Section archive - Programs & Practicum

This article provides a description of service learning implemented in an introductory special education course focused on the culture of disability. Collaborating with liaisons from five community service organizations, students provided services to individuals with disabilities in a variety of projects across two semesters.

The authors employ Sizers’ (1999) school- and classroom-based lenses for observation and apply them to the events and interactions that teacher education students see during school-based field experiences. The findings show that participants engaged in a complex series of framing(s) and reframing(s) to make sense of their experience.

In conjunction with the social structures that shape one's sense of agency, neoliberal factors frame the context wherein teachers' develop their perceptions about incorporating critical multicultural curricula. In this research project, the author examined this intersection – between the local and the global – to better understand how teacher education can work to support and strengthen the possibility for critical pedagogy to be realized in teachers' classrooms. The findings indicate that structural obstacles undermined these teachers' ability to visualize and place aspects of social justice and diversity at the foundation of instruction.

The present paper highlights how different types of learning opportunities are available in school subject departments for student teachers even when they are working in the same school and within the same PGCE partnership scheme. This article derives from a year-long doctoral ethnographic study exploring initial teacher education (ITE) work with 15 student teachers in four subject departments (geography, history, modern foreign languages (MFL) and science) in one secondary school (for 11- to 18-year-old pupils) in the south of England. The discussion concentrates on three different types of learning were identified in relation to ITE in the subject departments: Learning by imitation, Learning by enculturation and Learning by innovation.