In light of the need to prepare reflective and effective teachers who can differentiate their instruction to support the learning of all students in inclusive classrooms, this article describes the collaborative process faculty have used to incorporate universal design for learning (UDL) and evidence-based practice (EBP) into an inclusive teacher education program’s curriculum and practicum experiences. Initially, faculty mapped the curriculum by agreeing upon a common definition of UDL and EBP, reviewing the research to create EBP documentation charts, which were used to constructing self-assessment tools known as innovation configurations (IC). Faculty used the IC to identify and address the strengths and gaps within the program’s courses and clinical experiences and align courses with online interactive instructional resources related to UDL and EBP. To bridge the gap between research and practice and guide educators in making evidence-informed decisions, faculty developed a 10-step practice-based evidence assessment and instructional model to collect and analyze classroom-based data about the efficacy, acceptability, and fidelity of one’s instructional practices and use of UDL and EBP. Faculty revised and field-tested a lesson plan template that prompted educators to personalize their instruction and make it more explicit by addressing such factors as student diversity and collaboration, and employing UDL, EBP, instructional and assistive technology and formative and summative assessment. Faculty also redesigned the program’s lesson observation form used to better evaluate preservice teachers working in inclusive classrooms and provide them with feedback related to their effective use of EBP, UDL, instructional and assistive technology, and assessment and classroom management strategies. The lesson observation form also was revised to make it more reflective of the program’s curriculum reform efforts related to the use of UDL and EBP, and to align it with the national teacher education accreditation standards, national and statewide teacher evaluation, curriculum and teacher education certification standards.
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A Collaborative Process for Incorporating Universal Design for Learning and Evidence-Based Practice into Inclusive Teacher Education Programs
Spencer Salend and Catharine Whittaker
Article
Action Research as Continuous Professional Development in Southeast Asia
Sarimah Shaik-Abdullah, S. Kanageswari Suppiah Shanmugam, and Mohan Chinnappan
The quality of education in any country rests on school communities as a whole. However, the real implementers of innovations and changes in curriculum are teachers. Teachers, as practitioners, are the ones most often held accountable for successes and failures in educating schoolchildren. The way to facilitate teachers in handling challenges and keeping up with curriculum renewals is through constant support in the form of continuing professional development (CPD) by means of action research. Action research as CPD has been viewed as a critical platform for advocating change, which is the outcome of teachers’ ability and autonomy to lead in making informed decisions about their own practices. Given its usefulness, action research is found well established, vastly practiced, and widely published in Western countries. This has raised the question of the widespread use of action research as CPD in the Southeast Asian (SEA) region. Preliminary analysis reveals that in some SEA countries, such as Timor Leste, there is limited literature on action research, while in countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, action research has been well documented. At the same time, there is an emerging trend in SEA countries to adopt different models of action research. In Malaysia, for instance, action research has been primarily classroom based, whereas in Indonesia, a critical and community based approach to action research seems to be prevalent. This suggests that the kinds of action research conducted in the different SEA countries may reflect variations in cultural, economic, and geographical landscapes. Given the importance of action research to teacher practitioners and school leaders, and in providing an identity to the action research approaches conducted in Southeast Asia, the historical trail of action research presents a window into the nature of CPD concerns of each country, as well as the successes and challenges of conducting action research as CPD for sustained impact.
Article
Adolescent Literacies
Donna E. Alvermann and William Terrell Wright
Naming is a curious practice. It entails rudiments, now mostly taken for granted, that serve to categorize everyday literacy practices across fields as diverse as cultural anthropology and the management of multiple Git profiles. As a term unto itself, adolescent literacies is not immune to the vagaries of naming. In fact, it serves as an excellent example of how commonly named concepts in education embed the field’s histories, debates, pedagogies, and policies writ large. Conceptualizing literacy in its plural form raised eyebrows among academics, researchers, practitioners, publishers, and indexers concerned with the noun–verb agreement in phrases such as “adolescent literacies is a subfield” of adolescence. For some, the very notion of literacy extending beyond reading and writing is still debatable. With each passing day, however, it becomes noticeably more evident that multimodal forms of communication—images, sounds, bodily performances, to name but a few ways of expressing oneself—are competing quite well in the marketplace of ideas that flow globally with or without a linguistic component attached to them. Aside from the naming process and its attendant political overtones, the practice of treating youth between roughly the ages of 12 and 17 as a monolithic group has been common in the United States. Largely traceable to a time in which developmental psychology dominated the field of literacy instruction (in the early to late 20th century), designating youth as adolescents equated to viewing them as some a normative group devoid of racial, class, gender, and any number of other identity markers. Even with the sociocultural turn in early 21st century and its abundance of studies reifying the socially constructed nature of adolescents, the term persists. Its adhesive-like attraction to literacies, however, may be weakening in light of research that points to youth who are agentic and dynamic game changers when it comes to participating in a world grown more attuned to the need for collaboration based not on hierarchical standing but instead on working through commonplace tensions too complex for any one solution.
