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As teacher education moves online, there is an increasing need for teacher educators who subscribe to relational stances that attend to and enact liberating pedagogies with preservice teachers preparing to teach and inservice teachers who come to online courses for professional development.

This chapter explores common frameworks for interactive relational models of teaching from John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, and Paulo Friere and then proposes, using examples from the author’s practice, how these models translate into online contexts.

Diversity in education calls for increased awareness of individuals using a relational stance. This stance should apply both to schoolchildren as well as the teacher candidates and teachers in development that are coming to teacher education to build and improve their practice.

More research on relationality in online learning is necessary. This research should take shape through using theories that are complex enough to provide insights that marry the pedagogical with the relational aspects of teaching as part of a comprehensive teacher education experience.

This chapter makes a valuable contribution to research in teaching online through its thorough inquiry into theories of learning and teaching and they apply – or do not – online.

Public education in the United States is White, middle class, and urban/suburban normed. However, in the past decade, national population trends show an increase in minority populations, particularly in the southeastern United States. This trend has resulted in a cultural mismatch between teachers who are not trained in strategies that are responsive to the needs of a diverse student population. Novice teachers in a rural school district in eastern North Carolina participated in a study to examine the degree to which they were prepared to successfully interact with their culturally diverse student populations through the lens of culturally relevant classroom management (CRCM), based on their training at either historically White (HWIs) or Black (HBCUs) postsecondary institutions. As part of this larger study, we found that teachers trained at HWIs, although well-intentioned, enter the classroom far less prepared than their HBCU-trained counterparts. However, for both groups of novice teachers, intercultural interactions earlier in their lives seem to have a greater influence than institutional effects on effective, culturally relevant classroom management practices.

This chapter addresses a sensitive topic in the field of education: the relationship between and among narrative inquiry, critical analysis, and critical theory. It argues that narrative inquirers are critical – but not in the same way that critical theorists are critical, although they may draw on the same literature and terms. To make our point, we unpack three of our peer-reviewed articles and highlight our theoretical frames and research moves to demonstrate criticality in narrative inquiry. We specifically discuss (1) titles and topics, (2) research frameworks, (3) historical and contemporary data, (4) use of participants' voices (words and feelings), (5) themes, and (6) new knowledge. We mostly argue that narrative inquiry exists because of experience. From experience, everything else unfolds – including criticality – depending on where the researcher in relationship with research participants, takes the inquiry. This chapter explicitly addresses a lived issue known both inside the narrative inquiry community and outside of it.

This chapter addresses the nature of reflective classroom practice in a Hong Kong setting where action research has been undertaken by both the student teachers and the teaching practice supervisor. It is based on a cross-case study of the processes through which student teachers learn to teach. Specifically, the analysis focuses on how student teachers reflect on their experiences in learning to teach. The data are based on student teachers’ reported thoughts about their learning over a period of 1 year. The results contribute to the understanding of reflective classroom practice by highlighting first, student teachers’ perceptions about learning to teach and second, their reviews on classroom practice. The discussion also adds to the literature on teacher development taken from the novice-expert research tradition. Accordingly, implications for curriculum development in teacher education are drawn.

Children experience trauma more often than many early childhood educators realize. As many as 26% of children experience multiple trauma events such as abuse, neglect, parental substance abuse, parental incarceration, and so forth. Trauma impacts brain development in many negative ways that may have serious consequences on the child’s ability to learn, grow socially and emotionally, and develop physically. These brain changes also change how the child will play in the early childhood classroom, and information is given to help recognize the signs of trauma in children. The early childhood educator can make trauma-sensitive modifications in the classroom to assist the traumatized child’s ability to play out the problem. School counselors can be a resource for assisting early childhood teachers when working with traumatized children. A brief description of the importance of play therapy as a developmentally appropriate method to help traumatized young children is provided.

This study, carried out in the bilingual and bicultural border area of South Texas, is an exploration of bilingual preservice teachers’ identity formation and their experiences and beliefs about literacy and biliteracy during an undergraduate class focused on learning about emergent literacy in the bilingual classroom. This study is based on a sociocultural approach to learning and identity development, and research that explores how bilingual teachers’ identity is shaped through their participation in cultural and linguistic practices. The purpose of this practitioner research is to provide insights into preservice teachers’ identities as they start to explore literacy and biliteracy practices. Two research questions guide the study: What experiences about literacy and biliteracy development do prospective teachers identify as meaningful? How do these experiences contribute to define bilingual preservice teachers’ identities? Findings indicate that bilingual preservice teachers’ identities are shaped by cultural and linguistic experiences that define the bilingual and bicultural dynamics of the region. Two predominant types of experiences impact bilingual preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching, learning, and literacy/biliteracy development. Particularly significant in defining their perceptions are the lessons learned from meaningful others – especially mothers and teachers – and certain relevant memories regarding effective practices they experienced when learning to read and write. Implications for teacher education preparation of bilingual teachers are identified.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the exploration of metaphors of learning and teaching can contribute to the professional development of teacher candidates and teacher educators.

