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This examination of the higher education landscape now shifts to consider the relationship between the university and the teaching profession. The intention of this chapter is to focus on pre-service teacher education to examine how professional identity and university curriculum have become managed. This chapter will introduce the conception of the scholarly blind eye to illustrate how performativity works in the modernised university and three central arguments are forwarded. Firstly, that pre-service teacher education programs are increasingly managed from outside the university. Secondly, that this represents a significant change to higher education. And thirdly, that higher education is contributing to the reworking of teacher identity.

The aim of this chapter is to critically analyse multiple stakeholders’ self-perceptions of the value, nature, success and impact of core Aboriginal Studies subjects in primary teacher education university courses.

Participants were drawn from two universities in New South Wales which taught a core Aboriginal Studies subject as part of their primary teacher education degree. The methodology was informed by Yin’s (2003) multiple-case study replication design. This replication presents a picture of the perceptions and events which have impacted on the participants in the study.

The findings have important implications for theory, research and practice. The results of this study demonstrate that core Aboriginal Studies subjects in primary teacher education courses can make a positive difference in changing the perceptions of many pre-service teachers about Aboriginal people.

The purpose of this study was to assemble an evidence-based rationale, which includes the voices of multiple stakeholders, to test the extent to which core Aboriginal Studies subjects in primary teacher education courses are vital to improving educational outcomes for Aboriginal children, advancing reconciliation and creating a more socially just Australian society.

Undertaking professional training through a core Aboriginal Studies subject builds pre-service teachers’ self-concepts, attitudes, commitment, knowledge and skills, and ability and understandings to teach Aboriginal Studies, incorporate Aboriginal perspectives and to be committed to effectively teaching Aboriginal students.

The study supports the need for the inclusion of core Aboriginal Studies subjects in all universities with teacher education courses.

Research on Indigenous students has mostly adopted a deficiency model. In contrast, this study takes an explicitly positive perspective on Indigenous student success by focusing on the active psychological ingredients that facilitate successful learning.

The puposes of this study is to examine the impact of primarily bureaucratic socialization; and demographic, experiential, and philosophical orientations (beliefs about key educational concepts) variables on teacher candidates' pupil control ideology (PCI) during a pre‐service teacher education program. The relationship between philosophical orientations and changes to PCI is of particular interest.

Data collected at the beginning and end of their teacher education program from 474 teacher candidates were analysed using multivariate analyses.

Practicum socialization experiences were more closely associated with participants' PCI at the end of the teacher education program than any of the demographic, experiential, or philosophical orientation variables.

An examination of interaction effects among the variables revealed a limited number of situations where the interaction of particular beliefs, demographic, and experience variables appear to minimize the shift to a more custodial PCI. Specific implications are identified in relation to males and elementary teaching, urban practicum placements, and pre‐service teacher education curriculum units pertaining to authenticity of beginning teacher practices.

The study provides a framework within which educators may examine the authenticity of beginning teachers' practice. In particular, educators may wish to carefully consider the evidence suggesting that pre‐service teachers practice may be inauthentic, that is, primarily imitative as a result of custodializing socialization factors, but only in particular circumstances associated with their predominantly humanistic beliefs about education.

The teaching of environmental sustainability was explored in five sections of an elementary social studies methods course with pre-service teachers. Using surveys and structured discussions, we identified pre-service teachers’ beliefs about environmental sustainability in response to prior experiences, course readings, films, guest lecture, and group activities (e.g., simulations). Findings suggest the subjects’ knowledge of environmental sustainability increased as a result of the course. They believed environmental sustainability is a significant global issue meriting attention in the elementary classroom; however, they felt ill prepared to teach sustainability issues to young children in developmentally appropriate ways. Finally, pre-service teachers expressed caring about improving their own consumer behaviors and sought concrete solutions from others in order to do so. Implications for elementary social studies education are discussed.

Recently, various policies have been implemented in Saudi Arabia to reform science teaching at K-12 levels in order to focus on critical thinking, inquiry-based learning, and problem solving. Research is needed to explore the adequacy of teacher preparation programs to determine whether these programs sufficiently prepare Saudi science teachers to teach according to these new reforms. This study explores the challenges that Saudi pre-service science teachers face in these higher education programs. Results indicated that graduates of the programs studied were satisfied with their experiences; however, various concerns were expressed by some pre-service teachers regarding the theory-practice gap between their university coursework and field experiences, and the supervision structures and functions in place for the professional experiences component. Modifications to the teacher preparation programs are suggested in order to address these concerns and to successfully enact reforms in science education in Saudi Arabia.

To improve the quality of field experience, support field experience cooperation and streamline field experience management, the purpose of this paper is to describe the experience in using Activity Theory to design and develop a web-based field experience tracking system for a special education program.

The authors used Activity Theory to design and develop a web-based field experience tracking system for a special education program. An in-depth evaluation of the developed web-based system including usability testing and actual use of the system was conducted.

