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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Using Technology to Prepare 21st Century Educators
Therese M. Cumming
The use of real-time technology has caused the world to “shrink,” with society becoming more global and information- and communication-based. The amount of information that people are exposed to continues to increase exponentially, requiring a new definition of literacy that includes digital literacy and other 21st-century skills. However, the implementation of technology in education has not kept up with how it is used in peoples’ lives. The main role of teachers is to prepare students to become literate, globally informed citizens. Generation Z, or the technology generation, are tech savvy and used to instant action and access to information due to their experiences with the Internet. Although students are proficient with and regularly use mobile devices and other information and communication technologies (ICTs), their teachers have difficulty integrating these technologies into their pedagogy beyond basic functional uses. The goals of educational technology are often not readily apparent in classrooms; this is problematic, as technology has the potential to be used for critical thinking, collaboration, and the dissemination of new knowledge.
Therefore, teacher education programs have a responsibility to ensure that teachers of the future are globally aware, proficient with current innovative technology tools and information resources, and have the ability to adapt to tools and educational strategies of the future. Supporting preservice teachers in their acquisition of digital literacy can widen their views of the world and strengthen their skills in locating, assessing, organizing, analyzing, and presenting information. Teaching preservice teachers to use the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) model and embedding new technologies throughout teacher education programs can support preservice teachers’ global understandings and information literacy, as well as develop their expertise in the use of the technology itself. Instruction in digital literacies can help preservice teachers to hone their teaching skills and minimize the isolation and anxieties that are often experienced during their field experiences.
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High Leverage Practices in Elementary Inclusive Education
Lawrence J. Maheady and Angela L. Patti
Teacher preparation programs are undergoing a shift from knowledge-based to practice-based, meaning the emphasis is on what teacher candidates can do, rather than what they know. In light of this movement, high leverage practices (HLPs)—a set of core practices that educational experts agree all teachers should be able to do upon entering the teaching field—have been developed in several different educational areas (e.g., general education and special education). As experts develop sets of HLPs, they identify practices that (a) are researched based, (b) are often used by teachers during the school day, (c) can be applied across grade levels and subject areas, (d) are fundamental to student learning, and (e) can be taught, practiced, and developed to some degree of fluency by teachers entering the profession. The idea is that these practices can be used as a core curriculum for teacher preparation programs. While initial work with HLPs is promising, additional questions must be answered before moving forward. Institutions of higher education that choose to use HLPs to frame their teacher preparation programs need to determine (a) which HLPs to use, (b) how to integrate HLPs into the program, (c) how to assess teacher candidate fluency with HLPs, and (d) how to evaluate the effects of HLPs on P–12 students. As these questions are answered, further light can be shed on what truly makes a practice worthy of the designation “high leverage.”
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Learning To Teach Diverse Learners: Teachers and Teacher Preparation in the United States
A. Lin Goodwin
The question of what teachers should know and be able to do endures, given the central role teachers play in the development of young people into wise and contributing citizens for world societies. Research has demonstrated the relationship between teacher preparation and competence, and that quality teachers achieve better academic outcomes for learners. Moreover, the issue of quality teachers has become even more salient in the 21st century as forces of globalization blur boundaries, heightening both competition and cooperation among nations. These forces include: (a) massive global migration as a result of war and other political disruptions, such that countries around the world are receiving newcomers, many of whom are school-aged and bring with them new cultures and languages; (b) increased attention to human rights, with a focus on inclusion, equity, poverty reduction, and social uplift for all children, regardless of their circumstance or backgrounds, through universal education; and (c) international benchmarking assessments such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) that are driving international conversations about quality education and educators. The demands on teachers have increased, and definitions of quality emphasize the ability to capably teach children who represent multiple diversities (race, language, national origin, gender identities) and multiple vulnerabilities (poverty, dis/ability, immigrant status).
