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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 ongoing education of teachers. Our contention is that while there is general agreement about the important role played by teacher educators, their professional education is understudied and undersupported. 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 scholarly study agenda having to do with research, policy, and practice relating to teacher educators' professional development.

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.

In response to this criticism of the schools that had been building for decades, in 2002, the Japanese Ministry of Education (MOE) enacted a collection of initiatives that aimed to better equip students to face the realities of rapidly shifting social, economic, and political conditions. Ministry officials hoped that the reforms, which were labeled the “relaxed education” policies, would induce substantial changes in the way education is organized and delivered across the country. Government reports emphasized that the prevalence of problems experienced by Japanese youths necessitated reforms that could reduce the pressures experienced by their students and enhance their interest in learning.

This ethnographic study analyzes the translation and implementation of the relaxed education policies in a sample of Japanese elementary and junior high schools. The analysis provided highlights the tensions experienced by education stakeholders as they attempt to reconcile their ideals about education with more immediate concerns about what will bring students success in a competitive academic marketplace. Particular attention is devoted to the issue of equity, and how the relaxed education programs are affecting the learning opportunities and performance of different groups of students.

This chapter is an examination of research as teacher education. I present the experiences of preservice teachers/education students engaging in term-length research projects focusing on a student of a cultural or social background different from their own, while also documenting their own experiences of conducting research in their student teaching settings as part of their coursework. Recognizing the possibilities and addressing the challenges encountered by preservice teachers when engaging in research to learn about socially and culturally diverse students contributes to the body of teacher knowledge needed for all educators in an increasingly diverse local and global community. Students in the student teaching component of their teacher education program are professionally positioned to access firsthand the complexity and nuances of diversity in a school community. Examination of their experiences highlighted benefits of including research, namely narrative inquiry research, to engage preservice teachers in learning about issues of diversity and curriculum in ways that are highly relevant to their own teaching contexts, while at the same time, gaining a framework and assuming an inquiry stance that will serve them well throughout their careers. I also explore challenges of engaging preservice teachers in research to learn about diversity in classrooms and schools.

This chapter examines the difficulties teachers currently face while attempting to teach toward more justice, more equity, and more healing in an increasingly challenging political climate. The author explores how Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been used by activists and politicians on the far right to shut down good faith debates about what students should learn about race in America and in the teaching of American history. The author suggests how progressive educators and teacher educators can best respond in this political moment and reclaim the debate over our shared values of freedom, justice, and democracy.

This chapter outlines the contents of Preparing Secondary STEM Teachers to Teach in America's Urban Schools. The volume begins with an overview of the teachHOUSTON STEM teacher education program in Chapter 2 and is followed by an account of the collaboration that took place between a Physics professor and a teachHOUSTON Physics teacher educator and its impact on STEM teacher preparation in Chapters 3-4. Chapters 5 and 6 include discussions about formal and informal learning opportunities and include a narrative of a student's experience on how the Noyce Internship Institute contributed to their STEM teacher learning. In Chapters 7–9, readers learn about the influence of parents, teachers, and professors on students' entry into and decision to work in the STEM and/or STEM education field, with an emphasis on those in STEM teacher education. Chapter 10 highlights the value of scholarship grants; Chapter 11 addresses the growth and development of teachHOUSTON, the impact of the scholarships awarded to many of its students and traces where its graduates currently are teaching in order to demonstrate that teachHOUSTON has fulfilled its mission. The final chapter of the book reflects on teachHOUSTON as a secondary urban teacher education program and summarizes significant points that have led to its success.