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An Emerging Framework for Inclusive Educational Leadership
Michelle D. Young and Noelle W. Arnold
Ongoing shifts in demographics, knowledge, and expectations require continuous critical reflection on the leadership of K-12 schools. The models of school leadership offered in the past, which focus on management, are no longer adequate. Today, leaders must also ensure that all the students in their care are being provided high-quality, developmentally appropriate, and challenging educational opportunities that prepare each student for college, careers, and life. In other words, leaders must engage in “Inclusive Educational Leadership.”
Inclusive Educational Leadership is a reconceptualization of traditional education leadership, which is dedicated to equity, quality and inclusion. We emphasize “inclusive” because it is our contention that providing a quality education experience that is both equitable and fosters equitable outcomes requires an intentional focus on inclusion.
Inclusive Educational Leadership has three key areas of emphasis: place, preparation, and practice. Place refers to social practices and policies that reflect competing meanings and uses of spaces, the role people play in a given space and articulations of locations (geographic positions), environments (conditions), and ranks (hierarchies). Preparation refers to education, training and mentoring that is provided to leaders, and practice refers to the work leaders do to cultivate dispositions that support inclusion, support inclusive and culturally responsive practice, and develop an inclusive school culture.
The goal of inclusive leadership is to cultivate an inclusive, caring, and supportive school culture that promotes the academic success and well-being of each student. In other words, its goal is to offer more than expectations that lightly touch on all students; its goal is to deliver results for each student. Thus, the work of Inclusive Educational Leadership involves a restructuring of the education experience to prevent marginalization, while creating school cultures based on dignity and respect and focused on achieving equity, high-quality educational experiences, and life success for all students.
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An Exploration of Evolving Approaches to Teacher Identity Revealed in Literature on Teaching from 2010 to 2018
Catherine Beauchamp
Teacher identity is conceived in complex ways, in part because of the attention that must be paid to both the personal and the professional dimensions of teaching experience. In addition, teacher identity as a concept is closely intertwined with the notion of teacher agency, as well as with the potential for a teacher to encounter ongoing challenges in the development and adjustment of identity in diverse educational contexts. Literature on teaching from a range of areas—teacher education, preservice teaching, in-service teaching in schools, and university or higher education teaching—reflects a variety of existing approaches to teacher identity. Despite the complexity of the concept, understanding teacher identity remains of critical importance to individual educators, to institutions and to society as a whole.
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Art-Informed Pedagogies in the Preparation of Teachers in the United States
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Lynn Sanders-Bustle
There are several interrelated themes in arts-informed pedagogies and teacher preparation: (1) the arts as tools to improve students’ academic achievement in other content areas such as math, science, social studies, language arts, and foreign language; (2) the arts as holistic and dynamic process for meaning-making; (3) the arts for teachers’ own professional identity and satisfaction (e.g., for teacher reflection, teacher retention, job satisfaction, and relationship-building); and (4) the arts for social change, social justice, and education advocacy work. There are a series of key questions and concerns regarding where, how, and why arts-informed teacher education practices are used, who uses them, and to what end.
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Arts-Based Action Research in the North
Timo Jokela
The art-based action research (ABAR) method has its roots in action research, particularly in participatory action research (PAR) and action research in education and is clearly linked with international artistic research (AR) and art-based educational research (ABER). The ABAR methodology was developed collaboratively by a group of art educators and researchers at the University of Lapland (UoL) to support the artist-teacher-researcher with skills and professional methods to seek solutions to recognized problems and promote future actions and visions in the changing North and the Arctic. On the one hand, the need for decolonizing cultural sustainable art education research was identified in multidisciplinary collaboration with the UoL’s northern and circumpolar network. On the other hand, the participatory and dialogical approach was initiated by examining the pressures for change within art education stemming from the practices of relational and dialogical contemporary art. ABAR has been developed and completed over the years in doctoral dissertations and art-based research projects on art education at UoL that are often connected to place-specific issues of education for social and cultural sustainability.
