice teachers’ emotional experiences and needs. Teacher attrition and burnout, particularly in the early years, continue to be vexing international problems. Research into preservice teacher emotions and emotion management are two important areas of inquiry that could address the related problems of burnout and attrition. Emotion management is also linked to social bonds, and better understandings of these connections are needed in the context of preservice teachers’ experiences and learning during practicums and within university courses. A focus on enacted classroom and staffroom interactions offers great scope for novel research contributions. Better understandings of structural conditions affecting emotions and preservice teachers’ learning are needed that include the bridging of macrosocial structural factors influencing work conditions with microsocial interactions in classrooms, staffrooms, and during parent-teacher interactions. New research adopting contemporary theories of emotion and methods is needed to explore preservice teacher identities. Combining this focus with the aforementioned lines of investigation into burnout, attrition, social bonds, and connections between macrostructural and microinteractional aspects of teaching and learning presents a third line of novel research. Guiding questions to prompt these and other lines of investigation are offered.
Article
Empowering Policies and Practices for Teen Mothers
Crystal Machado and Wenxi Schwab
Early pregnancy is a global issue that occurs in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Although the teen birth rate in the United States, which is high on the Human Development Index (HDI), has been declining since 1991, it continues to be substantially higher than that of other Western industrialized nations. For countries that are lower on the HDI, the teen birth rate is higher, partly because early marriages, pregnancy rates, and infant mortality rates are higher and more common in these regions. Except for some influential articles written by scholars in the Global south, much of the scholarship related to early pregnancy has been written by those in the Global north. Nevertheless, analysis of available scholarly literature in English confirms that several sociocultural factors—child sexual abuse, intimate partner violence/dating violence, family-related factors, poverty, early marriages, and rurality—lead to early pregnancy and/or school dropout. Although pregnancy can occasionally increase pregnant and parenting teens’ desire to persevere, the scholarly literature confirms that the majority need support to overcome the short- and long-term ramifications associated with early motherhood, such as stigma, expulsion and criminal charges, segregation, transition, strain and struggle, depression, children with behavioral problems, and financial instability. Based on the availability of human and financial resources, educators can use U.S.-based illustrative examples, with context-specific modification, to empower this marginalized group. Providing pregnant and parenting teen mothers with thoughtfully developed context-specific school and community-based programs has the potential to promote resilience, persistence, and a positive attitude toward degree completion. Schools that do not have access to federal, state, and locally funded programs can help teen moms thrive in the new and uncharted territory with inclusive community or school-driven policies and procedures such as the use of early warning systems (EWS) that generate data for academic interventions, mentoring, counseling, health care, and day care for young children.
