Twenty-first century classrooms are filled with increasingly diverse student populations. Effective teacher preparation programs must include explicit course work in culturally responsive pedagogies and field experiences that place educators in new sociocultural contexts. Field experiences in cross-cultural, place-based settings have the potential…

Although strong arguments espousing the accolades of arts involvement are evident, the visual and performing arts continue to be underfunded and underused in K-12 schooling and teacher preparation. Valiant efforts from arts advocates have made inroads to reverse this negative trend, yet policies and practices that reflect a commitment to "arts for…

The author describes an interactive intervention strategy to assist pre-service teachers in developing reflective practices in an undergraduate literacy course. The goal of the study was to encourage deeper analysis rather than purely descriptive summaries of field placements in teacher candidates' written reflections, so pre-service teachers may…

Two separate research studies explored two types of experiential learning, situated learning and service learning, used in a liberal arts university setting to further understand their importance in the learning process. From both the service learning and situated learning research, two main findings emerged, limited student reflection and…

Program accountability is increasingly important in teacher education. Yet, program accountability often implies reporting quantitative data in an easy-to-understand visual format. Such data can lack validity when numbers are small and they may confuse issues of candidate performance with candidate understanding. In this study, four teacher…