Preparing teachers for diverse students has long been relevant to the U.S. given its history as a country of immigrants, juxtaposed against a devastating legacy of enslavement, genocide, and imperialism. But the 1970s was when educators began to more seriously attend to educating diverse children who had been uniformly ignored because of racism, discrimination, and segregation. This was on the heels of civil rights legislature, activism on the part of people of color, people with disabilities, and indigenous people for better schools for their children, and large waves of immigration from Latin America and Asia, versus primarily European countries as in the past. As the proportion of non-white students increased in U.S. schools, preparing teachers for diversity became imperative, especially since the majority of teachers were white, and the achievement gap between mainstream children and diverse children remained stubbornly wide. Researchers also documented the inequities diverse learners faced in schools—poorly funded schools, less qualified teachers, limited access to academic curriculum, excessive disciplinary practices, and so on—as well as the teaching practices that made a positive difference in the educational experiences and achievements of diverse children. These included Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP), meaningful learning that honors diverse students’ culture and communities, high academic standards supported by excellent teachers, and multiple access points into the curriculum. The solution to inequitable education requires that all teachers instruct and advocate for every student as if she or he mattered, that all students receive the same care and attention as the richest, most advantaged. This solution is deceptively simple because it requires teachers to examine and revise their own biases and misconceptions, and actively resist the persistent messages that depict diverse children as deficient, so as to see them as worthwhile, full of capacity, and on the brink of greatness.
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John Dewey and Teacher Education
Margaret Schmidt and Randall Everett Allsup
John Dewey’s writings on schooling are extensive, and characteristically wide-ranging: teachers are expected to think deeply about knowledge construction, how we think and learn, the purpose of curriculum in the life of the child, and the role of school and societal reform. He worked throughout his life to develop and refine his philosophy of experience, describing all learning as defined by the quality of interactions between the learner and the social and physical environment. According to Dewey, teachers have a responsibility to structure educational environments in ways that promote educative learning experiences, those that change the learner in such a way as to promote continued learning and growth. The capacity to reflect on and make meaning from one’s experiences facilitates this growth, particularly in increasing one’s problem-solving abilities.
While Dewey wrote little that specifically addressed the preparation of teachers, his 1904 essay, “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education,” makes clear that he grounds his beliefs about teachers’ learning in this same philosophy of experiential learning. Dewey argued that thoughtful reflection on previous and current educational experiences is especially important in teacher preparation; teacher educators could then guide beginners to examine and test the usefulness of the beliefs formed from those experiences. Teacher educators, therefore, have a responsibility to arrange learning environments for beginning teachers to promote sequential experiences leading to increased understanding of how children learn, “how mind answers to mind.” These experiences can then help beginning teachers grow, not as classroom technicians, but as true “students of teaching.”
Dewey’s ideas remain relevant, but must also be viewed in historical context, in light of his unfailing belief in education and the scientific method as ways to promote individual responsibility and eliminate social problems. His vision of a democratic society remains a fearless amalgam of human adaptation, continuity, change, and diversity: public schools are privileged locations in a democracy for the interplay and interrogation of old and new ideas. Teacher preparation and teacher wellbeing are crucial elements; they can provide experiences to educate all children for participation in their present lives in ways that facilitate their growth as citizens able to fully participate in a democracy. Despite criticism about limitations of his work, Dewey’s ideas continue to offer much food for thought, for both research and practice in teacher education.
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Community-Engaged Teacher Preparation
Eva Zygmunt, Kristin Cipollone, Patricia Clark, and Susan Tancock
Community-engaged teacher preparation is an innovative paradigm through which to prepare socially just, equity-focused teachers with the capacity to enact pedagogies that are culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining. Operationalized through candidates’ situated learning in historically marginalized communities, this approach emphasizes the concerted cultivation of collaborative relationships among universities, communities, and schools; the elevation of funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth; and an in-depth analysis of social inequality and positionality, and the intersections between the two, as essential knowledge for future teachers. As a means through which to address the persistent achievement gap between racially, socioeconomically, and linguistically nondominant and dominant students, community-engaged teacher preparation is a prototype through which to advance educational equity.
