Opening Doors to Open Digital Practice for Educators: The Open Page Project

This paper outlines the design and purpose of an open educational resource (OER) project focused on developing digital literacies and open educational practice (OEP) within a Canadian Faculty of Education. Called The Open Page, the project features a Tool Parade of videos and podcasts created with and by Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) students). Designed to enable students to build critical and participatory digital literacies with common classroom tools, and to encourage the development of OEP, the project assesses classroom uses of specific educational technology platforms. It also engaged student creators in analysis of various platforms' implications for student data and for differentiated learning. Featured on the University of Windsor Faculty of Education's website, The Open Page and its Tool Parade of OER offer professional development resources for faculty and practicing teachers and contributes to a common conversation about digital learning between educators at all levels. This paper will overview The Open Page and its creation, and the ways in which it represents an effort to focus pre-service teachers on the participatory and production capacities of the web for digital learning.

Understanding and developing food pedagogies in Ontario pre-service education

Policy documents implore Ontario teachers to integrate environmental education (EE) in the curriculum. Evidence of significant barriers such as lack of time, resources and knowledge, and lack of preparation at the Bachelor of Education level to teaching EE is well documented (Barrett, 2007, 2013; Stevenson, 2007; Thompson, 2004). Food literacy (FL) is often considered a framework from which to understand environmental issues, thus the authors sought to consider its’ usefulness in aiding integration of EE curricula. Using a ‘theory into practice’ approach we asked: Can food literacy be used to make environmental issues more relevant and accessible, thus diminishing the barriers to teaching EE? How do pre-service teachers define FL and do they know enough to use this framework? Qualitative interviews were conducted with thirteen Ontario pre-service teachers to determine their understanding of FL. Findings included a lack of exposure to FL concepts, however, there was an interest to using FL to help teach EE. Some suggestions to improve food pedagogy in the pre-service program and placements included: curriculum changes that made explicit connection to food; clear linkages between environmental issues and food; empowering students to do projects, debates and assignments on food, and experiential learning. Ultimately, there was interest and promise of utilizing FL to integrate EE, but a change of culture at the pre-service level is needed for it to be supported.

Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions of the Relevance of Teacher Professional Ethics in Contemporary Lesotho

Previous research suggests that new teachers have more negative ethical perceptions than their senior counterparts. However, there is limited research on teachers’ perceptions regarding the relevance of professional ethics in the contemporary world. Hence this study sought to explore the extent to which pre-service teachers in Lesotho consider professional ethics to be relevant. A qualitative approach was adopted and Kohlberg’s (1987) moral development theory was used as the theoretical framework for the study. Data were generated with the use of both semi-structured and focus-group interviews. Forty-six (n 46) final-year Bachelor of Education (BEd) students were purposively selected to take part in this study. Sixteen (16) were interviewed individually, while 30 were interviewed in three focus-groups of ten participants each. The findings are that the participating pre-service teachers had mixed feelings about the relevance of professional ethics of teachers. Some emphasised the importance of a teachers’ code of ethics while others indicated that some of the regulations were outdated. The position taken in this paper is that teacher professional ethics are timeless. These are meant to protect the interests of different stakeholders in education as well as the image of the teaching profession.

Educación superior rural y ambiente: la experiencia de la licenciatura en biología del centro Valle de Tenza de la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional con comunidades campesinas de Colombia / Rural higher education and environment: the experience of the bachelor of education in biology of the Valle de Tenza center of the National Pedagogical University with peasant communities of Colombia

El Centro Valle de Tenza fue una sede rural de la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional de Colombia, que desde el año 2005 hasta el 2017 formó maestros para el mundo rural campesino desde la Licenciatura en Biología. El proceso se consolidó con las comunidades rurales a través de un ejercicio de construcción social de currículo con el propósito de atender a las necesidades reales del contexto y de constituirse en una opción de vida para los jóvenes de la región.A partir de la experiencia de 12 años, se identificaron algunas tensiones relacionadas con los procesos de formación de maestros y maestras que recogemos en cuatro perspectivas: la biología y los sistemas de conocimientos locales, las encrucijadas de los maestros y maestras en torno a lo ambiental, las lógicas curriculares y de vida, y el papel de los maestros y maestras en los sistemas de gobernanza ambiental.Este documento aporta elementos que pueden enriquecer la construcción de programas y experiencias de educación superior rural dirigidos a la formación de maestros y maestras en Latinoamérica, cuya práctica se desarrolla en comunidades rurales que conviven con diversas problemáticas ambientales.

Primary specialisations in Australia: graduates’ perceptions of outcome and impact

In 2014, the Australian Government established the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) to advise on how teacher education programmes could ensure new teachers were adequately prepared for the classroom. Following this, the Australian Government endorsed a key recommendation of the TEMAG Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers report, the inclusion of specialisations in primary Initial Teacher Education (ITE). This research was conducted at an Australian public university that, in 2016, had embedded specialisations in a revised primary teacher programme structure and was one of the first ITE institutions in Australia to graduate primary teachers with a specialisation. Using a mixed-methods case study design with convenience sampling, this study sought to investigate these primary graduates’ perceptions of undertaking a specialisation in relation to the development of content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge in the specialist area, as well as perceived employment advantages. This research took place over 4 years with participants having completed a Bachelor of Education (Primary) at least three months prior to participating. The participants reported benefits to having completed a primary specialisation but expressed concerns about their preparedness to teach their specialisation and whether it would result in any advantages for employment. Recommendations from the participants included teaching practice in their area of specialisation, consideration of specialist skills and changing the timetabling of the specialisation in the programme. Ultimately, there is a need for ongoing research in this area to determine the extent to which primary specialisations deliver the intended outcomes and impacts at both the policy driver level and the university level.

