Section archive - Preservice Teachers

Effective inclusive teaching practices continue to be an area of uncertainty for preservice and practicing teachers. This qualitative study examined the lived experiences of three, general education, early childhood, preservice teachers (PST) completing a field experience in preschool classrooms for children with significant disabilities. All three PSTs in the study were completing a semester long requisite field experience while concurrently completing an introduction to special education course. Both the field experience and the introduction to special education course were required for their early childhood, general education certification program. While the PSTs initially acknowledged anxiety related to working with children with significant disabilities, the levels of anxiety decreased during the experience. Additionally, PSTs noted the importance of the pedagogical skills they acquired from their special education mentor teachers. Highly skilled, special education mentor teachers were noted being critical to a successful experience.

The aim of this study is to gain insight into the content and sources of the educational ideals of beginning student teachers. The authors interviewed twenty-four beginning student teachers within the disciplines of history and the English language from three teacher education institutes in the Netherlands. The student teachers were selected using the maximum variation sampling strategy and participated voluntarily. The authors’ findings show that beginning student teachers have various educational ideals regarding the personal, interpersonal and societal development of their students. Meaningful experiences related to forming educational ideals took place in the context of school, family, jobs and voluntary activities and societal issues. They conclude by discussing the outcomes of this study for teacher education and future research.

This study utilized cultural historical activity theory to explore the evolution of nine preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) conceptions of social justice teaching while enrolled in a social justice-oriented teacher education program. From three interviews conducted over one year, findings show that tensions PSTs encountered while student teaching in high-poverty schools predominantly shaped their thinking. PSTs’ conceptions of social justice teaching evolved to include navigating inequitable systems, loving students critically, and viewing social justice teaching as uniquely personal. Implications include the importance of teacher educators leveraging inevitable student-teaching tensions as learning opportunities to further PSTs’ commitment to social justice teaching.

Team-based learning (TBL) is a type of small-group collaborative learning that promotes students’ accountability and intellectual growth. The readiness assurance stage of TBL, though having a great potential of addressing the widespread course preparation problem, has not been given enough attention. This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of the readiness assurance stage in online and on-campus TBL and to enhance our understanding of how pre-service teachers’ interpersonal dispositions affected their learning in both environments. Results of the mixed-method study showed that both online and on-campus modes were effective in improving pre-service teachers’ understanding and applying pedagogies in teaching. Students’ conceptual understanding of pedagogies was positively associated with their learning behavior and negatively affected by the conformity in online TBL. However, none of the interpersonal dispositions were found to significantly affect pre-service teachers’ application of pedagogies in online TBL. Likewise, those interpersonal dispositions did not significantly affect pre-service teachers’ understanding and applying pedagogies in on-campus TBL. Based on these results, the authors offer suggestions for educators and researchers who are interested in implementing or examining TBL