Approach – The chapter draws on the author's experiences as a teacher and teacher educator to illustrate ways in which metaphors of teaching offer deeper understandings of the personal and social dimensions of teaching and teacher education practices.

Findings – Metaphors and other artifacts by the author and teacher candidates are examined to illustrate how metaphors have been be used to story experience in teacher education.

Research implications – Imagining and re-imagining metaphors provide a solid foundation for the preparation and development of teachers. Engaging teacher candidates in the identification and development of their metaphors of learning and teaching contributes to their development into teachers able to understand the experiences of their students and adapt their teaching to enhance student learning. The exploration of metaphor can also help teacher educators to better understand their professional identities and practices.

Value – Teacher educators are uniquely positioned to help teachers explore how their teacher images inform practice and to analyze these images to enhance personal professional knowledge and teaching practices.

Chapter 1 overviews the purposes, organization, and various contributions in the volume, “Smudging composition lines of identity and teacher knowledge: Cross-cultural narrative inquiries into teaching and learning.” Through these inquiries, we unpack the complexities of teachers and students engaging in cross-cultural classroom contexts. We present narrative inquiry as a fitting research approach to document and to analyze complexities underlying and informing understanding of teacher knowledge in cross-cultural teaching contexts. Such a methodological approach reveals details of the kinds of cross-cultural perspectives that might unfold in the implementation of curriculum, and explores ways in which teachers' sense of teacher knowledge are shaped by experiences of teaching and learning. We recognize complexities revealed through a comparative cross-cultural narrative approach as a way of highlighting the educational significance of this work. We organized chapters of this volume into sections, using Schwab's (1973) curriculum commonplaces as a framework for examining some of these complexities. The four section headings are: Section I: “Becoming a cross-cultural teacher: Developing teacher knowledge from cross-cultural experiences;” Section II: “Learner experience informing teacher knowledge;” Section III: “Subject matter/curriculum informing teacher knowledge;” and Section IV: “Milieu informing teacher knowledge.”

The purpose of this study is to explore schoolteachers’ experiences of knowledge sharing as a source of informal learning in the workplace when teaching new education programs on financial literacy and entrepreneurial skills.

This study is based on interviews with American schoolteachers teaching education programs provided by Junior Achievement USA that aim to equip pupils with practical skills in financial literacy and entrepreneurship to improve their work-readiness in adult life.

The findings of this study indicate that knowledge sharing is a source of informal learning among the teachers when dealing with the JA programs. This takes place through collaboration in communities of practice. Experienced teachers (who have previously taught the programs) are especially valuable in sharing their insights and helping the teachers prepare their teaching. Such knowledge-sharing practices help the schoolteachers to improve their practices. Having a supportive social culture encourages knowledge sharing between schoolteachers, but more time is needed to prioritize this kind of collaboration between co-workers.

Teaching financial literacy and entrepreneurship through pupil-driven activities can be experienced as different from teaching regular subjects, and teachers in the study seem to benefit from sharing experiences when it comes to preparing or adding to their teaching. The findings suggest that to facilitate knowledge-sharing practices can be helpful to schoolteachers when introducing new topics and pedagogical methods in schools.

Policy makers, professional associations and scholars continue to advocate for the integration of enhanced clinical experiences for future teachers’ preparation. These recommendations reflect the growing recognition that few events in preservice teachers’ education are more significant than their experiences in the classrooms of veteran peers. Aware of the fact that the field of teacher education needs examples of effective clinical experiences, the authors examined the “critical, project-based” (CPB) model, employing Photovoice activities in a dropout prevention course in a secondary education partner school at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

Aware that the field of teacher education needs examples of effective clinical experiences, the authors examined the CPB model, employing Photovoice activities in a dropout prevention course in a secondary education partner school at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article they detail a practitioner research examination that explores the experiences of 12 preservice middle/high school teachers, reporting on these individuals’ considerations of general pedagogies, writing instruction strategies and teaching personas.

Results suggest that preservice teachers might best identify pedagogical practices that are consistent with their nascent teaching identities via experiences that occur in school-university partnerships in which future teachers are positioned as pedagogues.

This manuscript explores the use of the “CPB” clinical experience model, identifying the impacts of this approach for preparing future teachers.