The multi-phased and long-term Winter Art Education project has played a central role in the development of the ABAR methodology. During the Winter Art Education project, ABAR has been successfully used in reforming formal and informal art education practices, school and adult education, and teacher education in Northern circumstances and settings. Winter art developed through the ABAR method has supported decolonization, revitalization, and cultural sustainability in schools and communities. In addition, the ABAR method and winter art have had a strong impact on regional development and creative industries in the North.
Article
Asian American and Pacific Islander Children
Valerie Ooka Pang, Benjamin Chang, Yoon K. Pak, Audrey Hokoda, Noreen Naseem Rodríguez, and Esther June Kim
Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are often invisible to others. AAPI children are even more ignored in schools. They comprise many different groups with diverse cultures, languages, values, geographical roots, and ethnicities. This is why we have chosen to write about AAPI young people and not to limit our discussions to Asian Americans. We believe in inclusivity and so use the pan-Asian term of AAPIs. Some children may be Guamanian American, Thai American, Taiwanese American, Samoan American, Hawaiian American, Fijian American, Filipinx American, or a combination of several ethnic or racial backgrounds. Not all AAPI youth are the same. This is a major AAPI issue that teachers need to understand. Often teachers hold the misconception that most AAPIs are Chinese American. This is not true.
One of the reasons that teachers and the general public are not aware of the educational, social, or psychological needs of AAPI children is because of the model minority myth. Not all AAPI students do well in school. Research has shown that young people have different academic strengths and vulnerabilities. These distinctions may be due to many variables such as ethnic membership, class status, parent education, and language proficiency in English. The model minority stereotype hurts and conceals the hardships that many AAPIs face, from low self-esteem to academic limitations. In addition, there are AAPI students who must deal with trauma from microaggressions that young people face because they are bullied due to accents, differences in physical appearance, and cultural conflicts. Others have come to the United States experiencing trauma as refugees who fled civil persecution or war. In addition, students who are LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) and AAPI may have to deal with the trauma of homophobia. Teachers must be able to identify ways to reduce trauma in schools like using culturally relevant/responsive strategies to help lessen student depression and anxieties. There are numerous approaches that teachers can take to develop compassionate classrooms in a democracy where all students are accepted and respected. They can teach compassion and kindness. Educators can teach about the contributions of various AAPI civil rights role models such as Grace Lee Boggs, Larry Itliong, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Philip Vera Cruz, Patsy Mink, and Yuri Kochiyama in the curriculum. Teaching about civil rights activists demonstrates to children and adults that AAPIs have been actively fighting for the rights of all. In addition, teachers can integrate AAPI children’s literature so students are aware of cultural values, experiences, and knowledge that has arisen from AAPI communities. All students should have the opportunity to see photos and drawings of various AAPI people in picturebooks and other texts. AAPI students are not super students; they are not math whiz kids. They are Americans like anyone else, with strengths and limitations.
Article
Assistive Technology to Enhance Inclusive Education
Dianne Chambers
Schools, teachers, and students are increasingly able to access and apply assistive technology to enhance inclusion within mainstream classrooms. To ensure that a classroom is truly inclusive, the teacher and other professionals involved in supporting children with disability using assistive technology require appropriate knowledge and skills to bring potential to reality. There are many successful examples of assistive technology successfully embedding into the practices of inclusive setting, but there is still some way to go to ensure this is a seamless approach. There are many benefits and difficulties associated with adopting assistive technology to support students with disability, particularly in developing countries. While the challenges may be great, the potential for assistive technology to impact significantly on the educational, social, and recreational outcomes for students with disability in inclusive classrooms is immense.
