Employing empathetic-reflective-dialogical restorying as a teaching-learning strategy, pre-service teachers situated in two different geographical contexts, namely, South Africa and Norway, engaged in self-dialogue, self-narrative and in a Community in Conversation. Using Adobe Connect, together, they participated in a Community in Dialogue. By…

COVID-19 and the resultant national lockdown saw thousands of initial teacher education students in South Africa moving at short notice to online learning. For teacher educators this represented significant technical and pedagogical challenges, as they faced the task of adapting their teaching to an online modality, while simultaneously…

Previous research indicates that beginning teachers are not fully prepared for what awaits them in the workforce. This study highlights the value of partnerships among higher education providers, schools and employers and links the experiences of beginning teachers to initial teacher education (ITE). Real-life experiences from the field provide…

This article uses a South African case study to argue that postcolonial, emerging economy societies in transition often contain schools characterised as high risk and high need. Such schools require teachers to adapt to roles other than facilitating learning, such as psychosocial support and care, and which requires additional professional…

In a country like South Africa, as in many other countries around the world, there is an imperative to prepare student teachers for a wide variety of social contexts, as part of breaking the cycle of disadvantage for poor learners. This article explores the challenge of placing student teachers for their field experience in schools that differ…

This paper argues the importance in and for a democratic state and society of discussing controversial issues in education. In particular it analyses two national educational contexts, that of England and South Africa. It considers both whether they provide a suitable framework for teaching controversial issues in school classrooms and if they…

This paper focuses on a British Council funded Higher Education Link project involving three institutions--Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) in the UK and two South African institutions, the University of South Africa (UNISA) and Rhodes University. The link is a research and development project that has three main research strands:…