Japan enacted a new teacher education curriculum in 2019, following which it became possible to include school experiences and internships within one's practicum credits. However, the contents of the practicum are not systematically arranged, and discussions on student-teachers' (STs) learning and their resulting professional development achieved…

Teachers' professional identity is multifaceted and fluctuating, and while it is formally developed during initial teacher preparation, it is influenced by experiences before and beyond teaching programmes. The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which a module on language curriculum development may influence the professional…

Curriculum integration has recently stirred growing interest in educational discourses. New Finnish core curricula for basic education and for general upper secondary schools encourage and even obligate schools to integrate the curriculum. Integration has been deemed to be important, as the boundaries between school subjects have remained…

Despite a growing awareness of the importance of future-oriented reflective practices among teacher-education researchers, there is a gap in the literature regarding the question of whether and in what way these kinds of written reflections promote the development of student teachers' professional identity. To fill this gap, the current study aims…

School experience has been practised as an integral component of undergraduate teacher education programmes in many countries. This has spurred a large amount of research on various issues in the whole experience. However, the stage of school visits and classroom observations remains unexplored as a research subject. This paper reports on a study…

Learning to teach is an emotional endeavour and student teachers challenging emotions are recurrently created in teacher education. The aim of this study was to investigate student teachers' coping with emotionally challenging situations in teacher education. In the study, 22 student teachers studying their last year of teacher education…

The role of English in Israel is important to the country's prosperity. However, Arab students' results are low on national exams, which could be due to a variety of factors. This paper focuses on the training of Arab English teachers as per the directives of the Ministry of Education, particularly the Academic Class practicum. Using both…

This study reports on changes in student teachers' meaning-oriented learning during teacher education and their perceptions of what enhances this learning. Students with a meaning-oriented learning pattern view learning as an active process of knowledge construction, are capable of regulating their learning, want to understand a topic thoroughly,…

The partnership model 'School Adoption' was developed in Norway as a part of teacher education and in the meantime, is being implemented in several European countries as an internship concept. The core element is the so-called 'adoption week', during which student teachers teach all the lessons at a school, while the teachers attend a professional…

This paper traces 120 student teachers' professional identity transformation during practicums in China and US. By eliciting the participants' 240 written metaphors at the start and the end of the teaching practicums respectively, this study reveals the change of the embodied metaphors revolving around four arenas: (1) from idealistic expectations…

This research investigated an initiative to familiarize pre-service teachers with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as an example of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Student teachers in one faculty in a teacher education college in Israel were given the option to register on an international MOOC for credit. The purpose of the research was to…

Although some research results indicate that joint reflection can improve student-teachers' reflection, it is not clear how the interaction between student-teachers during a joint reflection process helps this to happen. The aim of this paper is to explore how the organisation of joint activity in processes of joint reflection assists students'…

Drawing on the dual perspectives of teacher educators and student-teachers, this research explores the complex learning needs of pre-service school counselling teachers (SCTs) in China. Relying on data from in-depth interviews and relevant curriculum documents, the findings of the study demonstrate four critical needs of SCTs, namely, developing a…

The "theory-practice divide" in teacher education can be viewed not simply as an acceptance of a body of knowledge but instead an acceptance of the teacher educator's authority to determine what is relevant educational theory. This research aimed to explore student teachers' views of "educational theory" and how it was…

This is the first report in a series of studies concerning student teachers' readiness-for-the-job, defined by a framework of 11 international teacher competences (ITCs). Attaining readiness-for-the-job is connected to four characteristics of teacher education, namely; (1) employing the ITCs in day-to-day teaching in initial teacher education, (2)…