The general premise of the student teaching abroad experience being that it will provide future teachers with experiences that will enable them to interact effectively and productively with the increasingly diverse student population that comprises U.S. schools (Martines, 2005). It is understood that teacher preparation programs must provide…

Research indicates that historical and social backgrounds influence individuals' motivation to teach and their commitment to teaching (Gordon, 2000; Su, Hawkins, Huang & Zhao, 2001). This article reports on a comparative study exploring the motivation to teach and the commitment to teaching among non-local prospective student teachers from…

To date, research on admission processes has largely focused on either selection trends or on determining the predictive and concurrent validity of admission indicators. Unfortunately, comparatively little research has examined the subjective processes used in the selection of personal dispositions related to inclusivity and the impact of these…

In 2007, eleven diverse undergraduate students from Texas spent a month in Mexico on a study-abroad program sponsored by the School of Education at their university. A central goal of the program was to facilitate pre-service teachers' ability to articulate a critical understanding of the needs of second language (L2) learners in their future…

Language education is a complex social practice that reaches beyond teaching and learning phonology, morphology, and syntax. Language is not neutral; it conveys ideas, cultures, and ideologies embedded in and related to the language, so that language education needs to be examined not only on the purely linguistic level, but also on the broader…

One of the main challenges confronted by higher education in the 21st century is to internationalize its programs and to make students more globally competent. This challenge is not new, but it has become increasingly complex. Gutek (1993) explains how the efforts to internationalize the university in the United States became particularly…

The challenges facing teacher educators to bridge the gap between theory and practice and to solve the problem of curricular fragmentation necessitate the creation of a more coherent program, the establishment of partnerships with schools, and the building of new educative spaces. In order to provide students with rich learning opportunities, and…

America's civic community from the end of the Great Depression through the post World War II years was hardly rational or racially neutral in its uneven and unequal treatment of African Americans and other underrepresented groups. Conventional civic scholarship of the era has ignored the complexities of a racially segregated society that in theory…

When environmental education manifests itself in schools, it is usually a simple matter of the insertion of an environment-related activity into the science, or perhaps social studies, curriculum. However, if one finds a teacher who has "the ethic," the entire school might be "green." The fact that this ethic is spreading through a relatively well…

The learning value attributed to perceptual and conceptual modes of "seeing" in context, underscore their significance as integral to the practice teaching experience. Programmatically, it challenges teacher educators to design observation approaches and activities that allow for associating perceptual experiences with conceptual understandings.…

In the last decade, educational reform efforts have focussed primarily on "technical fixes--changes in structures and practices" such as mandated curriculum and standardized tests. The imposition of these accountability measures has led to the deprofessionalization of teachers as mediators between the curriculum and the students in the classrooms.…

Teaching must be recognized "as a socially constructed activity that requires the interpretation and negotiation of meanings embedded within the context of the classroom." As part and parcel of this interpretation and negotiation, there is a continual redefinition of teacher identity. "Teaching and teacher identity are socially constructed through…

There is a propensity, when considering the meaning(s) of citizenship, to think in terms of universality and equality rather than difference and inequity. In a North American context, citizenship often operates as a taken for granted status with the requisite rights and responsibilities associated with membership in a nation. In education, how…

Novice teachers often struggle in their first year. Some succumb to illness, depression, or burnout, and some even decide to abandon teaching as a career option. The classic stressors identified by new teachers have been remarkably consistent over the years, and their challenges have been well chronicled. Less has been written, however, about the…

The life history method, which achieved a prominent position in the Chicago tradition of sociological research in the early 1920s, has been widely adopted for educational inquiries since the 1980s. The power of the life history method in illuminating subjective teacher experiences in social historical contexts has made it "probably the only…