Teacher Education in Australia

Author(s):  
Diane Mayer ◽  
Wayne Cotton ◽  
Alyson Simpson

The past decade has seen increasing federal intervention in teacher education in Australia, and like many other countries, more attention on teacher education as a policy problem. The current policy context calls for graduates from initial teacher education programs to be classroom ready and for teacher education programs to provide evidence of their effectiveness and their impact on student learning. It is suggested that teacher educators currently lack sufficient evidence and response to criticisms of effectiveness and impact. However, examination of the relevant literature and analysis of the discourses informing current policy demonstrate that it is the issue of how effectiveness is understood and framed, and what constitutes evidence of effectiveness, that needs closer examination by both teacher educators and policymakers before evidence of impact can be usefully claimed—or not.

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Estelles ◽  
Jesús Romero

Current curricula, which organize initial teacher education programs, include, among their stated purposes, preparing teachers to help their future students to grow as global, participatory, and ethically engaged citizens. However, we know little about how teacher educators prepare their students to be citizens. This article analyses how a group of teacher educators from a public university in Spain understand citizenship education, exploring the net of metaphors and idealized visions they seem to share, regardless of their formal conceptualizations. The discussion of the findings considers the implicit hierarchies of these shared assumptions that define what is deemed as real, desirable, and possible in citizenship education. Implications for teacher education are also contemplated.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Kibler ◽  
René Pyatt ◽  
Jason Greenberg Motamedi ◽  
Ozen Guven

Grow-Your-Own (GYO) Teacher Education programs that aim to diversify and strengthen the teacher workforce must provide high-quality learning experiences that support the success and retention of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) teacher candidates and bilingual teacher candidates. Such work requires a holistic and systematic approach to conceptualizing instruction and mentoring that is both linguistically and culturally sustaining. To guide this work in the Master of Arts in Teaching in Clinically Based Elementary program at Oregon State University’s College of Education, we conducted a review of relevant literature and frameworks related to linguistically responsive and/or sustaining teaching or mentoring practices. We developed a set of ten mentoring competencies for school-based cooperating/clinical teachers and university supervisors. They are grouped into the domains of: Facilitating Linguistically and Culturally Sustaining Instruction, Engaging with Mentees, Recognizing and Interrupting Inequitable Practices and Policies, and Advocating for Equity. We also developed a set of twelve instructional competencies for teacher candidates as well as the university instructors who teach them. The instructional competencies are grouped into the domains of: Engaging in Self-reflection and Taking Action, Learning About Students and Re-visioning Instruction, Creating Community, and Facilitating Language and Literacy Development in Context. We are currently operationalizing these competencies to develop and conduct surveys and focus groups with various GYO stakeholders for the purposes of ongoing program evaluation and improvement, as well as further refinement of these competencies.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Epstein

The client analysis conducted in this study explores the professional development needs of11 language teachers, five in South Africa and six in Canada. The study employs a questionnaire and interviews to discover how each teacher's background and context affects his or her perceived professional development needs. Interviews show that teacher educators cannot necessarily predict teachers' professional development needs based on their backgrounds and contexts alone. A variety of inputs from recipients over an extended time is desirable and would yield more accurate predictability of an individual's professional development needs. This would result in teacher education programs that more accurately meet a teacher's real needs.


2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena Guillen ◽  
Ken Zeichner

This article examines the experiences of a group of nine community-based mentors of teacher candidates who partnered for several years through a local, community-based organization with the graduate elementary and secondary teacher education programs at a research university in the Pacific Northwest. Following a brief discussion of the history of partnerships between teacher education programs and local communities, we report the findings of a study of the perspectives of these community mentors on their work with teacher candidates and university teacher educators.


