Section archive - Teacher Education Programs

This paper reflects on a new pre-service teacher education initiative, Classmates. Classmates is a collaboration between the University of Western Sydney (UWS) and the New South Wales Department of Education and Training (DET), South Western Sydney Region. Classmates aims to prepare pre-service teachers to work in challenging, hard-to-staff schools. These contexts typically have socially disadvantaged populations and annually experience teacher shortages and high teacher turnover, particularly amongst beginning and early career teachers.

The study reports on preservice teachers' perceptions of which memorable experiences contributed to shifts in their culturally responsive disposition and teaching practices. The preservice teachers were enrolled in a teacher preparation program, designed to prepare them for work with a diversity of children and their families. Findings suggest five types of experiences that were instrumental in the disposition shift. These included material resources, diverse internship experiences, interactions with diverse families, critical reflection, and discussion and dialogue.

A study was conducted to examine the changing demography of teachers. The study examined secondary teachers' initial notions of careers, and through third and fourth year of professional experience. Results suggest a typology of teachers: the 'career' teacher, the 'classroom' teacher and the 'portfolio' teacher, whose commitment to teaching may be temporary. In addition, the commercialization of the education and intensification of teachers' work challenge teachers' 'moral purpose' and professional identity and adversely affect not only their retention but also new teachers' intentions to remain in teaching.

A study is conducted to examine Swedish teachers' work outside of the classroom. The article describes what teachers do in their out of class time, and gathers data from 1166 reports from K-12 teachers. The study reveals that approximately 10 hours of the weekly 45 teaching hours in unregulated, and this time roughly corresponds to the non-regulated working time, where teachers do not have to be at school.