International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C): Volume 22C

Teacher education pedagogies face the complex challenge of attending to standards of professionalism while being sensitive to the local changing needs of professional learning. Encounters between these two aspects of professional work are manifested, for example, through the relations between innovative, “against the grain” pedagogies and standardized criteria and accountability to policy issues and measurement. This chapter characterizes various “contact zones” across participants, contexts and contents, called for by the four categories of pedagogies (working with multimodalities, partnerships and community learning, teacher assessment, and vehicles for dissemination) that comprise this volume of International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C). The four categories of pedagogies join five earlier categories of pedagogies (teacher leadership, diversity, family, social justice, and technology), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part B). These go in with yet another five categories of pedagogies (teacher selection, reflection, narrative knowing, teacher identity and mediation and mentoring), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A).

This chapter introduces a theoretically grounded pedagogical procedure of moral argumentation that aims to facilitate student teachers’ learning of moral competencies during teacher education. Despite the essentiality of the moral aspects of teaching, they often remain implicit in the curricula and pedagogical practices of teacher education. Thus, there is a clear need to bring these aspects to the foreground and create possibilities for student teachers to elaborate them thoroughly during teacher education. Authentic cases capturing classroom realities and moral dilemmas at school as well as their systematic analysis and reflection from various lenses form the core of the procedure. Based on the results of the use of the procedure in the practice of teacher education, it promisingly fulfills the aims to demonstrate the moral core of teaching and teacher’s central role in it for student teachers.

The theory–practice relation in professional programs like teacher education should be a fruitful challenge that inspires students to learn through reflecting on practical experiences with theoretically based concepts. However, instead of being a learning-promoting challenge it often is a problem that causes students to consider leaving teacher education.

Universities and colleges have developed different strategies to make the theory–practice relationship easier for students to handle. One of these strategies is to introduce a third learning space between theory at college and practicum experiences. A Danish university college developed a so-called Teaching Lab to establish a laboratory-like relationship between theory at college and practices in schools. Observations and interviews showed that the college managed to realize its goal and bridge the gap between theory and practice.

This chapter presents the multimodal-pedagogical model and initial teacher training organization aimed at preparing primary school teachers at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro.” The work centers on how the components of curriculum are balanced and how theory meets practice in school and university classrooms. We specifically focus on the epistemic function of didactic-disciplinary laboratories as experiences promoting and advancing multimodal learning essential to teacher preparation.

The chapter discusses my response to the urgent need for a pedagogy that would effectively promote Israeli teachers’ meta-representational and particularly Visual Representational competencies in order to prepare new generations of school students to fully and successfully navigate the diverse, rich multimodal information that they encounter in the postmodern visual world. Currently, although VRs widely permeate school curricula, learners’ mass media sources for information gathering, and even matriculation testing, students’ meta-representational competence (MRC) are not intentionally developed to enable their dealing with visually transmitted information and their mindful manipulation of it for achieving their goals. VRs usages have been shown to be superficial, implicit, inadequate to utilize VRs’ potential for promoting knowledge acquisition and understanding, and even frequently erroneous. Following a short discussion of the constructs of Meta-Visual Representational Competencies and pedagogy, and potential institutional obstacles for introducing VRs, I propose core pedagogical guidelines for promoting such competencies in teachers, based on evidence collected continually over a decade of work with teachers at Haifa, Israel, while designing, developing, and refining this pedagogy in preservice teacher training and other programs at the University of Haifa and inservice frameworks. Each guideline is operationalized into tasks and activities designed for achieving its specific purpose, focusing on the application of these suggested guidelines in preservice teacher development program. The MRC-promoting pedagogy was designed and developed while keeping in mind the notion that a pedagogy should be flexible, adaptable to different instructional styles, goals, and contexts, and based on guidelines that are operationalized into detailed instructional plans for achieving specific goals, in accordance with teachers’ preferences.

This chapter focuses on teaching practices used in multigrade classes and the importance of them being incorporated in teacher education as promising pedagogies for future use. Multigrade classes – defined as classes in which two or more grades are taught together – are common worldwide. Hence, there is a need for teacher candidates to become familiar with how to teach in split grade classrooms. However, research on multigrade teaching as well as its development in teacher education studies has been neglected, even though multigrade teachers need special skills to organize instruction in their heterogeneous classrooms. We argue that in successful multigrade teaching practices, the heterogeneity of students is taken into account and cultivated. Based on content analysis of teacher interviews conducted in Austrian and Finnish primary schools, we recommend teaching practices such as spiral curricula, working plans, and peer learning as promising teacher education pedagogies for future multigrade class teaching. We also suggest that the professional skills required in high-quality teaching practices in multigrade teaching should be further studied by researchers and educators.

