Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

This paper offers a critical review of the literature on 21st century knowledge frameworks, with a particular focus on what this means for teachers and teacher educators. The article identifies common themes and knowledge domains in 15 reports, books, and articles that describe the kinds of knowledge that researchers state are integral and important for success in the 21st century. The authors argue that seemingly disparate frameworks converge on three types of knowledge, as necessary for the 21st century: foundational, meta, and humanistic. They argue that the synthesis of these different frameworks suggests that nothing has changed, that this tripartite division between what we know, how we act on that knowledge, and what we value has always been important. This analysis suggests that, though the 21st century is different from previous times, it does not mean that our core roles have changed.

In this article, the author examines the challenges faced by American schooling and the reasons for persistent failure of American school reforms to achieve successful educational outcomes at scale. He concludes that many of the problems faced by American schools are derived from trying to solve a problem that requires professional skill and expertise by using bureaucratic levers of requirements and regulations. The author advances a sectoral perspective on education reform, exploring how this shift in thinking could help education stakeholders produce quality practice across the US.

This article examines the accounts of teacher educators on their experiences with a professional accreditation process through the multi-focal lens of professional responsibility, accountability, survival and coping strategies. The findings reveal that teacher educators operate on the premise that they live out their professional responsibility in ways consistent with the complexity and ambiguity inherent in democratic, deliberative decision-making. They argue that teacher educators must be more articulate about the purposes a process of increased explicitness and the logic of accountability actually serve, and what the less tangible moral dimensions of responsibility contribute to the discourses of reform.

In this article, the author explores the role of the arts in education through the lens of current research in cognitive neuroscience. The article explains that although arts education has largely used multiple intelligences theory to substantiate its presence in classrooms and schools, this relationship has ultimately hindered the field of arts education's understanding of the relationship between the arts, human development, and learning. The author argues that as we strive toward the new theory of whole-mindedness, learners can be freed from their labeling - and so can the arts in education. The arts not only represent a wide spectrum of crafts and domains valued by society in so many ways, but also represent core modalities that align with cognitive constructs in the mind-brain - constructs that are critical to our development as individuals and to a society that has entered a visual revolution.