Section archive - Programs & Practicum

Providing support to student teachers to implement participatory pedagogies is vital for understanding the importance of listening to children’s voices and involving them in decision making. At a local university in the Western Cape, South Africa, ten final year Foundation Phase student teachers studying toward the Bachelor in Education who enrolled in the Reception Year module participated in a project during work integrated learning using Harry Shier’s Pathways to Participation model in support of a participatory pedagogy. After the first session of work integrated learning, student teachers participated in focus group interviews guided by open-ended questions on their experiences using Shier’s model. Findings reveal that whilst student teachers were open to listening to children’s voices, they did not have the necessary opportunities in their training to listen to children. Students were restricted to the confines of a Grade R class dominated by mentor teachers who adopted a transmissive pedagogy. Student teachers also noted that children were not accustomed to having their voices heard and making decisions.

This study focuses on the self-efficacy of preservice teachers enrolled in a co-taught early childhood education course on special education. The course was developed to increase awareness and access to special education through a field-based co-taught practicum course. Instructors from general education and special education shared planning and teaching roles to model collaborative practices for future early childhood educators. Data from focus groups, interviews, and a post-then-pre instrument were used to explore preservice teachers’ self-efficacy related to comfort with inclusion, perspective-taking, and professional roles as well as their experiences participating in the co-taught course. Recommendations for research related to supporting self-efficacy and teacher education are shared.

The development of a teacher educator requires a sustained, systematic, and critical inquiry into one’s own practice. The purpose of this study was to explore how two doctoral students, in their first semester of doctoral study, understood how to do physical education teacher education in an introductory teaching method class, through the lens of socialization theory. This was a collaborative self-study using an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Three themes were identified. First, social justice and its sub-themes: (a) challenges in changing habited behaviors, (b) social justice issues embedded in the class material, and (c) understanding diversity, change, and the importance of adaptability. Second, practice-based teacher education and its two sub-themes: (a) alignment between theory and practice, and (b) core teaching practices. Third, adapting to the COVID-19 environment and sub-themes of: (a) environmental constraints, (b) improving while being online, and (c) creating a supportive and caring atmosphere in the breakout sessions. The authors’ recommendations include using self-study as a tool to help doctoral students understand and do teacher education.

This article explores how university learning and the period of school placement can contribute to identity development understood as a dynamic and evolving process. From this perspective, we understand the teacher’s professional identity as an ongoing process of interpretation and re-interpretation of experiences that are shaped in professional spaces of relationship with others, where each person makes different processes of identification, representations, and attributions, creating a spiral of continuous construction or reconstruction. It is thus a phenomenon of social interaction. Data collection involved eight students, their school tutors, and university teachers within the framework of 4th-year school placements. Data analysis was organised around three dimensions of the research project: the teacher him/herself, the bond between students and the educational community, and the relationship between the school and the university. The results highlighted the need to improve the practicum, especially at the university level. Both school and university tutors are crucial in promoting and guiding dialogical processes of knowledge construction with oneself, others, and the world. However, the university has an added responsibility in this key relational process; university tutors must improve their role as mediators between students and school tutors to contribute to the development of the teaching identity in a complex and dynamic way.