This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…

The purpose of this mixed methods sequential explanatory study was to explain the relationship between literacy experiences over time and the literacy identities of the doctoral students in a teacher education and higher education program. The quantitative phase, surveying 36 participants, revealed a positive correlation between participant's…

In different ways and in different contexts it has been and still is argued that music education should be prioritized because of its positive impact on pupils in terms of general development as good citizens and in terms of skills in other disciplines. In this article, the authors discuss whether this tendency is best interpreted as an example of…

In a time of limited means and continued calls for higher student achievement, school leaders need to be wise in their use of resources. Earlier research has called for greater levels of teacher preparation, and, while many school districts provide greater compensation for teachers with graduate degrees, some districts have begun phasing out this…

This study examined 100 beginning teachers' transfer of learning when utilising Information Communication Technology-enhanced activity-based learning activities. The beginning teachers had participated in a professional development program that was characterised by "learning technology by collaborative design" in their final year of…

As a major policy focus, teacher evaluation is currently the primary tool promoted to improve teaching quality. But evaluation alone is not enough. What will most transform teaching quality--and the profession--is the creation of a larger system that supports teaching and learning through on-the-job evaluation and professional development, and…

In this article, the authors use an explanatory narrative of participation and transformation across two consecutive early childhood communities of practice to chronicle the evolution of a teacher leader, Michelle. This narrative illustrates how the continuity of experience spawned her development from apprentice toward an agentic teacher leader,…

Student teachers consider cooperating teachers to be one of the most important contributors to their teacher preparation program. Therefore, the ways in which cooperating teachers participate in teacher education are significant. This review seeks to move conceptions of that participation beyond commonly held beliefs to empirically supported…

In this article, the authors provide a summary of the current techniques being used to recruit, retain, and support a diverse range of scholars, including students with disabilities, in a doctoral program. The manuscript provides a summary of the current need for leadership personnel who are scholars with knowledge in special education, general…

Various commentators have argued for years that the study of teachers' self-efficacy (TSE) beliefs, largely dominated by quantitative research methodologies, has been confused. Contentious issues include the very conceptualization of these beliefs, how they are defined and accessed through research and how the research is used. One of the…

One of the ways that researchers have found to expand and inform global thinking about the impact of education is through international teaching experiences for students preparing to become teachers. "People have always been curious about the ways that societies acquire and use knowledge, the way that knowledge is translated into skills, the…

This paper discusses challenges and opportunities arising during the development of open educational resources (OERs) to support communicative language teaching (CLT) with interactive whiteboards (IWBs). iTILT (interactive Technologies in Language Teaching), a European Lifelong Learning Project, has two main aims: (a) to promote "best…

Research on preparing language teachers for blended teaching of summary writing, a mix of on-site and online instruction for college students to grasp the gist of the texts, is scarce in higher education. This study examined the problems encountered and solutions proposed by six language teachers, who altogether instructed 214 college students on…

This study investigates the effects of Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction on the production of the English phonological contrast /i/ and / I /. Acoustic Spectrographic Instruction is based on the assumption that physical representations of speech sounds and spectrography allow learners to objectively see and modify those non-accurate features in…

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…