This article analyses the trajectories into teacher education of a group of child minders who are studying to become pre-school teachers. The specific focus is what impact their prior experiences and learning from pre-school have on their trajectories, and how these experiences and learning are recognised in the first year of teacher education. A…

This article presents the nontraditional research of four teacher educators who used their own stories about teaching and their responses to those stories to problematize their work with preservice elementary education teachers. The data were analyzed using qualitative data methods of coding, categorizing, and interpreting. Among the themes that…

Individual recommendation plans (IRP) for student teaching practice were co-constructed with two methods students based on the select application of National Science Teachers Association's National Standards for Science Teacher Preparation. Methods students completed a resume, an interview on pedagogical preferences, and a learning styles survey…

This study was undertaken in order to better understand prospective elementary school teachers' motivations for working with fractions before and after taking a course designed to deepen their understanding of mathematics, as well as what instructional practices might be related to any changes detected in their motivations. Eighty-five education…

Although there is a fair amount of knowledge on the issue of promoting student-directed learning, research indicates that teachers are not always able to put that knowledge into practice. Therefore, new educational practices related to student-directed learning should be introduced in teacher education. This makes it possible to break the didactic…

Bioinformatics, merging biological data with computer science, is increasingly incorporated into school curricula at all levels. This case study of 10 secondary school students highlights student individual differences (especially the way they processed information and integrated procedural and analytical thought) and summarizes a variety of…

The advantages of video conferencing in educational institutions are well documented. Scholarly literature has indicated that videoconferencing technology reduces time and costs between remote locations, fill gaps in teaching services, increases training productivity, enables meetings that would not be possible due to prohibitive travel costs, and…

Many teacher educators have recently implemented inquiry based instructional practices into their programs (Crawford & Deer, 1993 ; Foss & Kleinsasser, 1996 ; Klein, 1996 , 1997 , 1998 , 2001 ; Schuck, 1996 ; Tillema & Knol, 1997). In mathematics education the promise has been that pre-service teachers' socialization into new interactive…

Since 1999, pre-service teachers undertaking the Bachelor of Teaching (Secondary) Program at the University of Western Sydney have participated in an alternate practicum called Professional Experience 3 (PE3). This practicum encourages students to engage in broader educational settings within local communities. Increasingly, a number of…

Worldwide there has been a range of initiatives in the area of standards for teachers as part of a discourse of professionalism. In Australia there are a plethora of standards: state and territory frameworks, generic and subject-specific, systemic and cross-systemic, for pre-service, beginning and experienced teachers. Little has been written as…

Reviewing and rethinking the 'knowledge base' for teacher education has become a particularly critical issue in recent times, given profound social and cultural shifts and changes and the emergence of new epistemological, political and technological conditions and contexts. This paper takes up the question of what are the key conceptual and…

While there has been widespread take-up of the concept 'flexible learning' within various educational environments--and equally frequent references to the flexible 'natures' of the computer and communication technologies that often underpin flexible learning initiatives--the relationship between technologies and flexibility is not a simple one. In…

The need to collaborate in the fields of business, health care, and technology is not a new concept. Educational institutions, however, have been slow to recognize the need to teach collaboration skills (Brownell & Walther-Thomas, 2002; Jackson, 2004). This article focuses on the development of the Collaboration Self-Assessment Tool (CSAT). The…

This article describes activities and experiences that encourage students to construct and reconstruct knowledge of self and teaching through community building and reflective practices. Following the assumption that teacher education should focus on the human and ethical dimensions of teaching, and the conscious development of a sense of self,…