Section archive - Theories & Approaches

In this article, the authors used ecological perspective to prepare preservice teachers to be attentive and responsive to their students. The authors want to prepare teachers to perceive their students as complex beings who navigate in different contexts such as home, school and community. The authors conclude that the Teaching and Learning Together project at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges provides structures, scaffolding, and support to build awareness among prospective teachers. Such support allows preservice teachers to acknowledge the complexity of the educational process and prepare themselves to be teachers who will embrace, and structure opportunities for their own students.

In this article, the author is talking about non-formal education. The goals, content, methods of teaching, ways of achievement measuring, and all the other aspects of non-formal education can differ widely. Also, teachers working in non-formal education can be very different from each other from many aspects, e.g., the training they got before starting any type of non-formal teaching. They can also be different if they had or still have any experience in mainstream education ('schooling'). We should pay much more attention to non-formal education than we did typically, i.e., without thinking that non-formal education would be better than formal education or the opposite. They are different, but based on the same roots. There are dozens of crucial issues such as What kinds of knowledge can be constructed in non-formal education?

This article explores the research practices used by teachers and their schools. It also investigates the value that teachers attribute to those research practices. In conclusion, this study reveals that teachers are interested in research and research practices and value these things even if they are unable to engage with them in their daily work.

In this study, coteaching between pre-service and in-service teachers is used to lessen the gap between theory and practice, to develop reflective practice and to develop pedagogical content knowledge. Explanatory frameworks have been proposed for coteaching. The authors also suggest that Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development helps to propose a more nuanced developmental and learning explanatory framework which provides pedagogical structures for implementation and highlights the importance of the social environment for learning.