“If Not Me, Then Who?”

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ann Ethridge ◽  
Vickie E. Lake ◽  
Amber H. Beisly

Research has indicated that teachers typically do not view themselves as advocates for many reasons such as fear of personal and professional risk (Peters & Reid, 2009). Participants include both preservice teachers and graduates of an early childhood teacher education program. This chapter addresses how the program utilized intentional assignments and group and individual scaffolding as preservice teachers moved from experiencing service learning to pure advocacy. Through a mixed methods study, preservice teachers began to see themselves as agents of change with increased confidence and sense of power. These transformations continued as graduates of the program reported they were still engaging in advocacy.

2019 ◽  
pp. 1264-1285
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ann Ethridge ◽  
Vickie E. Lake ◽  
Amber H. Beisly

Research has indicated that teachers typically do not view themselves as advocates for many reasons such as fear of personal and professional risk (Peters & Reid, 2009). Participants include both preservice teachers and graduates of an early childhood teacher education program. This chapter addresses how the program utilized intentional assignments and group and individual scaffolding as preservice teachers moved from experiencing service learning to pure advocacy. Through a mixed methods study, preservice teachers began to see themselves as agents of change with increased confidence and sense of power. These transformations continued as graduates of the program reported they were still engaging in advocacy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 488-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyun Hu ◽  
Nicola Yelland

This review examines the design cycles of innovation in response to changing policy, technological and practical imperatives. It begins with the initial creation of an information and communication technology course in an early childhood teacher education program and describes its evolution into a contemporary topic. Program changes occur because of policy-driven trends, including the expansion of the definition of what constitutes technology and the incorporation of innovations into curricula and pedagogical practices. We characterize these changes in three design cycles. In the first cycle, courses to prepare preservice teachers for early childhood centers focused primarily on computer-based skills. In the second cycle, new technologies were integrated into the curricula and teaching programs and incorporated into the practicum. In the third cycle, the principles and practices inherent to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) education were adopted to extend the role of new technologies in contemporary curricula and pedagogies. These new learning ecologies were characterized by the application of inter-disciplinary knowledge in authentic learning contexts. The reviewed case studies included students in three new technologies course projects in an early childhood teacher education program. The findings revealed that early childhood preservice teachers expected more opportunities to practice and apply new technologies in innovative learning spaces focused on stem learning. Furthermore, they believed that university teacher education courses should be applicable to practice-based contexts. The implications of this review inform the process of change in the design of teacher education programs from technology-based learning to the pedagogical innovations needed to prepare future teachers. It illustrates that new technologies for learning should consider changing learning ecologies in their design and implementation, and should support early childhood teachers in understanding and using child-centered pedagogical approaches.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-103
Author(s):  
Christopher P Brown ◽  
Joanna Englehardt

The global shift toward neoliberalism continues to impact early childhood in numerous ways. One example of this shift is the push by education stakeholders for the incorporation of technology into the teaching of young children. Advocates contend implementing such technology in the classroom will increase children’s academic performance and provide them with the skills needed to attain well-paying jobs in the future. Such rhetoric creates a new set of challenges for early educators who seek to resist this neoliberal shift toward individualism and the framing of education as a process of learning, earning, and consuming. The case study examined in this article begins to address this issue by investigating how utilizing iPads in the process of becoming a teacher affected a sample of preservice teachers’ articulations of their roles as educators. Investigating and analyzing their experiences provides members of the early childhood community with steps they might take to assist early educators in framing their roles as teachers through democratic conceptions of practice that they can then implement within their early education context.


2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Cherubini

Preservice teacher-candidates are assigned to a number of different schools for their practicum experiences and as a result are immersed in a variety of school cultures and their respective climates. Interestingly, though matters related to school climate and the hidden curriculum are discussed in the literature, there is a lack of comprehensive research around preservice teachers’ expectations and observations during their formal teacher education program. Given that beginning teachers’ experiences are intensely impacted by their observations and experiences throughout their teacher training, the purpose of the study was to investigate teacher candidates’ beliefs about the climate of schools at the beginning and near completion of their teacher education program. More specifically, this study employed a mixed methods research design to determine how beliefs about the hidden curriculum of schools compared to teacher candidates’ impressions as they gained practice-teaching experience in various schools. The results may induce preservice education faculty to evaluate the underlying pedagogical causes that profoundly illuminate and engagingly implicate the tensions within teacher candidates’ expectations of school climate and their observed realities.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document