The evaluation and data analysis results demonstrate the value of Activity Theory and show that a web-based tracking system is a valuable tool to support the management of pre-service teachers’ field experiences.

This is the first paper to discuss the design and development of field experience tracking system using Activity Theory. This paper can be used to motivate other developers to use Activity theory to design campus-wide information system. The system and methodology the authors used in this project has wider applicability and generalizability, and can be applied to the management of other competency and field based professional training in areas such as nursing, social work and medicine.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a curriculum change in the provision of health promotion in pre‐service teacher education in a one‐year postgraduate certificate in education (PGCE) secondary course in one Higher Education Institution (HEI) in England.

The paper describes the iterative development process, from an initial survey and mapping of the existing pre‐service teacher training programme, which provided an evidence base for the piloting of a new health promotion component in the curriculum, and its subsequent evaluation. Changes to the health promotion element of the curriculum reflect the programme philosophy which balances the requirements of a competency based curriculum with a more liberal approach to education and training in which pre‐service teachers are expected to critically reflect on, and evaluate their practice. This work adopts a socio‐constructivist approach to teacher education, in which teachers develop their knowledge, skills and attitudes by interacting with others through dialogue, and learning from more knowledgeable others in a cooperative and scaffolded manner.

The paper presents the results of these changes and discusses implications for their sustainability. The changes made to the health promotion component of the programme and their implementation would not have been possible without the inter‐professional collaboration that took place over three years.

To the authors’ knowledge similar work involving a multi‐disciplinary collaborative approach to the development of a health education component of a pre‐service teacher education curriculum has not been employed or reported.

The aim of this study is to examine the pedagogy courses of teacher education programs implemented in two universities in Turkey and the USA in terms of multicultural education. The teaching practices in the pedagogy courses of teacher education programs in the USA might have multicultural education principles, and they could be models for teacher educators in Turkey. In addition, this study can contribute to the cross-cultural studies on teacher education between the USA and Turkey.

Ten teacher educators participated in the study; all of them had experience in teaching pedagogy courses in the early childhood teacher education program. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The open-ended questions were related to objectives, content, teaching methods and activities. Assessment procedures and methods were also asked from the participants to evaluate their teaching experiences in terms of multicultural education. Thematic analysis was used to examine data of the study.

The results of the study revealed that there were differences between the objectives, content, teaching process and assessment methods of the courses in the teacher education programs in Turkey and the USA in terms of multicultural education. The results of this study revealed that the objectives, content, teaching process and assessment methods planned and implemented by teacher educators in the USA are more multicultural and multiethnic when compared with their counterparts in Turkey.

This study can contribute to the cross-cultural studies on teacher education between the USA and Turkey.

Teachers are increasingly required to include students with disabilities in mainstream classroom settings. In order to effectively prepare pre-service teachers to address the needs of all students in the classroom, including students with disabilities, teacher-training programs must utilise effective pedagogy. Service-learning has been shown to be an effective pedagogy to employ to address the knowledge/learning needs of pre-service teachers. This chapter will build upon the use of service-learning to increase knowledge and will discuss the importance and practice of also developing positive attitudes towards students with disabilities. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (Azjen, 2002) is utilised as a basis for developing the service-learning program, and exemplifies three main elements as being necessary to bring about behavioural change: behavioural beliefs, normative beliefs and control beliefs. The pre-service teachers described in this chapter are completing a special education specialisation at a tertiary institution, and are required to complete a service-learning unit as a component of the specialisation. Reflection, an important requirement for service-learning programs, allows the researcher to determine if the goals of the program have been met, and how these outcomes relate to the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the potential they may have to bring about behavioural change for the pre-service teachers. Six main themes were identified in the pre-service teacher reflections. These themes were further divided into two main categories: affective (empathy, personal growth, confidence); and cognitive (knowledge, skill development, enhanced professional practice). Links between the pre-service teacher reflections and the Theory of Planned Behaviour suggest that the service-learning experience is beneficial for developing pre-service teachers who are more inclined to address the needs of students with disabilities.

Teacher educators are expected to create experiences for pre-service teachers to prepare them for the world of teaching and the ever-changing contexts of schools and teaching. In this article, we discussed integrating two different aspects of teacher education—field-based instruction and technology—through the use of Evernote^®, a digital note-taking and archiving application, to create digital interactive student notebooks. Our goal was to provide other practitioners with insight into our use of Evernote^® to address two different pedagogical goals of a field-based course: 1) to enrich our pedagogies through the use of a digital interactive notebook with pre-service teachers who were spending more time in Pre-Kindergarten-12 social studies classrooms, and 2) to teach pre-service teachers to use a particular cloud-based technology that could be implemented in their future classrooms. We described Evernote^®, how we used it to work against the notorious theory and practice gap in teacher preparation, and discussed the importance of taking the time in teacher education to teach technology to digital natives.