This article describes a seminar process in which poetry is used with student teachers to provide a focal point for reflection and introspection. Through this reflection process, students have been able to reflect deeply and personally on their student-teaching experiences, on their own personalities in the context of those experiences, and on…

In this article, we argue that preparing and maintaining a cadre of culturally responsive teachers is critical to improving urban education and achieving educational equity. We discuss a collaborative, social-justice-oriented approach to teacher preparation committed to developing a stable and effective teaching force reflective of the student…

The purpose of this study was to determine the capacity of teacher candidates to facilitate and reflect on classroom discourse in the context of an early field experience. The classroom discourse and reflections of 10 teacher candidates were examined through interviews, audio and video recordings, and written reflections. The findings indicated…

This study summarizes the results of a survey conducted by university faculty to improve the secondary teacher education program at a public university in the southeast. The survey's primary objectives were to identify areas of needed improvement among student teachers and to identify areas in which supervising teachers desired additional training…

This article analyzes the work of a long-term network of teachers, the Philadelphia Teachers Learning Cooperative, with a focus on their descriptive practices. Drawing on three years of ethnographic documentation of weekly meetings and a historical archive of meetings over 30 years, I characterize the teachers' knowledge about teaching and…

In this case study, part of a larger study of the Prospect School Teacher Education Program, the author investigates the processes of descriptive inquiry by exploring a moment in their evolution and their effect on the learning of one teacher educator and his students ("interns") as they investigated the teaching of social studies. She also…

As four teacher educators teaching a course associated with state-mandated assessment of literacy subject matter knowledge and instructional practices, we conducted a self-study of our experiences. In this article, we describe how high-stakes assessment further compounds the problematic nature of teaching and learning literacy in coursework. We…

This study describes a teacher certification literacy methods course taught in an elementary school setting and featuring a classroom practicum, integrated with course sessions, that focuses on work with individual children. It examines the influence of an inquiry approach, promoted in this course model, on teacher candidate development. Drawn…

In an attempt to address perceived shortcomings in traditional content-area literacy preparation, an interdisciplinary group of teacher education faculty developed an approach called "content-driven literacy" (CDL), which was applied to the design of courses to prepare preservice secondary science and social studies teachers. This article…

Prospective teachers are often found to have difficulty focusing their attention on students in sustained and constructive ways. Instead, in what is sometimes understood as a developmental matter, beginners may seem highly concerned with their own feelings and needs. This article offers a contrary finding. It examines two cases of prospective…

In this article, the author illustrates how the Descriptive Process can assist teachers in shifting relationships with students because it requires both associative and reflective processes. Drawing on discussions from a teacher study group, she illustrates how associative processes can lead to a strengthening of connection with self. Similarly,…

The perspectives of immigrant youth are important to be aware of because they can reveal the powerful role society has in framing and forming the range of possibilities available to them. Culturally speaking, immigrant youth often face mismatches between home and school values, but they sometimes encounter intracultural struggles as well. This…

Within this study, we examine the nexus of immigrant parents' language attitudes and motivations towards a lesser-spoken, endangered language and the revitalization efforts in the Basque Country, Spain. Attitudes and motivations are conceptualized as multileveled, relational, and dynamically constructed within their immediate and broader…

The increasing number of undocumented immigrants coming to the United States has created serious socioeconomic, sociocultural, and socioeducational challenges for the communities in which these immigrants settle. Minors represent over 1.3 million of the 10.8 million unauthorized immigrants presently living in the United States. Given the secretive…

Scholarship on immigrant integration often examines immigrant characteristics and the host society's contexts of reception. This article explores how teachers fit within this framework by presenting findings on teachers' preferences to teach immigrant-origin youth who are classified as "English learners" (ELs) within separate content courses known…