Over the past ten years there has been increased interest in research on various aspects of teacher education, ranging from the preparation of teachers to continuing professional development. The increase of interest in how teachers become competent in very complex social settings is a result of a general recognition by researchers and policy makers alike that teachers are the key to any serious efforts at educational reform. This book addresses a variety of issues surrounding the field of inquiry into teaching practice that has become known as 'self-study', equivalent in many ways to the 'action research' movement, but at tertiary level.
Reconceptualizing STEM Education explores and maps out research and development ideas and issues around five central practice themes: Systems Thinking; Model-Based Reasoning; Quantitative Reasoning; Equity, Epistemic, and Ethical Outcomes; and STEM Communication and Outreach. These themes are aligned with the comprehensive agenda for the reform of science and engineering education set out by the 2015 PISA Framework, the US Next Generation Science Standards and the US National Research Council’s A Framework for K-12 Science Education. The new practice-focused agenda has implications for the redesign of preK-12 education for alignment of curriculum-instruction-assessment; STEM teacher education and professional development; postsecondary, further, and graduate studies; and out-of-school informal education. In each section, experts set out powerful ideas followed by two eminent discussant responses that both respond to and provoke additional ideas from the lead papers. In the associated website highly distinguished, nationally recognized STEM education scholars and policymakers engage in deep conversations and considerations addressing core practices that guide STEM education.
As it stands, there is currently a void in education literature in how to best prepare preservice teachers to meet the needs of individualized learners across multiple learning platforms, social/economical contexts, language variety, and special education needs. The subject is in dire need of support for the ongoing improvement of administrative, clinical, diagnostic, and instructional practices related to the learning process. The Handbook of Research on Reconceptualizing Preservice Teacher Preparation in Literacy Education stimulates the professional development of preservice and inservice literacy educators and researchers. This book also promotes the excellence in preservice and inservice literacy both nationally and internationally. Discussing topics such as virtual classrooms, critical literacy, and teacher preparation, this book serves as an ideal resource for tenure- track faculty in literacy education, clinical faculty, field supervisors who work with preservice teacher educators, community college faculty, university faculty who are in the midst of reconceptualizing undergraduate teacher education curriculum, mentor teachers working with preservice teachers, district personnel, researchers, students, and curricula developers who wish to understand the needs of preservice teacher education.
In this collection, Canadian scholars articulate a response to their collective concerns about the impact of global policy on teacher education, provoking a far-reaching dialogue about teacher education in and for our times. The first two decades of the new millennium have witnessed unprecedented appraisal, analysis, and educational policy formulations related to teaching (K–12) across the Western world. In turn, teacher education has been greatly impacted, as governments around the world see the reform and management of teacher education as a key component in restructuring education toward greater economic competitiveness. The result has been an unwarranted and undesirable level of standardization. It is vital to the future of teacher education, and concomitantly public education, that we imagine alternatives to the homogenization of the educational experience that globalizing policies install. What is needed are vocabularies that enable educators and teacher educators to discern and articulate educational purposes beyond capital and which focus on the kinds of educational experiences that can help prepare the young to lead good and worthwhile lives. Using lessons learned from the Canadian context, the authors identify and investigate the importance of initial and continuing professional education that fosters teachers’ intellectual freedom and study; advances an informed and critical appreciation of civic particularity and historical circumstance; and cultivates ethical (i.e., pedagogical) engagement with ideas and histories—teachers’ own and their students—as crucial themes of teacher education globally. This book is published in English - Les chercheurs canadiens qui ont participé à cet ouvrage collectif proposent une réponse à leurs préoccupations collectives qui portent essentiellement sur l’impact de la politique globale sur la formation des enseignants, et ce, afin d’établir un dialogue franc et approfondi sur la formation des enseignants telle que pratiquée à notre époque. Durant les deux premières décennies du nouveau millénaire, le monde occidental a connu une augmentation sans précédent des analyses, des évaluations et des propositions les plus diverses