Author(s):  
Jarrett D. Moore

This chapter advocates for the (re)framing of critical thinking from a skill to a disposition and proposes a framework whereby teacher education programs can create space for pre-service teachers to develop a critical disposition. By studying the context of American education and schooling and their corporate interest, pre-service teachers along with teacher educators can start to unravel the discourse and power inherent in American education. Understanding how these concepts lead to hegemony can begin the process of creating a counterhegemonic movement among American educators that includes the reclaiming of the purpose of education, raising pertinent epistemological question, and practicing critical self-reflection. The final part of the new framework for developing critical dispositions is a reintroduction of broader theoretical concerns into teacher preparation programs.


Author(s):  
Vivian H. Wright

In teacher education programs, there is a consistent need to locate and to recommend to teacher educators, teacher candidates, and in-service teachers, viable technology tools and concepts that can be used in the classroom. Digital storytelling is a concept that is growing in popularity and one which offers versatility as an instructional tool. This chapter presents information and ideas on how to facilitate learning, productivity, and creativity through a variety of digital storytelling classroom uses.


The authors perceive that institutionalized racial hierarchies are the greatest barrier to educational equity in the United States. While P-12 teachers may express the desire to make their classrooms spaces of joy, creativity, and intellectual brilliance, it is primarily through intentional skills development that teachers succeed. The authors assert the need for greater investments by school districts and teacher education programs in professional development for in-service P-12 teachers that further empower them and, in turn, their students, to contribute to the dismantling of racism in the U.S. Teacher educators, administrators and policy makers need to position themselves as cultivators and supporters of P-12 teachers in ways that encourage and sustain their antiracist advocacy and equity work in their teaching.


Author(s):  
Bethy Leonardi ◽  
Sara Staley

Generations of education scholars have positioned issues that affect LGBTQ youth as critical to conversations about equity, diversity, democracy, and social justice in schools. Those voices, for generations, have been relegated to the periphery of those conversations at best and have been silenced at worst. Relatedly, university-based teacher education programs have been remiss in their attention to issues of gender and sexual diversity, systematically sending teachers into the field largely unprepared to create contexts that are safe for LGBTQ youth and to affirm gender and sexual diversity. With growing attention to issues that affect LGBTQ youth, both in educational research and practice as well as in the larger sociopolitical discourse, teachers are on the front lines. They are charged with navigating the complexities of students’ identities, the contexts in which they teach, local politics, and their own deeply held beliefs—and they are often, unsurprisingly, doing so with little or no support. That support needs to start much earlier. Teacher education programs—and teacher educators—are implicated as central in changing the discourse around what counts as (non)negotiable in learning to teach. By supporting preservice teachers’ learning around gender and sexual diversity, their processes toward that end, and their engagement in queer practices, teacher educators and teacher education programs can work toward paying down the debt owed to teachers in the field and to LGBTQ students and families who have long suffered the consequences of silence.


Author(s):  
Abdul Nasir Kiazai ◽  
Zarina Waheed ◽  
Saba Rehman

A large number of children in Balochistan attend religious schools (Madrasas) that have been criticized for spreading extremist views in the society. Teacher education institutions play a vital role in bringing cultural and religious harmony by producing prospective teachers who are able to cultivate tolerance, acceptance, patriotism, ethnic, religious respect and counter extremism, sectarian, and discrimination prospective. This qualitative exploratory study explores whether the prospective teachers in Balochistan are trained enough to teach in religious schools. The data were collected through in-depth interviews and focused group discussions. All teacher educators and prospective teachers from the universities that remained part of Pre-STEP or Teacher Education Project (TEP) assisted by USAID constituted the population of the study. Sample was selected through purposive sampling from two universities situated in Quetta. 10 teacher educators (5+5) and 10 prospective teachers (5+5) were selected as sample for interviews while two groups of prospective teachers (5 participants in each) were selected from the both case universities for focus group interviews. Data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings indicated that the prospective teachers and teacher educators considered the recent teacher education programs in Balochistan not enough to train teachers to teach in religious schools. Keywords: Prospective Teachers; Religious Schools; Teacher Education Programs; Balochistan


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