Section archive - Preservice Teachers

This article examined the transfer problems experienced by pre-service teachers enrolled in the Free Normal Education programme during their internship teaching practicums. It was their first significant point of exposure to such problems. The author found three patterns in transfer problems. First, the participants’ personal backgrounds (rural/urban, eastern/central/western) generally correlated to various degrees with how they perceived their previous learning experiences and teaching practice. Second, participants from rural backgrounds who returned to their hometowns for their practicums found their prior learning experiences to be less useful than did their urban counterparts, and were less familiar with the teaching skills they had been taught at university. Third, rural background participants who undertook their practicums in Shanghai viewed their teaching experiences as excellent, but still faced many difficulties.

This study examines pre-service teacher (PST) perceptions of educational and professional uses of the social media platform Twitter. The findings reveal that participants from two countries perceived Twitter to have definite learning applications. Furthermore, it was found that a majority of PSTs from both countries perceived benefits from the access Twitter provided them to in-service educators, and expressed intentions to continue collaborating with other educators via Twitter.

This case study examines preservice teachers’ K–12 memories, their initial educational beliefs, and the changes in those beliefs over their teacher education program. The findings reveal that the preservice teachers initially believed that students were similar to themselves, that teaching was simple and autonomous, that students perform uniformly within grade levels, and that teaching ensures learning. At program’s end, the participants believed that students differ from one another and from themselves, that teaching is complex, that classroom freedom has limits, that differentiation is essential, and that teaching does not ensure learning.

This study aims to examine Turkish pre-service teachers’ experiences related to a two-month international teaching and cultural experience in United States. The findings revealed that pre-service teachers perceived the international teaching experience helped them develop professionally and personally.In this programme, the participants had a chance to observe student-centred teaching approaches and collaborative/cooperative learning strategies while observing their mentor teachers. Later, the participants were able to teach lessons that were observed by their mentors. The opportunity to practice in US helped the participants to improve their teaching confidence and skills during the internship.