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Bridging the Gaps Between Theory and Practice of Inclusive Teacher Education
Umesh Sharma and Jahirul Mullick
Successful implementation of inclusive education reforms in any country depends on several factors. One critical factor is adequate preparation of pre-service teachers. We cannot expect our schools to be inclusive if teachers are not adequately prepared to teach in inclusive classrooms. There are some key challenges that most teacher education programs face, including lack of appropriate inclusive professional placement settings, lack of collaboration between universities and schools, lack of connection between curriculum content and placement activities, and lack of appropriate evaluation tools to measure teacher readiness to teach in inclusive classrooms. We need new ways to address the issues faced by teacher educators to ensure that the persistent gaps between theory and practice can be met. In this regard, a new framework entitled CHANGE (Collaboration, Hands-on activities, Assessment of readiness, Networking, Greater contact with learners with diversities, and Effective coaching) was developed to address the challenges and substantially fill in the gaps between the theory and practice of inclusion. The CHANGE framework guides teacher educators to focus on six different aspects of enhancing teacher readiness for inclusion. The application of the framework is not dependent on extensive resources, but it does require rethinking the way teacher education curriculum is developed and delivered. The framework can be applied in any country context and is likely to appeal to teacher educators who are looking for better ways to prepare confident and skilled inclusive educators.
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Multiliteracies in Teacher Education
Tala Michelle Karkar Esperat
Multiliteracies is an inclusive literacy approach that extends traditional print-based literacy (reading and writing) to integrate a wide range of modes of communication. These modes of communication include linguistic (words, text, speech), visual (images, pictures, video, color), audio (music, sounds), spatial (placement, location), gestural (movement, sensuality), and synesthesia (multimodal design). In addition to communication modes, multiliteracies integrates technologies (e.g., new literacies; digital media) in the classroom and is characterized by four pedagogical practices (situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice) and cultural and social practices. Multiliteracies in teacher education includes the understanding of nature, theory, and pedagogical practices to inform curriculum decisions to meet the needs of all students.
The concept of multiliteracies was developed as a new approach to literacy pedagogy by the New London Group in 1996. This provides a pedagogical space for learners to interact with information by using different modes of text forms to accommodate language, culture, context, and social effects to connect to the local and global world. Since the constitution of multiliteracies (1996–2024), the conversation of adopting multiliteracies as a pedagogical approach has evolved to identify the need for urgent and equitable educational change. It advocates for multilingual students’ learning experiences using modalities that support their individual learning. One way to ensure this is using tangible tools in teacher preparation, such as the pedagogical holistic model of the new literacies framework and pedagogical content knowledge of the multiliteracies survey instrument, which allow preservice teachers to continue to reflect on their teaching delivery.
Educators use multiliteracies in the classroom to engage students in learning, embrace students’ diverse cultures, and help students form their identities. Multiliteracies education can be used as a tool for the empowerment of marginalized students. It supports the development of multimodal literacy skills and enables learners to communicate their identities in authentic ways, which fosters a more inclusive and equitable society. Multiliteracies aims to promote social justice through education, inspiring learners to think critically and become active participants in understanding the world by engaging in dialogue, developing more profound understanding, and appreciating other cultures.
The use of multiliteracies is crucial in the diverse classroom. Teacher education programs must respond to the growing need by addressing the following questions: What do preservice teachers need to know about multiliteracies? Why do preservice teachers need to adopt multiliteracies? How can multiliteracies be used to prepare preservice teachers to integrate multiliteracies in multilingual classrooms?
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A Search for the Heart of Teacher Education Through Curriculum
Mari Koerner
Most of the millions of teachers in public and private schools have gone through teacher preparation programs. Preparing a person to teach is a centrally important, complicated, and many-layered process that carries deep responsibilities for the people who prepare those teachers, namely, teacher educators. So, it is not surprising that, even in the face of over 1,400 research studies about its effectiveness, there are still ongoing debates about the impact of teacher preparation on teachers in classrooms. It is not uncommon to see claims that teacher preparation is vitally important and, at the same time, claims that teacher preparation makes little difference. Because of myriad philosophies and varied desired outcomes, experts who design the pedagogy and content have varying touchstones for excellence that are put into programs along with variation in courses, admission, and degree requirements. How is it possible to get to the “heart” of preparing knowledgeable and caring teachers? There seems to be no one curriculum for the thousands of people entering the classrooms across America, so how can educators design and implement the methods that will best serve students in classrooms all across the country? Many underlying philosophies and values, as well as research, steer this enterprise—which leads to more confusion and angst. There has always been the quest for a “one shoe fits all” model for definitive curriculum, so epochs in teacher preparation can be traced back to when ideas and practices shifted. Other, varied sources contribute to the implementation and goals of teacher education: state and federal governments, education college research faculty, and local Boards of Education. The necessary professional credentials should be a factor (and ideally the same in all states), but ways to obtain teaching credentials are currently multiplying as alternative pathways are being created at a rapid pace. Then, there is the central question: Who is speaking for the welfare of the children in a united voice? Certainly, everyone in this endeavor should never forget that the purpose of a free and public education, both in the United States and other countries, is to create a literate population who can support and sustain a democracy. The ongoing quest is to discover what constitutes the heart of teacher preparation.