Exploring Educative Components to Conceptualize an Effective Implementation of Reading Discipline Curricula in Pre-service Teacher-Education Program

The curriculum implementation literature has recently focused more on identifying and measuring the key components of the innovative curriculum needed to achieve desired outcomes. However, most of this work centers on curriculum implementation external to the field of teacher education. In this article, we report on our identification of the educative components that form one component of the framework for conceptualizing the implementation of newly developed reading curricula for a Bachelor of Education Elementary program. The results suggest that prerequisite knowledge about reading instruction and knowledge of the entire reading program are necessary for an effective implementation of curriculum change in the discipline of reading.

Insights into the reversal error from a study with South African and Spanish prospective primary teachers

This study, using a quantitative approach, examined Spanish and South African pre-service teachers’ responses to translating word problems based on direct proportionality into equations. The participants were 79 South African and 211 Spanish prospective primary school teachers who were in their second year of a Bachelor of Education degree. The study’s general objective was to compare the students’ proficiency in expressing direct proportionality word problems as equations, with a particular focus on the extent of the reversal error among the students’ responses. Furthermore, the study sought to test the explanatory power of word order matching and the static comparison as causes of the reversal error in the two contexts. The study found that South African students had a higher proportion of correct responses across all the items. While nearly all the errors made by Spanish students were reversals, the South African group barely committed reversal errors. However, a subgroup of the South African students made errors consisting of equations that do not make sense in the situation, suggesting that they had poor foundational knowledge of the multiplicative comparison relation and did not understand the functioning of the algebraic language. The study also found that the word order matching strategy has some explanatory power for the reversal error in both contexts. However, the static comparison strategy offers explanatory power only in the Spanish context, suggesting that there may be a difference in curriculum and instructional approaches in the middle and secondary years of schooling, which is when equations are taught.

Responding to Worldview Threats in the Classroom: An Exploratory Study of Preservice Teachers

This study used two training sessions and two focus groups with 17 preservice teachers (aged 20–36) completing their first teaching practicum placement during their Bachelor of Education program at an urban research university in western Canada. The aim was to implement ideas from terror management theory (TMT) during their teaching practicum. Participants explored how to facilitate contentious issues so as to prevent defensive reactions when worldviews clash in the classroom. A dramaturgical analysis identified participant objectives, conflicts, tactics, attitudes, emotions, and subtexts as they explored how to anticipate and avoid worldview and self-esteem threat, navigate tense pedagogical spaces, build capacity for expressing uncomfortable emotions, and diffuse threat with humor. Because difficult emotions are central to teaching potentially polarizing content, participating preservice teachers explored when compensatory reactions might emerge and, as a result, developed their own emotional awareness—TMT became both an experience and a teachable theory.

Mapping pre-service teachers’ faulty reasoning in geometric translations to the design of Van Hiele phase-based instruction

Background: Pre-service teachers (PSTs) training does not equip students with adequate skills and knowledge of geometry to enable them to teach this section of mathematics competently. Inadequate teacher knowledge of transformation geometry, in particular, requires intervention that targets PSTs’ faulty reasoning displayed in errors they make.Aim: The aim of this study was to explore the use of Bachelor of Education (BEd) students’ faulty reasoning in geometric translations, in designing a Van Hiele phase-based instructional programme that could address such faulty reasoning.Setting: The setting for the study was a newly established rural university in South Africa.Methods: Tests on geometric translations were administered to BEd Foundation Phase students, followed up by interviews to explore errors made when responding to the test items. The errors were then mapped to the design of a Van Hiele phase-based instructional programme.Results: The results revealed that the students had several misconceptions with geometric translations. The misconceptions were delineated into the errors that the students displayed and these were classified under two themes. The first theme was incorrect properties of transformation and under this theme, the errors were coded as confusing translation with rotation, wrong translation method, incorrect interpretation of coordinates and confusing the x and y axis. The second theme was errors involving basic mathematics operations including wrong diagrammatic representation of coordinates and incorrect calculations.Conclusion: The study showed that if the students’ misconceptions and the resulting errors are mapped to specific instructional approaches, their faulty reasoning in geometric transformations is addressed and effective learning is enhanced.

Effect of Mind Mapping as a Learning Tool on Online Learning of Chemistry

The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic brought distortions in the academic calendar of nations when educational institutions were closed. As a way of filling the gap created in the trend, tertiary institutions introduced online learning to support students’ learning while at home. There was also the need to introduce alternative learning approaches to students that will help them summarize and represent the lengthy lecture notes and reading materials into meaningful and memorable units. This study looks at the effectiveness of mind maps in promoting this home-based online learning. The participants were seventy-one (71) first-year Bachelor of Education students pursuing a 4-year degree program in Basic Education in Kibi Presbyterian College of Education. One group consists of students pursuing Home Economics as their major and the other primary education. A test and questionnaire were used to collect data. T-test was used to test the significance of the performance of the two groups, and multiple regression was used to find an association between the use of the strategy and students’ performance. The statistical software used for data analysis was IBM’s SPSS version 25. The result shows that the mind map strategy helped learners retain knowledge; however, students’ understanding of concepts was low