In this chapter, I explore embodiment as a multi-modal pedagogy for teacher education. I begin with a theoretical exploration of the concepts of embodiment and embodied pedagogy across a range of cultural, philosophical and research traditions and their significance in considering powerful pedagogies for contemporary teacher education. I then go on to present a lived example of ‘the image of the images’ as a drama-based embodied pedagogy for pre-service teacher reflection. Drawing on my research in Australia with a group of pre-service teachers, I unpack the potential benefits of embodied reflection as a pedagogical strategy for engaging pre-service teachers in deep, collaborative reflection on learning to teach. Finally, I offer suggestions for adapting and applying this pedagogical approach across different teacher education contexts.

Beginning with a brief overview of education in Australia from both an Aboriginal perspective and that which developed after the arrival of European settlers, this chapter asserts the significance of faith communities in shaping school and teacher education in ways which express their worldviews and moral purpose. Reflecting a Catholic understanding and focusing upon the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, teacher education programs at Australian Catholic University incorporate a holistic approach through their course structures, core curriculum and community engagement experiences. These come together as a pedagogy of promise within community engagement based teacher education. The rationale, examples and model discussed here are presented in ways which show the transformative power of this person- and value-centered pedagogy.

This chapter is about the multiple forms of collaboration that are crucial to designing and implementing a school and community-based early childhood teacher preparation program. Maintaining quality in education and teacher education is a systemic, interdependence among individuals, institutions, and local, state, and national policy makers. We conclude that teacher education redesign is less about courses and pedagogies and more about systemic relationships, routines, and evaluations over time.

Practitioner research is now widely used in different programs of teacher preparation. It is expected that teachers conducting research on their own work will become more reflective and develop the skills required to become life-long learners. Even though many programs for teacher preparation include some form of teacher research it is not common to find tools to assess teachers and to allow for peer- and self-assessment. In this chapter, we present a pedagogy that uses heuristic diagrams as a mean to assess teachers’ research. We have used such heuristics with teachers participating in a Research Methods Course in a Master Degree and have found that it allows teachers to engage in a constant interplay between the theoretical and the practical and encourages the development of better research questions. Teachers have systematically found this tool very useful in advancing their research projects in the different scenarios where teachers are trying to improve their practice through research.

Evaluating preservice teachers’ performance is essential for quality teacher education programs. Since the 1980s, China has explored a new, more appropriate and effective evaluation system in teacher education. Traditional assessment systems have shortcomings, such as being one-shot, single measures, with more emphasis on quantitative than qualitative assessments. These limitations affect students’ learning motivation and progress, and subsequently the quality of teachers and teacher education. Under China’s New Curriculum Reform, preservice teacher evaluation is being adapted accordingly. Thus, more effective and easy-to-implement evaluation methods will be examined. Portfolios are a relatively new assessment tool, originating in the West. An increasing number of teacher education programs in China has adopted portfolio assessment, but efforts are needed to improve its implementation. Standards, for example, are necessary to measure its effectiveness. This chapter reviews the teacher knowledge literature and how it relates to portfolio building, describes and explains the use of portfolios in teacher education, and then shows a typical portfolio template and its content to illustrate its use in China. Finally, the issues and challenges encountered while using portfolio assessment are discussed. Any lessons for international teacher education programs experiencing similar assessment issues with their evaluation systems are shared.

Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogging, allow for locally developed, cost-effective, and holistic alternative portfolio assessment systems. By enhancing critical reflection and fostering social interaction, blogging portfolios or bPortfolios become integral formative and summative assessment tools for all teacher education students enrolled in a university program. Blogging platforms such as WordPress.com are free to use and are available worldwide allowing bPortfolios to be implemented at any institution where students have Internet access.

Through autobiographical narrative inquiry into the experiences of five teacher educators, we illustrate an alternative way of educating teacher educators. We show how learning to be, and become, a teacher educator occurs within a particular knowledge landscape at the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development (CRTED) at the University of Alberta. Drawing on a conceptualization of both personal and professional knowledge landscapes (Clandinin, Schaefer, & Downey, 2014), we highlight 13 features of the CRTED knowledge landscape that were particularly salient in the shaping of two of the authors’ practices as beginning teacher educators. The CRTED knowledge landscape differs from dominant university professional knowledge landscapes and is a kind of counterstory (Lindemann Nelson, 1995) that shapes the knowledge of teacher educators in distinct ways, that is, ways that call them to attend to lives, to stay open to diverse ways of knowing and being, and to the importance of response. Through learning to be and become a teacher educator within the CRTED knowledge landscape, we show how, within this landscape, teacher educators learn to shape different knowledge landscapes with teacher education students, through enabling them to learn to attend to personal knowledge landscapes, within teacher education and future classroom spaces, knowledge landscapes in which living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories of experience with one another is education.