portant sur la politique éducative (du jardin d'enfant à la fin du secondaire). En conséquence, la formation des enseignants a été très fortement impactée dans un contexte global où les gouvernements considèrent la réforme et la gestion de la formation des enseignants comme une composante clef de la restructuration de l’enseignement, et ce, afin que l’enseignement dispensé soit plus compétitif sur le plan économique. Force est de constater que cette approche s’est traduite par un niveau de standardisation indésirable et totalement injustifié. Pour garantir l’avenir de la formation des enseignants et donc de l’éducation publique, il est aujourd’hui fondamental d’imaginer des alternatives à l’homogénéisation de l’expérience éducative, qui résulte des politiques adoptées dans le cadre de la mondialisation. Dans cette perspective, il est nécessaire de fournir aux enseignants et aux éducateurs un vocabulaire et une terminologie spécifiques qui leur permettent de définir et d’articuler leurs objectifs éducatifs, au-delà de la notion réductrice de capital, tout en privilégiant les différents types d’expérience éducative qui préparent les jeunes à mener des vies satisfaisantes et utiles. En s’inspirant des enseignements tirés du contexte canadien, les auteurs de cet ouvrage ont identifié et évalué l’importance d’une éducation professionnelle initiale et qui continue de favorisé l’apprentissage et la liberté intellectuelle des enseignants ; promeut une appréciation critique et informée des spécificités civiques et des circonstances historiques ; et favorise un engagement éthique (et donc pédagogique) qui prend en compte les idées et les antécédents des enseignants et de leurs élèves et les considèrent comme des thèmes cruciaux de la formation globale des enseignants. Ce livre est publié en anglais.
Recognizing the various ecological contexts that support children’s development while amplifying voices from across the globe, this book challenges narrow interpretations of quality and best practice. Each author offers a unique perspective on issues germane to the field of early childhood education: perceptions of children, curriculum, teacher education, and play-based learning. An innovative, timely, and much-needed contribution, this book represents an inclusive collection of theoretical and cultural knowledge, as well as research. Such a diverse multicentric lens opens new intellectual pathways for authentic, reciprocal knowledge exchange, while ensuring that a reimagining of early childhood education remains at the core of our teaching practice, scholarship, and activism. This book invites everyone to imagine, to dare to believe, to hope, and to act—in the interests of children, in the interests of communities and families, and in the moral precepts of equity, inclusion and justice.
Over the past ten years there has been increased interest in research on various aspects of teacher education, ranging from the preparation of teachers to continuing professional development. The increase of interest in how teachers become competent in very complex social settings is a result of a general recognition by researchers and policy makers alike that teachers are the key to any serious efforts at educational reform. This book addresses a variety of issues surrounding the field of inquiry into teaching practice that has become known as 'self-study', equivalent in many ways to the 'action research' movement, but at tertiary level.
Feedback is a crucial element of teaching, learning and assessment. There is, however, substantial evidence that staff and students are dissatisfied with it, and there is growing impetus for change. Student Surveys have indicated that feedback is one of the most problematic aspects of the student experience, and so particularly in need of further scrutiny. Current practices waste both student learning potential and staff resources. Up until now the ways of addressing these problems has been through relatively minor interventions based on the established model of feedback providing information, but the change that is required is more fundamental and far reaching. Reconceptualising Feedback in Higher Education, coming from a think-tank composed of specialist expertise in assessment feedback, is a direct and more fundamental response to the impetus for change. Its purpose is to challenge established beliefs and practices through critical evaluation of evidence and discussion of the renewal of current feedback practices. In promoting a new conceptualisation and a repositioning of assessment feedback within an enhanced and more coherent paradigm of student learning, this book: • analyses the current issues in feedback practice and their implications for student learning. • identifies the key characteristics of effective feedback practices • explores the changes needed to feedback practice and how they can be brought about • illustrates through examples how processes to promote and sustain effective feedback practices can be embedded in modern mass higher education. Provoking academics to think afresh about the way they conceptualise and utilise feedback, this book will help those with responsibility for strategic development of assessment at an institutional level, educational developers, course management teams, researchers, tutors and student representatives.
