Section archive - Preservice Teachers

Despite a surge of research interest in pre-service teachers’ identities over the past years, scant attention has been paid to the process of their identity construction during their teaching practicum. Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study seeks to fill this gap by examining the identity construction experiences of four pre-service school counselling teachers who have just completed their teaching practicum in a university in China. Informed by possible selves theory and identity conflicts theory, the study shows that the participants’ identity construction emerged from the interactions between their core identities and new forms of identities arising from their daily practice and social interactions in different school settings. While some participants’ identities updated and expanded in a supportive work environment, some experienced identity conflicts and deficits with a reduced sense of commitment towards teaching in a constraining school context. However, facilitated by their self-agency and contextual affordance, some navigated their identity conflicts by developing a negotiated identity and/or enriching their ideal identities for their continuing practice and development. The study argues for an explicit focus on teacher identities in current teacher education programs to raise student teachers’ identity awareness and facilitate their reflective learning and identity building.

This paper reports on an aspect of a project that aimed to develop pre-service teacher awareness of the mathematical and statistical thinking required across the breadth of primary teachers’ professional role. This thinking is conceptualised as the mathematics and statistics embedded in each of the curriculum learning areas, in data literacy, and administration and management tasks. Mentor meetings indicated pre-service teachers who were completing a one-year graduate diploma initially had a limited awareness of the extent of this thinking. Through focus group discussions across the year participating pre-service teachers’ commentary showed an increased awareness and appreciation of the breadth of contexts where teachers might encounter mathematics and statistics thinking beyond mathematics lessons. Given awareness is fundamental to learning and subsequent action we posit that developing this awareness during teacher education is important.

This paper examines how Chinese (n = 11) and Spanish (n = 11) preservice teachers reflect on their learning-to-teach experiences during the teaching practicum period through the lenses of transformative learning theory and third space conceptualisation. Specifically, the authors adopted the five-stage transformative learning model and collected reflective journals from the participants. Framed by this model, the authors traced the Chinese and Spanish preservice teachers’ transformative professional learning experiences evidenced by (1) disorienting dilemma, (2) reflection and exploration of assumptions, (3) gaining confidence in a new role, (4) behaviour changes, and (5) integration of new perspectives. Implications for fostering a third space, namely hybridity and boundary-crossing between university and schools, during teaching practicum are discussed in this paper.

English is vertically distributed in the socioeconomic layers of Turkish society as there has been a discrepancy between English learning opportunities in public vs. private educational institutions and developed vs. underdeveloped regions. Attracting qualified English teachers to work in unprivileged regions and public schools would be one of the solutions for the social inequity caused by unbalanced access opportunities to satisfactory English proficiency. Collecting and analysing questionnaire data from pre-service teachers from 13 English Language Teaching departments (N = 583), and conducting semi-structured interviews with 88 participants, this study aims to understand regional and institutional plans of pre-service English teachers with a focus on factors affecting their plans. Majority of the participants plan to work in public institutions as they offer job security and moderate workload; on the other hand, professional development opportunities in private institutions are quite attractive for many teacher candidates. Participants seem to have a tendency to work in developed regions. Cultural concerns, geographical concerns, altruistic concerns, opportunities and beliefs derived from others’ experiences are found to be effective on their regional plans.