As teacher education aims to prepare thoughtfully adaptive teachers, programs have begun to examine a practice-focused approach. One movement focuses on the pedagogy of teacher education, including how practice is unpacked, decomposed, for teacher candidates. This paper examines the pedagogy of decomposition in a U.S. based practice-focused…

This essay relies on methods of narrative research to both present and consider an example of a second-wave of critical whiteness pedagogy in K-12 contexts. The author focuses on his interactions with one high school student -- Adam -- to theorize how "The Whiteness Project" allowed students to "play with whiteness" in…

For the past two decades, scholars have advocated for reforms in teacher education that emphasize relevant connections between theory and practice in university coursework and focus on clinical experiences. This paper is based on our experiences in designing and implementing an integrated literacy methods course in a field-based teacher education…

Many scholars have characterized the "apprenticeship of observation" as a "pitfall" to be avoided or a barrier to be overcome in preservice teacher education, but directly challenging students' experience-based beliefs often leads to resistance, making students feel discounted or disrespected. In my introductory educational psychology course,…

Pre-service teachers spend an inordinate amount of time observing teaching and learning in classrooms with the goals of understanding the complexities of that space and impacting their teaching. Consequently, teacher educators are responsible for scaffolding pre-service teachers in the use of appropriate and effective observational skills and…

Teachers can profit from a solid knowledge base that can function as a frame of reference to help them organize their thinking. However, theoretical knowledge is easily "washed out" during the first confrontations with practice. For this reason, several Dutch university-based teacher education programs use a realistic approach to teacher…

The pedagogical work of university supervisors has received little attention in teacher education literature. Based on this concern, this paper provides a conceptual framework for university supervisors, recasting their role as teacher pedagogues focused on responding to the particular contextual needs of student teachers as they learn to teach.…

This article is a summary of comprehensive units on gender and sexuality diversity that the authors have used in teacher education courses in undergraduate and graduate social foundations of education classes over several years. The course lesson plan includes a five-part analysis of the following categories: biological sex; gender identity/sexual…

This article describes an in-service training program in action research designed for mature teachers returning to college to upgrade their teaching diplomas and complete their BEd degrees. The initial impetus was the need to develop a student-oriented pedagogy based on and enhancing the extensive professional experience of these teachers,…

Schools of education struggle to provide future teachers with opportunities to engage in and practice parent-teacher conferences. This manuscript addresses the diffusion of a signature pedagogy from medical education to teacher education, specifically highlighting the design and implementation considerations surrounding simulated parent-teacher…

In this article, the author describes a pedagogical approach to teaching theory to pre-service teachers. This approach involves articulating academic texts that introduce theoretical ideas and tools with carefully selected popular culture texts that can be taken up to illustrate the elements of a particular theory. Examples of the theories…

This article discusses the attitudes of math and science educators toward incorporating literacy activities into their teaching and offers suggestions for ways that teacher educators can encourage the integration of critical literacy principles into their lesson and unit planning. Emphases placed on textbooks, correct answers, multiple choice or…

Lev Vygotsky was an educational theorist and psychologist of extraordinarily wide knowledge whose major writings deal with the entire learning-teaching-development enterprise. Despite wide-ranging interests towards Vygotskian theory, the issue of imagination remains outside of the main line of the general inquiries. Thus there is a gap in that…

In the context of learning theories the problem of the passage from the psychological dimension governed by images to the "scientific" dimension dominated by concepts needs to be reformulated. The starting point of the question should be recognition that at a "deep" level, between the two dimensions, there is a bridge, the design of which can be…

Paul Ricoeur asks that we conceive of the imagination less in terms of visual images than in terms of language. He develops this idea as part of the hermeneutic work of interpreting literary texts and posits that the world disclosed by the literary work provides a space for the imaginative consideration of new possibilities for the self. I…