Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

This article compares three major movements demanding accountability in American education across: The efficiency reforms of the Progressive Era; The movement toward accountability in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and The modern standards and accountability movement, culminating in No Child Left Behind. This paper considers the three movements as cases of school “rationalization” in the Weberian sense in that each sought to reduce variation and discretion across schools in favor of increasingly formal systems of standardized top-down control.

The author argues that a (re)turn to a focus on ‘practice’ in initial teacher education programs might allow teacher educators to start to relate and integrate the experience that their students have of their courses. He claims that the challenge for teacher educators is to find a way to allow student teachers to confront the work of teaching as something that must be practised and refined, reflected upon and tried again. The author presents a form of ‘thought experiment’ which designed at Charles Sturt University to investigate what happens when new student teachers encounter a program that focuses on studying and practising ‘core practices’ of teaching that could be practised again and again.

In this article, the authors reflect on their design and delivery of a new undergraduate unit offered by the School of Education, University of Western Sydney. The paper offers a critical review of multiculturalism in teacher education and examines theories associated with cosmopolitanism in the education context. The authors examine the ways in which a ‘cosmopolitan imagination’ might have relevance in contemporary contexts of diversity in Australia, and particularly in the western and south-western Sydney region in which they teach.

This study was aimed to examine the current issues published between January 2006 and December 2009 in three leading journals in teacher education. A research team selected three journals: the Journal of Teacher Education, Action in Teacher Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies. The research team reviewed and analyzed 721 articles from these journals. The findings reveal that the current issues include teacher-focused issues, instructional models for teacher education, multicultural education, field experiences/school partnerships, and mentoring and induction into the profession. The article also discusses the topics which are missing in the current teacher education literature.