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During a site-based certification program in a large county school district in the southeastern United States, 14 educators took 7 graduate courses on teaching emergent bilinguals. These educators made a shift in their practices and perceived a corresponding shift in their teaching efficacy. Ten years after the onset of this program, researchers returned to the site and conducted a mixed-methods study. The first purpose of this study was to explore educators’ perceptions regarding instructional practices for teaching emergent bilinguals after a decade had passed. The second purpose was to identify course features perceived by educators as having been most instrumental in fostering a long-term transformation in their teaching practices. Data were collected from a survey and interviews with the 14 educators (13 teachers and a program specialist) who had completed this certification program. Results indicated changes in their teaching methods and interactions with parents as well as heightened confidence for taking on leadership roles. Study participants identified professional learning communities, cyclical reflective activities, and action research projects as the course features that had been instrumental in transforming their practices for working with emergent bilinguals. Findings suggest that this site-based certification program was a catalyst for generating individual change that continued beyond program completion. By exploring this decade-long transformation, the current study provides implications for designing and implementing graduate certification courses that prepare in-service teachers to work effectively with emergent bilinguals.

This paper aims to explore the multicultural education strategies employed by primary school teachers in Georgia.

In-depth interviews with 65 primary school teachers were used. The interviews were analyzed using the theoretical framework of multicultural educational approaches defined by James Banks. The approaches used by Georgian teachers were classified into four approaches to multicultural education: contributions, additive, transformation and social action approaches.

The research revealed that the majority of teachers use the contributions and additive approaches to multicultural education. The use of the transformation approach by teachers is very rare and only happens if school textbooks, as well as exercises and assignments in the textbooks, provide this opportunity. The social action approach to multicultural education has not been used in primary grades in Georgia. The research revealed that some teachers reject diversity in their classroom as well as the necessity of developing their students’ intercultural sensitivity. These teachers have an informed and conscious approach to not using multicultural approaches in the teaching process. This approach is named by the author as the “inactive action approach”, which is specific to Georgia and is widely used in primary school classes.

The study has scientific and practical importance. The findings of this study also have practical importance. They can be used for the implementation of teacher education and training programs in Georgia. Consideration of these findings will contribute to the implementation of the National Objectives of General Education and the National Curriculum of Georgia.

This study makes contribution to the development of the field of multicultural education in Georgia.

The purpose of this paper is to examine practicing mathematics teachers’ learning through parallel lesson study in China. Lesson study in China has been practiced for decades. Parallel lesson is an enriched mode of lesson study to address the implementation of new curriculum.

The expansive learning perspective has been used to explore the ways practicing teachers learned to improve teaching through the transformation of learning objects and boundary crossing.

Two cases are illustrated and compared to highlight features of teachers’ learning through parallel lesson study. The practicing teachers developed their competence in transforming instructional objectives and task selection and implementation. In addition, they also developed professional vision in alignment with the reform-oriented curriculum.

This study makes significant contribution to understanding teachers’ learning through lesson study in China. Meanwhile, it also demonstrates how the theory of expansive learning could be used as a conceptual framework to examine teachers’ learning through lesson study.

Current global shifts in education towards inclusive early childhood education are deeply engineered by the crisis of educational exclusion. In responding to exclusion, teachers have mainly utilized dominant western theories to plan and implement inclusive teaching. In this chapter, we draw on a non-western philosophy, a Nichiren Buddhist (Soka) philosophy, to provide a ‘kaleidoscopic’ lens through which to create inclusive educational learning spaces that engender full participation of all children. The Soka education philosophy is a humanist concept which can guide teachers when preparing to create inclusive education. The aims of this chapter are threefold: The first is an exploration of the Nichiren Buddhist (Soka) philosophy. The second aim is to highlight how this philosophy can enable teachers to unleash the unlimited potential of children in inclusive learning settings. Thirdly, we argue that grounding early childhood teacher education in this philosophy can help improve the effectiveness of inclusive educational experience for all children.