Reconceptualizing Disability in Education provides an essential critical exploration of problematic discourses, practices, and pedagogies that inform how disability is presently understood and responded to within the field of education. Luigi Iannacci interrogates and destabilizes ableist grand narratives that dominate every aspect of how disability is linguistically, bureaucratically, procedurally, and pedagogically configured within education. Ultimately, this book seeks to forward human rights for people with disabilities in educational contexts by clarifying and operationalizing inclusion so that it is not just a model necessitated by a hierarchy of legality, but rather a set of beliefs and practices based on critical analyses and a reconceptualization of current understandings and responses to disability that prevent inclusion and human rights from being realized. As the book is grounded in reconceptualist theorizing, it draws on multiple perspectives—including critical disability theory, post-modernism, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and social constructivism—to deconstruct and destabilize what is currently taken for granted about disability and those ascribed disabled identities within education. A variety of personal, professional, research experiences and data are offered and drawn on to critically address questions regarding philosophical, epistemological, pedagogical, organizational, economic, and leadership issues as they relate to disability in education. Critical incidents, interviews, documents, and artifacts are drawn on and narratively presented to explore how disability is presently configured in language, identification, and placement processes, discourses, pedagogies, and interactions with students deemed disabled, as well as their parents/caregivers. This critical narrative approach fosters alternative ways of thinking, speaking, being, and doing that forward a human rights focused model of disability that sees as its mandate the amelioration of people with disabilities within education.
Focusing on adolescent multilingual writing, this text problematizes the traditional boundaries between academic writing in school contexts and self-initiated writing outside of the formal learning environment. By reconceptualizing the nature of adolescent multilingual writing, the author establishes it as an interdisciplinary genre and a key area of inquiry for research and pedagogy. Organized into six chapters, Reconceptualizing the Writing Practices of Multilingual Youth provides an in-depth examination of the writing practices of multilingual youth from sociocultural and social practice perspectives. Drawing on first-hand research conducted with young people, the text questions the traditional dichotomy between academic writing and non-formal equivalents and proposes a symbiotic approach to exploring and cultivating the connections between in- and out-of-school literate lives. By highlighting a bidirectional relationship between formal and informal writing, the text advocates for writing instruction that helps adolescents use writing for entertainment, identity construction, creative expression, personal well-being, and civic engagement, as well as helps them learn to navigate future literacies that we cannot imagine or predict now. This much-needed text will provide researchers and graduate students with a principled overview and synthesis of adolescent multilingual writing research that is significant yet underexplored in applied linguistics, TESOL, and literacy studies.
Reconceptualizing the Literacies in Adolescents' Lives, Second Edition focuses on exploring the impact of young people's identity-making practices in mediating their perceptions of themselves as readers and writers in an era of externally mandated reforms. What is different in the Second Edition is its emphasis on the importance of valuing adolescents' perspectives--in an era of skyrocketing interest in improving literacy instruction at the middle and high school levels driven by externally mandated reforms and accountability measures. A central concern is the degree to which this new interest takes into account adolescents’ personal, social, and cultural experiences in relation to literacy learning. In this new edition of Reconceptualizing the Literacies in Adolescents’ Lives students’ voices and perspectives are featured front and center in every chapter. Particular attention is given throughout to multiple literacies--especially how information and new communication technologies are changing learning from and with text. Nine of the 15 chapters are new; all other chapters are thoroughly updated. The volume is structured around four main themes: * Situating Adolescents’ Literacies–addressing how young people use favorite texts to perform their identities; how they counter school-based constructions of incompetence; and how they re/construct their literate identities in relation to certain kinds of gendered expectations, pedagogies, and cultural resources; * Positioning Youth as Readers and Writers–stressing the importance of classroom discourse, cultural capital, agency, and democratic citizenship in mediating adolescents’ literate identities; * Mediating Practices in Young People’s Literacies–looking at issues of language, social class, race, and culture in shaping how adolescents represent themselves and are represented by others; and * Changing Teachers, Teaching Changes–capturing the productive ambiguities associated with teaching urban adolescents to read and write in changing times, encouraging students to conduct action research on topics that are personally relevant, and using ‘enabling constraints’ as a concept to formulate policies on adolescent literacy instruction. Reconceptualizing the Literacies in Adolescents’ Lives, Second Edition is an essential volume for researchers, faculty, teacher educators, and graduate students in the field of adolescent literacy education.
