Section archive - Teacher Educators

This self-study explores the experiences and challenges that the authors as mothers of young children and teacher educators have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. While describing what their children experienced through remote learning and how they tried to support their learning, they reflect on their former school experiences and their teacher education practices. To do this, they address the following two research questions: (1) What were their children’s experiences in remote learning during the pandemic?; and (2) What were their experiences as mothers and teacher educators in supporting their children’s remote learning during the pandemic? Adopting a collaborative self-study methodology, they collected stories of their experiences as mothers and teacher educators during their children’s remote learning. Their data were collected through participant observations, field notes, and artifacts that their children created, as well as learning materials received from their teachers and schools during the period. In addition, they recorded virtual conferences and wrote reflective journals. The suda approach, which was developed as a research method by the authors was used for data analysis. Originally from Korean culture, suda in simple English is ‘chatting extensively.’ It is different from small talk or chit-chat, though, as it can take a large amount of time, covering several stories in depth. The findings provide several implications for teacher education, school policy, and educational research.

Given the strong influence of teachers educators’ pedagogical modeling on new teachers’ capacity to use technology to support student learning, this study sought to answer two interrelated questions: (a) How are teacher educators and teacher education programs currently working to prepare teachers to integrate technology? and (b) How are teacher educators implementing the TPACK (complex integration of technological [T], pedagogical [P], and content [C] knowledge [K]) model? The evidence to answer these questions was derived from an analysis of quantitative and qualitative survey responses from 843 teacher educators from approximately half (n = 541) of the accredited teacher education programs in the country. The results showed that teacher educators are increasingly integrating technology across the curriculum, that there is a fairly low level of TPACK adoption, and that conceptions of TPACK vary greatly. The study helps to better understand these teacher educator practices in relationship to the literature on preparing teachers to use technology to support student learning.

This article describes a U.S. based multi-year study focused on understanding how a critical reflective practice informs the identities and practices of two teacher educators and a group of preservice teachers. Using a self-study methodology, the authors have examined the processes and practices of their own identity development, alongside that of their preservice teachers. Using a framework as a tool for reflection, they posited a series of questions as a prompt for collaborative reflective writing. In their analysis of these written reflections, they discovered a process of becoming more reflective and expansive through writing, explicitly identifying the contextual factors at play in their personal development as educators. In addition, they found that this method of self-study became a space for transformational learning, where educators could share, be vulnerable, take risks but also care for one another in the process. The findings from this study highlight the importance of careful, critical reflection when supporting new educators.

This study made explicit the discourses of 10 teachers working as university-based teacher educators in Singapore to understand their enacted identities. It framed identity as discursive, constructed through language and talk. Interview data were analyzed using descriptive discourse analysis tools, with critical discourse analysis influencing the process. The discourses are as follows: (a) The value of seconded teachers is located firmly within schools, with practice and practitioner elevated above theory and academics; (b) teaching is the core role of seconded teachers, and discourses about learning, development, and research are weak; and (c) an individualistic framing situates the locus of change on teacher-practitioners. Hybrid spaces that bring theory and practice together are discursive spaces. Both the strengths and limitations of existing discursive identities need to be acknowledged, and multifaceted and complex practitioner identities explored. This article contributes to the integration of practitioners into the wider community of teacher educators in the university.