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Teacher Training for the Transformation of Schools and Communities
Etta Hollins, Jamine Pozú-Franco, and Liliana Muñoz-Guevara
The central purpose for teaching is advancing the quality of life on planet earth through the organized transmission of intergenerational collective and cumulative knowledge combined with further developing the academic and intellectual capacity of the present generation for building upon and extending existing knowledge, as well as developing new knowledge. Teaching supports the development of the whole person academically, intellectually, physically, psychologically, and socially. This includes developing the ability to take care of one’s self and to support the needs of family and community.
Competence for classroom teaching requires consistently demonstrating adequate subject matter knowledge, professional knowledge, and knowledge of learners for facilitating the growth and development of learners from diverse cultural and experiential backgrounds, and learners with special needs. Knowledge of learners includes familiarity with the home and community cultures, the resources available in the local community, prior knowledge from within and outside school, the research and theory about child and adolescent growth and development, and the aspirations and challenges embraced by both students and their communities.
Teacher preparation programs purposefully designed to support transforming urban schools and communities contextualize professional knowledge and practice for teaching students from cultural and ethnic groups that have been traditionally underserved, isolated, oppressed, who live in poverty or urban areas, or who have experienced cultural and linguistic imperialism. Purposeful teacher preparation provides candidates with a well-designed, interrelated, and developmentally sequenced progression of professional knowledge and learning experiences that foster the development of deep knowledge for learner growth and development.
Examples of purposefully designed teacher preparation programs ensure that candidates have deep knowledge of their personal cultural heritage and language. In the teacher preparation program, candidates learn to make connections between the school curriculum and the cultural traditions, values, practices, and ancestral knowledge from their personal cultural heritage. Candidates learn to apply their understanding of these connections in developing pedagogy and learning experiences for students with whom they share a personal cultural heritage and ancestral knowledge. Through this process candidates learn principles of teaching practice that can be transferred to teaching students with a different cultural heritage and ancestral knowledge. Learning to apply specific principles of practice across cultural groups is developed through shared experiences with peers in the teacher preparation program from different cultural groups and through engaging in guided teaching experiences with students from different cultural groups. Important goals embedded within this approach to teacher training are preserving and restoring the cultural heritage of students and improving the quality of life in the local community and the nation.
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Preparing Pre-Service Teachers for Rural Schools
Amy Price Azano, Jayne Downey, and Devon Brenner
Preparing pre-service teachers for rural schools has been a challenge in the field of education for more than a century, and issues specific to the rural teacher workforce remain a persistent and salient challenge in the United States and globally. This task is complex and multifaceted, conflated with a wide range of contextual variations in salaries, community amenities, geographic or professional distances, technology access, health disparities, and poverty rates. Additionally, institutions of higher education have wavered in their interest in and commitment to rural teacher education, though there is a growing awareness of the need to attend to the experiences of students in rural communities and the educators who teach them. The literature and research on rural teacher preparation has typically been organized around the three challenges of preparation (post-secondary education), recruitment (youth aspirations to teach, would-be career changers interested in teaching, and division-level efforts to staff schools with effective teachers), and retention (providing pre-service and new teachers with learning experiences and support that increase the likelihood of remaining in the profession in rural schools).
