Section archive - Theories & Approaches

This article aimed to examine recent policy documents and other reports on the education sector. It also analysed the ways in which initial teacher education (ITE) deals with poverty issues, within the post-Bologna context, through the voices of student-teachers who have finished their practicum at school. The findings pointed to the deterioration of working conditions at school for teachers. The authors argue that the strategies used by teachers to face poverty situations have made student-teachers more aware of their lack of preparedness to deal with teaching in such a demanding context.

This study examined how policy-makers described their work and motivations. Furthermore, the study focused on policy-makers' perceived relationship with teacher educators researchers and their understandings about research. The findings revealed that policy-makers described research as necessary to shape their decision-making and important to justify their work. However, some of the participants appeared acutely aware of their own lack of ‘research literacy’ and were quick to note they wished for greater support in this area. Policy-makers sought better communication strategies to utilise research findings in a timely, free and publicly accessible, user-friendly manner.

The authors want to understand how preservice teachers, who enrolled in elementary science concentration, negotiate a science teacher identity to support their motivations and goals to teach elementary science. Results suggest that when elementary preservice teachers learned science through hands-on, constructivist practices, they negotiated norms about how they believed that science could be taught and compared it to their own previous experiences. In early experiences with constructivist practices, participants described learning science as fun and innovative. Elementary preservice teachers who completed three or four classes saw themselves as a possible teacher of science as well as a learner of science. The authors conclude that providing elementary preservice teachers with individual courses that focus on the standards and expectations of elementary students in a particular domain influences the progression from learner to teacher in content and in practice.

This study aimed to explore the impact on program improvement of systematically gathering P-12 student learning data over a 5-year period. The findings reveal that candidates can demonstrate a positive impact on student learning that is generally equivalent for P-12 students of all ethnicities and learning needs. The authors did not identify statistically significant learning gain differences among P-12 students. The data also indicated that participants could differentiate instruction and meet the needs of all learners.