In an online context, without facial, verbal or gestural cues, establishing identities through naming social positions appeared essential to effective written communication for graduate pre-service teacher candidates enrolled in a course on literacy education for elementary students. As they engaged in small group asynchronous discussions about…

This document-based historical study looks back at the early years of the social foundations of education program that originated at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the 1930s-1940s, and focuses on the sociopolitical, intellectual, and educational currents that helped bring it about. Drawing on archival materials and published monographs…

Learning to systematically analyze the relationship between teaching and student learning is an important but difficult skill to engender in teachers. In this study, we examine how pre-service teachers who were introduced to a framework for analyzing teaching in a video-based teacher education course drew on this tool to analyze their own practice…

Background: Recently in education, the idea of promoting student ownership has emerged as a means of authentically engaging students in their own learning. Providing them with ownership over their experiences can lead to students making a greater connection with what they are learning. In teacher education, student ownership takes the form of…

In this paper, we deploy M.M. Bakhtin's notions about how language works to understand aspiring teachers' struggles about the intersecting roles race, class, gender, language background, and sexual orientation play in students' school lives and learning. Through life-history interviews and document analysis, we investigated the…

This design-based research project is concerned with the design, development and deployment of interactive technological learning environments to support contemporary education. The use of technologies in education often replicates instructivist positions and practices. However, the use of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (C), authentic…

Preparing to become an effective primary school mathematics teacher is a challenging and complex task; and is influenced by one's past experiences, personal knowledge of, and beliefs and attitudes towards mathematics. This paper examines the experiences of a small group of pre-service teachers who did not pass their first year mathematics…

As school-based action research has taken a higher profile in UK schools, the place of ethics warrants particular attention. This paper draws on evidence from a taught online Master of Education course collated via chat room discussion where 53 researching teachers were asked to explore policy within their own institution regarding school-based…

Within contemporary political discourses that narrowly characterize learning in terms of high-stakes standardized examinations, the value of the "social foundations of education" for teachers is increasingly questioned and challenged by those within and outside programs of teacher education. Even more troubling, prospective teachers…

This self-study investigated student teachers' perceptions of teacher educators modeling practices within a large lecture class in an initial teacher education program. It also studied factors that affected student teachers' developing ideas and practice. Phase 1 collected data from student teachers through focus group interviews and…

Background/Context: This piece draws on literature in justice-oriented teacher education, feminist pedagogy, and postmodern notions of bodies and place to make sense of data generated from a three-year study of an undergraduate teacher education course. A feminist lens was used to engage a body- and place-focused pedagogy that aimed to engage…

This manuscript introduces a multidimensional framework for academic literacies to help instructors become more aware of different aspects of literacies and how they might be used to plan and orchestrate meaningful, multifaceted literacy experiences in their classes. More specifically, this broad framework for literacy and learning explicitly…

To enhance students' understanding of nature of science (NOS), teachers need adequate pedagogical content knowledge related to NOS. The educational design research study presented here describes the design and development of a pre-service chemistry teacher education course on NOS instruction. The study documents two iterative cycles of…

Authenticity has recently become a popular term in science education. A study focusing on authenticity in the sense of making chemistry lessons better resemble chemistry practice is carried out at the University of Cologne in the Institute of Chemical Education, where prospective chemistry teachers are trained. In the long run an innovative module…

Using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, the author conducted a mixed method research study to examine the existence of the three CoI elements in a graduate-level educational technology online course. The author also looked at student perceptions and preference for community in online learning. High mean scores on the CoI showed that all…