Article
Biographical Approaches in Education
Belmira Oliveira Bueno
Since the 1980s, in different countries, researchers and educators have put into action a number of studies of teachers’ biographies, teachers’ narratives and stories, as well as other ways of employing life history methods, in order to renew the field of education. A vast literature has been produced in the last decades on this perspective, giving testimony to a surprising growth of the educational area under the impulse of such approaches. There was a clear need for a methodological renewal of this field but also a need of a revision of the functions of school and to the way of conceiving education. The idea of lifelong learning frames this scenario and the expectations outlined in the turn of this century, altering profoundly the functions of school and the ends of education. The biographical approaches are taken as an attempt of meeting such demands. However, the work with life histories and biographies has shown different directions, following from a conjugation of factors and from more specific demands for education present in the respective contexts where such experiences have taken place. Such approaches are part of a broader movement of individualization and subjectivism that characterizes contemporary society. The two perspectives focused on in this article—that of English-speaking countries, with a predominant focus on the life and career of teachers; and those developed in Francophone environments, with the focus on the continued education of adults—have shown great growth particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, giving testimony to the appeal that biographical approaches exerted upon researchers and educators. It presents the features of these two trends preceded by an incursion into the field of sociology aiming at highlighting some relevant methodological and epistemological issues. By this way we intend to emphasize the potentiality of biographical approaches to the knowledge of education, drawing attention to the challenges for individuals’ lives in the contemporary society and for the emergence of new ways of conceiving the subjectivities by the new human and social theories.
Article
Blended Learning in Teacher Education
Harrison Hao Yang and Jason MacLeod
Practices of blended learning are being wholeheartedly accepted and implemented into the mainstream processes of educational delivery throughout the world. This trend follows a large body of research that suggests blended learning approaches can be more effective than both traditional face-to-face instruction and entirely computer-mediated instructional approaches. However, in teacher education there are two important factors that influence the outcomes of blended learning; first, the articulation of differences between instructional approaches, and second, the understanding of key pedagogical strategies that support student success. Research on blended learning in teacher education should include both preservice and in-service teacher participants. Preservice teachers are individuals operating in the preparation and training stages, prior to assuming full responsibility of a professional teaching role. In-service teachers are individuals practicing as teachers that are typically still toward completion of their early career induction training to the profession.
Both historical utilization and future research trends are evident through a critical analysis of the last three decades of highly cited scholarship on blended learning in teacher education. Historical utilization trends show an emergence of online and blended learning approaches, which reached nearly 30% of postsecondary education students in 2016. Future research trends include evidence-based practices, preparing for active learning classrooms, building capacity for practical training, collaborative teaching opportunities, leveraging blended learning to improve education equity, and cultivating mixed reality blended learning environments. Researchers, practitioners, administrators, and policymakers should continue to stay informed on this topic and continuously find ways to improve the application of blended learning in teacher education.
Article
Career Change Teachers: Caveat and Opportunities in Workforce Planning for Schools
Babak Dadvand, Merryn Dawborn-Gundlach, Jan van Driel, and Chris Speldewinde
Teacher shortage has emerged as a significant policy concern in post-pandemic times, prompting governments to attract more individuals into the teaching profession, including those with career experiences outside schools and the education sector. The term “career change teachers” refers to those who enter teaching often later in life after spending some time in other professions. Career change teachers have qualities that make them particularly attractive candidates for teaching, including a strong sense of purpose and a commitment to care, up-to-date content knowledge, practical skills that can make learning more engaging and meaningful for students, and a broad set of organizational skills from their previous career or careers. Various incentives from governments throughout the world and a growing number of alternative pathways into teaching that combine intensive studies with teaching duties have offered more flexibility for individuals to undertake their Initial Teacher Education (ITE) mid-career. However, front-focused policy solutions that prioritize teacher recruitment over teacher retention tend not to address the revolving door of admission and attrition. Loss of investment occurs when new teachers, including career changers, leave the profession prematurely because they are not adequately supported during their transition into study and teaching. A retention-focused workforce planning strategy is needed, one that addresses the structural and education system-level contributors to high teacher turnover. Such a strategy will have implications for the types of support provided to career change teachers in their transition into ITE and teaching.