Research has documented how white teachers often fall short of their anti-racist intentions. However, much of this research is done with preservice teachers or teachers across disciplines. The authors investigate stories in which white English teachers who teach substantial proportions of black students and who self-reported anti-racist goals nevertheless fell short of those goals. The purpose of the study is to understand the tensions between racial liberalism and racial literacy in their pedagogy.

The authors snowball sampled 12 veteran white high school English teachers (3–27 years’ experience) who taught in schools with substantial proportions of black students. The authors used a two-stage interview process to narrow the sample to 7 teachers who confirmed their anti-racist intentions and who wrote narratives of moments when they tried to be anti-racist, but the lesson failed in some way. The authors used a three-stage narrative analysis to analyze how racial liberalism and racial literacy were reflected in the narratives.

The veteran English teachers, despite their anti-racist intentions, told narratives that reflected racial liberalism, portraying racism as an individual and interpersonal phenomenon. Some narratives showed teachers who had taken steps toward racial literacy, but no narratives showed a fully developed sense of racial literacy, portraying the layers of institutional and structural racism in English education.

The sample suggests that veteran white English teachers are subject to similar limited racial literacies as novice teachers. While the authors found glimmers of racial literacy, they still note the work necessary to equip veteran English teachers with the racial literacies necessary for anti-racist instruction. The authors propose directions for teacher education, systemic support and professional development.

In a context where standardized testing and achievement scores have become the hallmark of accountability frameworks, the issue of social responsibility is not given much attention in schools in Jamaica. This has led to a continuous decline of the moral and spiritual dimension of schooling in the country. This is evidenced through an increase in school violence and other disparities among students. This paper aims to explore teachers’ perception of how they are prepared for their role as agents of social responsibility.

Through interviews of 16 in-service teachers, this research sought to explore teachers’ perception of how they are prepared for their role as agents of social responsibility. Each participant in the study was interviewed using a structured interview schedule comprising six questions. Data collected were transcribed and analyzed by sorting and identifying codes. Pattern codes were established which were then interpreted to form themes. Three themes emerged which are used to present findings.

Findings revealed that teachers had a shared understanding of social responsibility; they felt that they were prepared for this role through ad hoc curriculum encounters, were not adequately prepared for their role and social responsibility required a belief in the idea first before it can be taught.

The findings from the research are used to present arguments in the paper for emphasis on preparing student teachers to be agents of social responsibility and for a rethinking of teacher preparation curriculum in Jamaica. The paper also presents strategies that can be used to guide the re-thinking of teacher preparation programmes.

Teacher preparation programmes represent the avenue through which teachers can be prepared to develop their social consciousness, so that they can in turn help students. The results of this paper are means of helping teacher educators understand this.

This paper is one of the first since the early 1990s to discuss social responsibility as a key component of teacher preparation in Jamaica. It also fills the void of scarcity of research in Jamaica on teacher education on a whole and social responsibility in teacher education in particular.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceptions of graduate students about the need for a multicultural education course at doctoral level in a mid-sized higher education public institution in Southwest Florida.

A qualitative case study method was applied with multiple sources of data collected, including semi-structured interviews, observations and students’ written papers, online discussions and assignments that aimed to prepare educators to teach culturally diverse students and challenge their own perceptions about culture, race and other multicultural education-related topics.

The findings indicate that, even though the multicultural education course promoted an eye-opening transformational experience for students through their interactions and learning from each other, the students still need further training in multicultural education because of their limited culturally responsive teaching skills.

Limitations of the study are that both the researchers were deeply involved with the material and the class, as the class professor and one of the students, which might have affected the authors’ perception about the students’ journey in learning about multicultural education. The researchers’ dual-role (as researchers and course professor and graduate assistant) might have influenced the participants’ responses, as they knew they were part of a research project. Thus, the participants’ spontaneity in sharing their opinions and beliefs about multicultural education may have been hampered, perhaps responding what the researchers expected rather than with their authentic perspectives on the topics.