Literature on rural teacher preparation and evidence related to “preparation, recruitment, and retention” can be repositioned to offer new insights focused on solutions. Three focus areas—Curriculum, Context, and Conveyance—serve to answer the question: What makes a teacher preparation program rural? Curriculum serves as a core component for preparing rural teachers. A rural curriculum for a teacher education program includes introducing students to content and experiences, including field experiences, that have been designed to support their professional and personal success in rural schools and communities. Context is understanding the strengths and assets of the rural places, communities, and cultures in which pre-service teachers are preparing to live, learn, and teach. Context allows us to consider the unique environments in which rural teachers live and work. Conveyance is the means by which potential teachers have access to teacher preparation programs, that is, how programs are delivered and structured to provide access to potential teachers in rural communities (online, in person, alternative and traditional programs, etc.). A focus on Curriculum, Context, and Conveyance allows school leaders and education researchers to resist deficit ideologies and to consider how rural communities are asset-rich environments, ultimately increasing resources that prepare teachers for, and build from the strengths of, rural communities.
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Teacher Education and Inclusivity
Sarah L. Alvarado, Sarah M. Salinas, and Alfredo J. Artiles
Inclusive teacher education (ITE) defines the professional training of preservice teachers to work in learning spaces encompassing students from all circumstances, regardless of race, linguistic background, gender, socioeconomic status, and special education needs (SEN). This preparation includes the content, pedagogy, and formative experiences required for teachers to work in inclusive schools.
To fully understand ITE, it is necessary to examine what is meant by inclusive education (IE). Indeed, it is essential to explore ITE’s definition since scholars and teacher educators have struggled to agree on what is meant by IE. In addition to disagreements about IE’s definition, support for this idea and its implementation may vary due to the cultural, historical, and political differences specific to local contexts. For these reasons, it is necessary to recognize the inclusive policies, practices, and processes that often shape definitions and concepts related to ITE.
Notwithstanding the ambitious meanings of ITE across the globe, researchers, professionals, and policymakers tend to emphasize a vision of teacher preparation for working with students with disabilities (SWD) or SEN. Also, there is no consensus about which particular aspects matter in teacher education programs, primarily based on ideological differences about the core goals of IE. These differences in views and beliefs have resulted in limited understandings and applications of ITE. For instance, a student with an SEN may also come from a family living in poverty, with no access to books in the home, or speak multiple languages, including languages that are not a part of their first (formal) educational experiences. In such circumstances, there is no agreement about whether ITE programs should focus on students’ linguistic, socioeconomic, learning differences, or multiple factors.
We review the research on ITE in various national contexts. We also discuss how scholars have conceptualized the preparation of future teachers and the implications for greater clarity on how teacher preparation can improve IE in an increasingly diverse society.
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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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Dual Certification Programs
Linda Blanton and Marleen Pugach
Dual certification refers to a teaching license both for general primary and/or secondary education and special needs education simultaneously. This term is unique to the United States, where licensure policy has traditionally offered options for teacher candidates to earn an initial stand-alone license in either general or special needs education, and contrasts with initial teacher education policy patterns outside the United States, where teachers are not typically permitted to earn an initial license for special needs education alone. Various forms of dual certification have existed in the United States for many decades, but until recently they were not the norm. Contemporary teacher educators and policymakers in the United States have adopted and encouraged dual certification as a way of supporting the preparation of teachers for effective inclusive teaching. As a result, dual certification is viewed as a means of restructuring and expanding the entirety of the preservice, initial teacher education curriculum to become highly responsive both to the increasing diversity of students and to the wider range and more complex needs of students who struggle in school, among them students with special needs.
Because dual certification addresses the vital question of how best to prepare initial teachers for inclusive teaching, its fundamental, underlying concerns transcend specific national structural or policy issues regarding licensure. Instead, dual certification reflects a focus on the content of initial teacher preparation writ large regarding what kinds of redesigned, reconceptualized clinical, course, and curricular experiences might be most effective in preparing teachers for high-quality inclusive teaching practice. Dual certification calls into question the nature of teacher expertise, challenging basic beliefs about where the responsibility of general education teachers ends and where that of special needs education teachers begins. In this way, dual certification can be viewed as a specific national policy vehicle that addresses common international concerns for developing appropriate preservice curricula that are responsive to the demands of inclusive educational practice. Implementing dual certification is not without its challenges, however, as reflected in some of the early and ongoing attempts at implementation. Therefore, it is critical both to anticipate potential pitfalls as well as to identify potential solutions that are appropriate to the fundamental purposes of preparing teachers for inclusive practice.