Japan has long occupied a unique place in East Asia and continues to do so in an era of increased global interconnectivity. Beginning with the Meiji Restoration (1868), it became the first in the region to make a decisive, sustained, and highly successful attempt to “modernize” its political, economic, and social structures, thereby largely avoiding Western domination. This particular historical trajectory built directly on social foundations laid during the prolonged closure of the Tokugawa period and largely allowed Japan free reign to craft its own version of modernity, educational and otherwise. One result of this conscious, directed process of “catch-up” was an impressive “compression” of the transition to modernity – a phenomenon that had stretched out over hundreds of years in most Western countries – to little more than a half century (Kariya, 2010); a feat unmatched by any country in the first half of the twentieth century. Following the devastation of the Second World War, Japan redoubled its efforts to “catch-up” and through a combination of high birth rates following the war, export-driven economic growth leading to an explosion of manufacturing jobs, a commitment to egalitarian growth and full employment, and the creation of an educational meritocracy that meticulously selected the country's best and brightest, the country quickly moved up the value-added chain until, by the early 1980s, the Japanese economy was globally dominant (Katz, 1998; Okita, 1992). As such, by the 1980s, Japan became unique, first, in being the only country in the region whose social conditions facilitated genuine comparison with the “advanced” countries of the West and, second, a model for “modernization” that other countries in the region could emulate, first the four Asian Tigers and then (although rarely explicitly) China in the post-Mao “Reform and Opening” period (Rappleye, 2007; Kojima, 2000).

This chapter focuses on the dispositions and values of The Education Doctorate (Ed.D.) students in England and the United States as they conducted research, graduated, and entered their work communities.

We will present a brief review of the history of the Ed.D. and an explanation of signature pedagogy, which leads to a consideration of values, particularly as they relate to the connection between the researcher and the community. A synthesis of Banks (1991, 1998) description of the researcher’s position and stages of ethnic development provide a framework to analyze the experience of a doctoral student in England and a doctoral student in the United States.

The leaders developed multicultural dispositions through doctoral pedagogies that included the supervised creation of a doctoral thesis in a Higher Education Institution with access to resources. The resources included pedagogical relationships with program providers, a library and access to intellectual networks that built leadership capacity within the doctoral education system. Leaders designing and implementing their research and drafting and redrafting their doctoral thesis, engaged with pedagogies that developed a deep understanding of “what counts as evidence,” and critical and reflective thinking tools that enhanced their multicultural dispositions and habits of hearts, minds and hands.

The findings may contribute to informing decisions to invest in the doctoral dividend, policy and a research agenda into doctoral pedagogies.

New insights into the benefits of educational leaders investing in the doctoral dividend are revealed.

This chapter takes the case of contextualizing a solar-powered Information and Communications Technology Center Model to train young women for employment in an informal education setting. One of the sites in which the Model has been actualized is in Mahabubnagar District of Telangana State, India. The Center provides employment-aligned training through computer, communications, business, personal and interpersonal development topics, while supplying steady energy source through solar panels to cover for the needs of sustained computer usage. The learning contents are delivered through a tailored curriculum founded on affective/humanistic education approach, facilitated through a teacher – better described as facilitator – for the personal, interpersonal and skills development of over 450 young women trainees. The objective of this chapter is to add a consideration in the teacher quality literature from the perspective of prioritizing affective education approach, both in the teacher as well as the learner. The chapter illustrates that teachers who can communicate the messaging and delivery of learning contents in a way that allow learners to feel understood and prioritized – with social, emotional, and attitude of learners considered – will be much more effective than an approach where teachers prioritize skills development and academic achievement.

Global governance has granted international organizations a political role of utmost importance. As the search for research-based best practices is the spearhead of these nongovernmental organizations, national decision-makers tend to accept their recommendations willingly. The way decision-makers use research-based evidence has been amply investigated, but few researchers have interrogated how the same international organizations, that claim to establish a bridge between research and policy, use such evidence. This prompted us to analyze the pedagogical discourse of UNESCO, an organization that recently reminded the international community that improving teacher quality is now a major issue for all those who are preoccupied with improving the quality of education (UNESCO, 2014). Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all. EFA global monitoring report. Paris, France: UNESCO). How does UNESCO deal with the issue of teaching practices? What is the content of its pedagogical discourse? To answer these questions, we analyzed the Organization’s publications on teachers in the past 15 years (N = 45) and conducted interviews with a number of its strategic members (N = 5). The results of our analyses of this dataset indicate a tension between the content of the publications and what the interviewees had to say. While the publications timidly but recurrently promote learner-centered constructivist approaches, the interviewees argued that pedagogical orientations are a matter of national sovereignty; that UNESCO should not cross this line. As an intermediary between research and policy and a think tank, UNESCO seems caught in this contradiction. In matters of pedagogy, shouldn’t the Organization be more forceful in counseling its member States by referring to research-based evidence on teaching effectiveness?