The implications of this study to teachers, educators and practitioners are that it invites the readers to reflect on their academic preparedness to work with culturally diverse students. For policymakers, the study indicates the need for creating standards that aim to examine in-service graduate student teachers about their self-efficacy, readiness and dispositions to work with culturally diverse students.

Because of the limited publications on doctoral students learning multicultural education, the authors’ study offers an important insight into the transformational experience of doctoral students learning multicultural education and the implications for improving graduate courses in multicultural education.

As the novel virus was declared a pandemic, Korean schools quickly transitioned to remote schooling based on its advanced IT system, government-operated digital learning platforms, and an abundance of pre-existing online teaching materials (Byun & Slavin, 2020). Unfortunately, this story of “successful” educational responses to the pandemic was of little relationship to physical education (PE) partly because of the sparsity of supportive resources for online teaching of the hands-on subject area but mainly because of the incompatibility between the nature of the online classroom and the essence of PE (Baek & Yoon, 2020; Oh, 2021). As its name implies, physical education is inseparable from physical movements, bodily dialogue, close physical contact, and active, direct interactions between engaged individuals. Accordingly, PE teachers, dwelling in either online or blended classrooms where bodies are absent, and touch is unthinkable, are experiencing diminished room to implement their pedagogical repertoires and, in turn, affecting their deconstruction and reconstruction of their teacher identities (Kamoga & Varea, 2022). In a nutshell, PE subject matter and PE teachers' identities are being challenged and experiencing unexpected metamorphoses amid this global crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic started a new era in understanding the topic of resilience and adaptability. The human society has not faced such a widespread global challenge until now. This paper aims to address a context change influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, using a case study in high education. While the character of the issues emerging is the same as in any other domain, in high education, the principles and consequences can be more directly studied and analyzed.

This paper describes a framework to evaluate how the context of the tertiary education service has been disrupted and the influence on the adherence of the students to the educational process, via primary quantitative data collection. This paper tackles the problem of distinguishing the change in context and context change and the possibility of system reconfiguration.

To properly face the evolving conditions induced by the pandemic, the education service system must be aligned to the imposed emergency situations, trying to “find” where the changes have emerged, i.e. what kind of reconfiguration is, whether it appears in the goals or in the service system itself. Furthermore, this study discusses how the findings can be valuable and applied to situations beyond the pandemic, in other cases of context disruption to highlight how general the service activities are within our reconfiguration approach.

From a theoretical point of view, this work is in line with main assumptions of system thinking, by confirming several insights of service systems’ behavior, even in a logic of B2B interactions (from the offer side); first in terms of openness and adaptation, in addition to readiness to change and – when and how – this change can occur. From a practical point of view, this paper’s contribution is directed toward achieving the more successful change management process, as reached together by motivated partners working hard for a common final goal. Realizing that the pandemic has brought a completely new context of education, managers should focus now on monitoring all aspects of the education business, not only directly affected projects and processes.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of learning Cantonese opera using Variation Theory as a guiding principle of pedagogical design.

A total of three types of speech in Cantonese opera were identified as the objects of learning in the study: patter speech, poetic speech and supported speech. Two classes of Grade five (N =54) students were arranged into an experimental group and a control group. In the experimental group, the characteristics of the three types of speech were taught using comparison and contrast techniques to help the learners identify and differentiate the characteristics of each type. The control group was taught the three types of speech sequentially without attempting to compare and contrast among the types. Pre‐ and post‐tests were conducted to test the students’ understanding of the objects of learning. An independent samples t‐test and a paired sample t‐test were applied to measure the statistical differences between the groups and the pre‐ and post‐tests, respectively.

The results indicated that there were no significant differences between the two groups before the treatment (p = .665). However, the experimental group achieved a significantly higher level of learning effectiveness than the control group after teaching (p = .003). The control group did not significantly improve their understanding after learning (p = .061), whereas the experimental group significantly increased their scores (p < .001).

The application of Variation Theory in academic subjects, especially mathematics, has been well explored in the literature. This study shows the application of Variation Theory in the cultural subject of music, and points to the potential of Variation Theory as a guiding principle of music teaching to enhance learning effectiveness.