Section archive - Preservice Teachers

In this paper, the authors report an enquiry into elementary preservice teachers’ learning, as they engage in doing mathematics for themselves. As a group of researchers working in elementary Initial Teacher Education in English universities, they co-planned and taught sessions on growing pattern generalisation. Following the sessions, interviews of fifteen preservice teachers at two universities focused on their expressed awareness of their approach to the mathematical activity. Preservice teachers’ prospective planning and post-teaching evaluations of similar activities in their classrooms were also examined. They draw on aspects of enactivism and the notion of reflective “spection” in the context of teacher learning, tracing threads between preservice teachers’ retro-spection of learning and pro-spection of teaching. Their analysis indicates that increasing sensitivity to their own embodied processes of generalisation offers opportunities for novice teachers to respond deliberately, rather than to react impulsively, to different pedagogical possibilities. The paper contributes a new dimension to the discussion about the focus of novice elementary school teachers’ retrospective reflection by examining how deliberate retrospective analysis of doing mathematics, and not only of teaching actions, can develop awarenesses that underlie the growth of expertise in mathematics teaching. The authors argue that engaging preservice teachers in mathematics to support deliberate retrospective analysis of their mathematics learning and prospective consideration of the implications for teaching can enable more critical pedagogical choices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the kinds of motivation driving Arab and Jewish students in Israel to choose teaching as a career. This study addressed several issues that have been largely overlooked in previous research such as the focus on Content Value motives (the motivation to teach specific subjects) as well as linking demographic variables to motivational factors, particularly cultural diversity and prior pedagogical experience. The present study yielded three central findings: the importance of Content Value motives; similar motivational patterns have been found between the two sectors despite demographic differences between them; prior teaching experience has been found to have an effect on the kinds of motivations for choosing teaching as career. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the present study on teacher preparation programs and on future research on the motivation to choose teaching as a career especially in culturally diverse educational contexts.

Policies on inclusion are being increasingly embedded within education systems and teacher education across the world, with schools and teachers called upon to add ‘inclusion’ to their already large set of skills and tasks. There is, however, no consistent definition of what inclusion means or how it can be best promoted. The purpose of this paper is to explore the dilemmas that student teachers face when they encounter policy requirements to practice inclusion, and how they mediate the tensions. Drawing on two exploratory studies with science student teachers in two Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes in England, the authors focus on the conceptions of inclusion held by the student teachers and the links between inclusion and teacher education. Their findings suggest that conventional understandings in relation to ability still dominate, with ability-based differentiation viewed as the key teaching strategy to promote inclusion. In addition, student teachers find themselves having to negotiate contradictory and often conflicting approaches to inclusion, diversity, and academic attainment. The discrepancies highlighted by this study have implications for how teacher education courses need to be organised to promote the practice of inclusion.

The purpose of this collective case study was to explore the impact of using young adult literature in a content area literacy course to leverage the development of professional identities in preservice agriculture teachers (n= 4). Empirical studies of the literacy-based experiences and professional development of agricultural education majors are often absent in teacher education scholarship despite a growing need for agricultural expertise in schools. Interdisciplinary groupings, disciplinary textual study, and teaching demonstrations comprised participant activities in which participants catalyzed their pedagogies through literature. The study followed the qualitative principles of case study methodology and employed interviews, field notes, and artifactual analysis over the course of eight weeks. Results show participants cultivated professional identities by constructing literacy-based learning communities, practicing agricultural instructional design, establishing themselves as experts across multiple fields, and exhibiting feelings of isolation and skepticism in their ability to transfer literary-infused agricultural education from the preservice setting to practice in schools. Implications, interpretations, and recommendations for research are also discussed.