Article
Classroom Discussions
P. Karen Murphy, Carla M. Firetto, Gwendolyn M. Lloyd, Liwei Wei, and Sara E. Baszczewski
Classroom discussions are a common pedagogical approach that involve verbal exchanges of information between teachers and students. Given their importance to teaching and learning, classroom discussions have been the focus of extensive curricular mandates and, to a lesser extent, research over the last several decades. In traditional classroom discussions, the teacher tends to be situated at the center of the discussion. This type of discussion model is commonly referred to as a transmissionary model, where the teacher transmits knowledge and understandings and often leads the discussion by posing factual questions and responding to students’ answers by giving evaluative feedback. However, productive classroom discussions are better characterized by a dialogic model with students at the center of the discussion. When students are encouraged to ask thoughtful questions, give reflective responses, and challenge each other using reasoned arguments within classroom discussions, they are more likely to become builders and owners of their knowledge. Indeed, productive classroom discussions tend to ignite students’ engagement, thinking, and understanding of knowledge across academic content areas. When adopting a dialogic model, classroom discussions can advance students’ learning by promoting their basic and high-level comprehension of literary text, reasoning, and argumentation during mathematical sense-making, scientific reasoning, and model building and even second-language proficiency and communicative competence. While the overarching aim of classroom discussions is to enhance student learning across content areas (e.g., language arts, mathematics, science, or second-language learning), the various roles that teachers assume in each of the content areas may have different emphases that align with various content learning expectations. Optimizing classroom discussions requires specific considerations of the content-focused goal, teacher knowledge of content and discourse orchestration, student instruction on classroom talk, and context of content learning. Importantly, the potential and promise of productive classroom discussions can be realized by supporting teachers’ content-specific discussion practices through sustained professional development and by supporting students through explicit instruction about discussion.
Article
Classroom Management and Teacher Effectiveness
Konstantina Koutrouba
Given the fact that the concept of “classroom management” and its connotations as well as its relation to effective teaching, despite decades of world-wide research, remain rather undefined, or, at least, not fully described, different educational systems and teachers around the world try hard to develop a wide variety of classroom management theories and strategies, since they obviously consider it as being significantly related to effective teaching. Effective classroom management reflects teachers’ multifaceted high-ranked ability to, inter alia, establish and maintain within their classrooms acceptable rules of productive teacher-to-student and student-to-student communication, to motivate students to work cooperatively, and to fruitfully implement best teaching strategies according to their students’ individualized learning needs. Moreover, it presupposes teachers’ ability to create a learning context where students’ disruptive attitudes are prevented or addressed and misbehavior is reduced while positive expected learning outcomes are achieved, and the students’ cognitive, social and affective development is continuously facilitated and sustained. Finally, it is based on teachers’ ability to set clearly defined and agreed—between teacher and students—codes of communication, to produce measurable learning outcomes that fulfill students’ and their parents’ expectations, and to take full advantage of their students’ features, classroom features, and local space features in order to develop their own professional features. It is, thus, evident why successful classroom management is considered by teachers, parents, students, and researchers to be tightly linked to teachers’ professional competence and effectiveness.
Moreover, teachers who successfully implement classroom management are reported to create in time a regulatory framework for communication within the classroom through the establishment and adoption of rules and consequences. They also tend to safeguard the quality of communication with their students, and to develop their professional authority profile. They succeed in that by strengthening their willingness to meet students’ learning requirements, needs, and interests, by using effectively verbal and non-verbal communication to encourage learning and, above all, by controlling and managing their institutionalized power.
International research over the past years has shown that the implementation of learner-centered innovative teaching strategies on the basis of flexible differentiated teaching focused on students’ personal values, abilities and potential, the establishment of student-to-student shared responsibility and of a student-to-teacher commitment contract, the development of a dynamic interplay between students during group work, the respect for diversity, and the reinforcing of students’ self-regulation all highly contribute to the creation of a fruitful in-class learning environment. In such an environment students feel secure and accepted, teachers manage the classroom successfully and are considered to be competent and effective professionals.
Article
Coaching Young Academics in Malaysia
Raja Maznah Raja Hussain
Coaching as a method of professional development is now practiced in higher education to supplement and replace the traditional methods of new faculty induction, workshops, and training programs. Coaching may be more appealing for Generation Y (millennial) academics as it allows for a more personalized professional development and takes into consideration individual needs for support in the early years of their career. Support offered through coaching allow young academics to set their own goals, focusing on what is important to them in regard to teaching, research, publication, and student supervision. Depending on what the goals are, a young academic may need to engage with several coaches who would facilitate and help to steer the achievement of those goals, whether immediate goals such as publication or long-term goals such as promotion. The coaching process requires trust and patience on the part of both the coach and the coachee to build a relationship that will drive transformation. Coaching is known to benefit both the coach and the coachee as the journey is a deep learning process. The coachee develops self-belief and confidence through finding solutions and alternative ways to move forward, and the coach develops skills and refines techniques. Formalized coaching programs in higher-education institutions require commitments from everyone at all levels. An institution planning to implement coaching needs to take into consideration the readiness of the institution to engage with and support the coaching plan. A coaching culture helps the institution to flourish as it fosters members who are motivated to help others to grow.
