Afterword: The Need to Re-Balance Our Portfolio of Education Means and Ends

2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Margaret Smith Crocco

The author responds to several themes that emerge across the articles in the special issue, considering them in light of contexts of schooling, teacher education, and the contemporary historical moment in the United States. The articles raise salient concerns about what the reform movements of the last twenty or so years have meant for scholars, practitioners, and students who are involved in schooling and teacher preparation.

Author(s):  
Sonia Nieto ◽  
Miguel Anxo Santos Rego

RESUMEN: En este trabajo ofrecemos una perspectiva derivada de lo que está sucediendo en dos países, los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica y España, en la Unión Europea, cuyos sistemas educativos, cada uno en función de sus características y problemas específicos, intentan dar respuesta a las grandes cuestiones planteadas. Pensamos que en las sociedades cuyas poblaciones están experienciando cambios dramáticos en sus formas de vida, la formación de profesores se ha convertido en un auténtico desafío. Este desafío se hace especialmente evidente en las sociedades occidentales teniendo en cuenta que la diversidad cultural, étnica, racial y lingüística de los alumnos se encuentra alejada tanto del origen como de las experiencias de quienes les enseñan. Esta contribución está animada por un espíritu de confrontación dialógica y autoanálisis crítico, desde nuestras respectivas concepciones, a fin de explorar las consistencias e implicaciones comunes que deben servir para una definitiva integración de las perspectivas multi/intercultural en la formación de los profesionales de la educación, con las oportunas consecuencias en la dinámica de reforma en ambos sistemas educativos. Tratamos de describir las condiciones que han llevado en los Estados Unidos y en España a desarrollar un foco de educación multi/intercultural como marco filosófico que suponga una transformación en los programas de formación del profesorado. Sugerimos ideas que pueden favorecer una formación más eficaz de los profesores en clave multi/intercultural. Terminamos llamando la atención sobre los principales desafíos que conviene tener presentes a la hora de avanzar perspectivas multi/interculturales en el complejo ámbito de la formación docente.ABSTRACT: The challenge of teacher preparation is a particularly urgent one in Western societies where the cultural, ethnic, racial, and linguistic diversity of the student body is growing at the same time that the diversity of teaching staff is diminishing. In addition, most teachers from the majority cultures in these societies have had few experiences with people different from themselves. In this article we present our perspectives concerning the current state of intercultural/multicultural teacher education in the United States and Spain. Our collaboration is motivated by a sense of dialogic confrontation and critical self-analysis. Given our respective wiewpoints and experiences, it is our intention in this article to explore commonalities and implications of multicultural/intercultural teacher preparation, with a view toward an integration of these perspectives in the educational reform movements currently taking place in many societies, including our own. We attempt to describe the condition in both the United States and Spain that have led to the development of multicultural/intercultural education as a philosphical framework that demands a transformation in the preparation of teachers. We suggest some fundamental concepts that can help promote teacher education that is centered in equiality and social justice, and we cióse by calling attention to some of the principal challenges of developing multicultural perspectives in the preparation of educators.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Susan Wiksten

This article reports on empirical research findings from a case study of teacher education in Finland and the United States. A sociological perspective was deployed for investigating how the concept of sustainability was addressed in two teacher education programs. One of the programs was located in Finland and the other in the US. The study was carried out in 2015 and 2016. Seventeen semi-structured, open-ended, audio-recorded interviews form the core of the research materials. A thematic analysis of interviews was conducted for identifying articulations related to sustainability in subject-matter specialized teacher preparation. Findings from this study contribute to research on teacher preparation. Notably, by articulating how context-specific culture and social norms contribute to local models of teacher education. Findings from this study indicate that teacher training practices in Finland have encouraged students to articulate sustainability in relation to critical thinking, whereas in the US, sustainability has been articulated in relation to social justice. The key point supported by the evidence is that sustainability was by teachers and teacher educators conceptualized as being about the popularization of knowledge about ecology and biodiversity. The kind of communication that was by teachers and teacher educators described as effective for popularizing knowledge about scientific phenomena were forms of teaching that expanded on content-specific knowledge by connecting it to ethical and civic frameworks of the societies in which students live.


2021 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Jaye Johnson Thiel ◽  
Karen Wohlwend

This special issue continues a two-year conversation about a #playrevolution in literacies research, theory, and practice. The juxtaposition of play and revolution is intentional, highlighting the tension between play's prosocial benefits and collaborative production and the rapid change, uncertainty, and violence in today's schools, where we desperately need more humanizing elements that build people's connections to one another. The #playrevolution calls educators and researchers to explore the (un)predictable, (un)expected knots emerging through the coalescence of play and literacies, while also considering the possibilities play holds for educational equity in contemporary times. Bringing together twelve educational researchers across the United States, Canada, and Australia, this #playrevolution special issue explores the lively ecology of play-literacies in a variety of spaces—traditional writing and storytelling workshops, digital dialogues, video games, teacher-education courses, makerspaces, and playgrounds—with learners from preschools and kindergartens to high schools and universities.


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maisha T. Winn

This article argues that, to prepare teachers in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, there must be a radical reframing of teacher education in which teachers learn to disentangle their teaching from the culture of Mass Incarceration and the criminalization of Black and Brown people in the context of the United States in their practice. Using a restorative justice paradigm, I seek to understand in what ways, if any, teacher training, specifically of English teachers, can address issues of Mass Incarceration and how teacher preparation can support preservice teachers to resist colonizing pedagogies and practices that privilege particular ways of knowing and being that isolate particular youth.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Sabina Magliocco

This essay introduces a special issue of Nova Religio on magic and politics in the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The articles in this issue address a gap in the literature examining intersections of religion, magic, and politics in contemporary North America. They approach political magic as an essentially religious phenomenon, in that it deals with the spirit world and attempts to motivate human behavior through the use of symbols. Covering a range of practices from the far right to the far left, the articles argue against prevailing scholarly treatments of the use of esoteric technologies as a predominantly right-wing phenomenon, showing how they have also been operationalized by the left in recent history. They showcase the creativity of magic as a form of human cultural expression, and demonstrate how magic coexists with rationality in contemporary western settings.


The Oxford Handbook of Preservice Music Teacher Education in the United States aims to work from within the profession of music teacher education to push the boundaries of P-12 music education. In this book, we will provide all of those working in music teacher education—music education faculty and administrators, music researchers, graduate students, department of education faculty and administrators, and state-level certification agencies—with research and promising practices for all areas of traditional preservice music teacher preparation. We define the areas of music teacher education as encompassing the more traditional structures, such as band, jazz band, marching band, orchestra, choir, musical theater, and elementary and secondary general music, as well as less common or newer areas: alternative string ensembles, guitar and song-writing, vernacular and popular music, early childhood music, and adult learners


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Irus Braverman

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 155545892199751
Author(s):  
Mehtap Akay ◽  
Reva Jaffe-Walter

This article details how a newly arrived Turkish refugee student navigates schooling in the United States. It highlights the trauma a purged Turkish families experience in their home country and their challenges as newcomers unfamiliar with their new country’s dominant culture, language, and education system. The case narrative provides insight into how children of Turkish political refugees are often overlooked in the context of U.S. schools, where teachers lack adequate training and supports. By illuminating one refugee family’s experiences in U.S. schools, the case calls for leaders to develop holistic supports and teacher education focused on the needs of refugee students.


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