Section archive - Theories & Approaches

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which prospective teachers’ conceptions about teaching science as inquiry, and their efficacy for teaching science change across the Science Semester. Entering the Science Semester, the participants related to science as coursework they needed to complete to meet program requirements. The Science Semester was designed to provide inquiry-oriented and problem-based learning experiences, opportunities to examine socially relevant issues through cross-disciplinary perspectives. In contrast to the mixed views on their own learning, all of the participants eagerly embraced the idea that elementary science teaching should involve inquiry-based methods. The idealized image of activity-based experiences for children fulfills their goals for their future classrooms, and is congruent with their goals for a nurturing classroom environment.

In this article, the authors investigate the extent to which three postgraduate teacher education institutes in the Netherlands pay attention to and aim to stimulate the development of community competence. This question is approached through three curriculum representations, the intended, implemented and attained curriculum. The study guides revealed that all institutes in some way or another stated the importance of developing community competence by their student teachers. However, it appears that community competence is weakly conceptualised in the intended curriculum. Furthermore, in the implemented and attained curricula, teacher educators, student teachers and the materials showed that there was no systematic and explicit policy for stimulating the development of community competence of student teachers.

The purpose of this article is to examine the possibility of teacher educators using the principles of the Strengths Approach when teaching preservice teachers to enrich the preservice teachers understanding and skills in parent–educator communication across a range of children’s early development, protection, attachment, and learning needs. The findings reveal that the preservice teacher responses used for this study indicate that before learning about and practicing the Strengths Approach, the participants initially struggled in their approach to working through complex issues with families and children. However, after participating in the Strength Approach module, the participants indicated changes in their perspectives and approaches to these complex issues, coming to the point of seeing families as partners, and communicating with children and families.

This paper explores the extent to which and ways in which philosophical ethics can make an educational contribution to teachers’ understanding of their practice as a distinct moral domain. Philosophical ethics is argued to facilitate two necessary features of teachers’ moral understanding of their practice. The article characterizes the educational value of these contributions as an on-going learning process of moral inquiry and practice that is best implemented through a form of liberal education. This characterization serves to distinguish it from approaches that would aim to initiate teachers into particular ethical frameworks, on the one hand, or a subjective or relativistic moral pluralism, on the other.