Article
Collaborative Teacher Inquiry for Inclusive Education
Sarah Schlessinger and Celia Oyler
Taking an inquiry approach for professional learning in support of inclusive education is both pragmatic and powerful, although it has certainly not been the norm throughout much of teacher education in North America. Much research in inclusive education has focused on teacher beliefs and practices, school structures, and service delivery models, and such foci often position teachers as technicians, implementing outside experts’ ideas about “best practices,” thus marginalizing educators as mere consumers of research and methods, rather than developers, designers, and architects of inclusive practices.
To foster full participation and membership of all learners in their classrooms, teachers often engage in trial and error, puzzle solving, and creativity, to build productive and participatory communities of learning. Although consciousness, criticality, and questioning are the foundation of an inclusive stance, awareness alone does not necessarily generate practices of critical inclusivity. The work of moving recursively from framings (ideological and affective) to specific, embodied practices requires continuous action and reflection, which is well supported by practitioner inquiry.
The practice of inquiry requires that teachers engage in persistent, reflective work; take risks; and use failures as points of departure for new learning and teaching approaches. The content of the inquiry, when focused on capacity and inclusivity, has the potential to work against the dominant discourses that marginalize and exclude particular students and populations, whereas the process of inquiry can position teachers as creative, intellectual problem-solvers, thus working against the dominant discourse of teachers as technicians.
Inquiry for inclusivity is most often taken up as a collaborative practice, supporting educators to make their problem-solving public, gaining both friendly critique and affirmation. The collaborative inquiry group can also serve as a space for ideological and affective clarification, as striving to design teaching and learning for inclusion involves challenging many of the norms of schooling, including individualism; meritocracy; competition; and sorting, leveling, and ranking students.
Article
Community-Based Experiential Learning in Teacher Education
Gary Harfitt
Institutes of higher education around the world have increasingly adopted community-based experiential learning (EL) programs as pedagogy to equip their students with skills and values that make them more open to an increasingly unpredictable and ill-defined 21st-century world. Values of social justice, empathy, care, collaboration, creativity, and resilience have all been seen as potential benefits of community engagement through EL. In the field of teacher education, the goals of preparing teachers for the 21st century have undergone similar changes with the local community being positioned more and more as a knowledge space that is rich in learning opportunities for both preservice and in-service teachers. It is no longer enough for teacher educators to only focus on the teaching of classroom strategies and methods; beginning teachers’ must now move toward a critical interrogation of their role as a community-based teacher. Boundary-crossing projects established by teacher education institutes and that are embedded in local communities can complement more traditional pedagogies such as classroom-based lectures and teaching practicum. Such an approach to teacher education can allow for new teachers to draw on powerful community knowledge in order to become more inclusive and socially connected educators. In sum, community-based EL in teacher preparation programs can create a hybrid, nonhierarchical platform for academics, practitioners, and community partners who bring together different expertise that are all seen as being beneficial to teacher development in a rapidly changing and uncertain world.
While research has shown that community-based EL projects can bring tangible benefits to students, universities, and community members, a number of contentious issues continue to surround the topic and need to be addressed. One concerns the very definition of community-based EL itself. There is still a need to better characterize what community-based EL is and what it involves, because too often it is seen in overly simplistic terms, such as voluntary work, or categorized loosely as another example of service-learning endeavors, including field studies and internship programs. There has also been a paucity of research on the degree to which community-based EL projects in teacher training actually help to promote subject matter teaching skills. Other ongoing issues about the case for community-based learning in teacher education today include the question of who the teacher educators are in today’s rapidly changing world and to what extent noneducation-related community partners should be positioned as co-creators of knowledge alongside teacher educators in the development of new teachers’ personal and professional development.
Article
Complexity Theory and Teacher Education
Susan D. Martin, Vicki McQuitty, and Denise N. Morgan
Complexity theory offers possibilities for thinking about the challenges and opportunities inherent in teaching, teacher learning, and many other networked systems in teacher education. Complexity theory is a theory of learning systems that provides a framework for those interested in examining how systems develop and change. It is transdisciplinary in nature, drawing on insights from diverse fields across both the hard and social sciences, and when applied to education may provide a complex rather than simplistic view of teaching and learning. Further, complexity theory has the potential to offer a powerful alternative to linear and reductionist conceptualizations, with implications for methodology of teacher education research as well as its analysis and design. This small but growing body of work has influenced teacher education in two ways. First, scholars have argued for complexity theory’s usefulness as a framework to understand and describe how teacher education functions as a complex system. The second category of work, smaller than the first, uses complexity theory to frame and analyze empirical studies. Much of the emerging body of research conducted from a complexity theory perspective is descriptive and largely confirms what has been theorized. Empirical work has confirmed that a variety of systems, at different levels, influence teacher learning and pedagogical decisions. Gaps in our knowledge still exist, however, as theorists and researchers continue to struggle with how complexity theory can best serve teacher education for the benefit of teachers and students.