A dialogic approach to Ontario, Canada policy development was utilized to collaboratively re-conceptualize provincial Special Education qualification courses for teachers. The stories, perspectives and lived experiences of teachers, principals, supervisory officers, parents, school board special services personnel, students, and the public were included as essential voices and information sources within policy development conversations. These narratives of experience revealed the forms of knowledge, skills, commitments, and ethical stance necessary for teachers to support students with diverse and unique learning needs today and in the future. The transformative nature of narrative dialogue to enlighten, deepen understanding, and alter perspectives was illuminated. The policy development processes used in this publicly shared educational initiative served as a model of democratic dialogue. The inclusive and dialogic methods employed to collectively re-conceptualize special education courses illustrate an innovative framework for developing policies governing the public good. This model of democratic dialogue holds considerable promise for the future of teacher education policy and practice.

This chapter uses macro policy analysis conducted at the Center for Teacher Education Research (CTER), Beijing Normal University to analyze the decision-making concerning teacher internship from the perspective of national policy. Internship, a teacher preparation policy initiative in China, is both needed to ease the teacher shortages in rural and poor areas of China and to create new models of teaching practice. Attention is then given to two aspects in policy implementation – student teachers’ learning and teachers’ multiple forms of instruction – from the perspective of teacher preparation. To conclude, the chapter offers some summary statements having to do with the policy debate and the implementation of the internship in China.

The MOFET Institution, which began under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, is Israel’s national center for research and professional development on teacher education. It consists of three communities: (1) the Writing Channel; (2) the Study Channel; and (3) the Research Channel. MOFET additionally has an Academic Committee that assists the aforementioned communities in their deliberations if needed. Although the MOFET Institute deals with multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas (i.e., Ministry of Education, participating teacher education colleges, the institute’s own goals), it remains one of the most unique and powerful ways to nationally address teacher education research and dissemination and the development of teacher educators in the world.

This chapter describes how the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s Iterative Best Evidence Synthesis Programme seeks to improve education and serve the public good. New Zealand’s best evidence programme is used (1) to determine what works, why and how; (2) what makes a bigger difference and what does not work to improve learning for all students across policy, research and practice communities; (3) to spotlight expertise, tools and actions needed to mobilise knowledge and (4) to pinpoint challenges in the change process in order to strengthen knowledge mobilisation at the system level.

This chapter is contributed by InFo-TED, the International Forum for Teacher Educator Development. This newly established community brings together people from across the world to exchange research, policy, and practice related to teacher educators’ professional learning and development. We define teacher educators broadly as those who are professionally involved and engaged in the initial and on-going education of teachers. Our contention is that while there is general agreement about the important role played by teacher educators, their professional education is under-studied and under-supported. Here, we elaborate the rationale for this initiative, delineate our conceptual framework, and provide examples of steps taken in Belgium, Ireland, and Norway to develop the professional identities and knowledge bases of those who educate and support teachers, and conclude with implications for a implications for a scholarly study agenda having to do with research, policy, and practice relating to teacher educators’ professional development.

This scholarly work analyzes the previous 17 chapters in the International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C) volume. The purpose of the analysis is to distill the essence of what constitutes promising international teacher education pedagogies and how those pedagogies can best be shared. The chapters are reviewed according to the sections in which they appeared: pedagogies of working with multimodalities; pedagogies of partnerships and communities; pedagogies of teacher assessment; and vehicles for teacher education research, and dissemination. Key knowledge contributions from each chapter are emphasized. Similarities between the featured pedagogies are also highlighted. Finally, overarching themes are pinpointed.

Part A of the three-book series on International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies focused on pedagogies of teacher selection, reflection, narrative ways of knowing, identity, and mentoring/mediation, while Part B of the three-volume set centered on pedagogies of preservice teacher leadership, diversity, parents/family, social justice, and technology. In this book, Part C of the trilogy, pedagogies of multimodalities, partnerships/communities, and teacher assessment are presented, along with vehicles for teacher education research and dissemination. To end the trilogy of books, ideas having to with traveling stories (Olson & Craig, 2009), the theory-practice split, and the praxical nature of pedagogies are summarized. Sustainability, hope, and the future are also discussed. A Traveling Pedagogies figure, with input from all of the chapters in the three-volume set, is presented to conclude the International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies series.