Article
Computing in Precollege Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Education
Amy Voss Farris and Gözde Tosun
Computing is essential to disciplinary practices and discourses of science, engineering, and mathematics. In each of these broad disciplinary areas, technology creates new ways of making sense of the world and designing solutions to problems. Computation and computational thinking are synergistic with ways of knowing in mathematics and in science, a relationship known as reflexivity, first proposed by Harel and Papert. In precollege educational contexts (e.g., K-12 schooling), learners’ production of computational artifacts is deeply complementary to learning and participating in science, mathematics, and engineering, rather than an isolated set of competencies.
In K-12 contexts of teaching and learning, students’ data practices, scientific modeling, and modeling with mathematics are primary forms through which computing mediates the epistemic work of science, mathematics, and engineering. Related literature in this area has contributed to scholarship concerning students’ development of computational literacies––the multiple literacies involved in the use and creation of computational tools and computer languages to support participation in particular communities. Computational thinking is a term used to describe analytic approaches to posing problems and solving them that are based on principles and practices in computer science. Computational thinking is frequently discussed as a key target for learning. However, reflexivity refocuses computational thinking on the synergistic nature between learning computing and the epistemic (knowledge-making) work of STEM disciplines. This refocusing is useful for building an understanding of computing in relation to how students generate and work with data in STEM disciplines and how they participate in scientific modeling and modeling in mathematics, and contributes to generative computational abstractions for learning and teaching in STEM domains.
A heterogeneous vision of computational literacies within STEM education is essential for the advancement of a more just and more equitable STEM education for all students. Generative computational abstractions must engage learners’ personal and phenomenological recontextualizations of the problems that they are making sense of. A democratic vision of computing in STEM education also entails that teacher education must advance a more heterogeneous vision of computing for knowledge-making aims. Teachers’ ability to facilitate authentic learning experiences in which computing is positioned as reflexive, humane, and used authentically in service of learning goals in STEM domains is of central importance to learners’ understanding of the relationship of computing with STEM fields.
Article
Conceptions and Models of Teacher Education
Maureen Robinson and Rada Jancic Mogliacci
Initial teacher education programs across the world bear many resemblances to one another in respect to their overall design features. Students generally follow courses that teach them foundational knowledge pertaining to education, like psychology or sociology, disciplinary knowledge in particular subject areas, and general and specific pedagogical knowledge. In addition, students are exposed to varying degrees of school placements. Despite these similarities in overall structure, the curriculum content and activities of teacher preparation may vary considerably, dependent on the underpinning conceptions of the goals and purposes of the program. Historical and geographical contexts also influence the choice of particular goals for teacher education.
Conceptions of teacher education can be clustered in a number of major approaches, each with its own subcategories. Although different terminologies may be used in the literature, the six major categories are as follows: a social justice approach, a master-apprentice approach, an applied science approach, a teacher identity approach, a competence approach, and a reflective approach. Each approach has certain key features and implications for curriculum design in teacher education, including vision, goals, content, teaching and learning methodologies, and the relationship between schools and colleges/universities. An example here is the difference between an applied science approach, based on the notion of teachers putting theories into practice, and a reflective practice approach, where teachers are encouraged to construct personal theories in and from practice. A second example of the different emphases is the extent to which education is located within its larger social context, with the relationship between school and society being more explicit within a social justice than a competence approach to teacher education. Conceptions may be implicit or explicit; in reality, most programs embody hybrid models with emphasis in particular directions.
The articulation of the key concepts, principles, and assumptions that underpin the design of teacher education programs contributes to the field in various ways. Promoting an understanding of different traditions of teacher education helps establish a shared vocabulary and knowledge base; this can improve the quality of teacher education through deepening academic debate and enhancing program coherence. In addition, strengthening the conceptual base of teacher education supports the professional autonomy of teacher educators, through advancing debate on the purposes, ethics, and politics of education and providing tools to discuss the curriculum implications of policy reform.
