Section archive - Teacher Education Programs

The goal of this study was to explore how participating in a political environmental action project influenced pre-service teachers’ environmental citizenship. Following the steps of Project Citizen, an international civic education program, pre-service teachers learned about and proposed policy solutions to address excessive energy usage at their university. Analysis revealed growth in the pre-service teachers’ environmental citizenry, including their self-efficacy, values awareness, and ecological and civics literacy.

The central purpose of this research was to ascertain the views of teachers and teacher educators in the lifelong learning sector in England about the comparative ‘value’ of different forms of initial teacher training (ITT). The article reveals that both teachers and teacher educators perceive HEI programmes as superior to other forms of teacher training, in terms of both labour-market currency and the quality of learning provided. Although the majority of respondents regarded awarding body courses as adequate, the data reveal that most believed that HEI provision offers a different learning experience to that provided by alternative awarding bodies. Furthermore, both teachers and teacher educators believed that HEI-validated courses offered a challenging experience combining theory and practice.

By adopting a scenario-based approach, teacher educators and others designing online environments can help prepare students for the types of challenges they will face in communities and classrooms after graduation.. Solving complex problems inherent in a scenario-based approach affords students the opportunity to tackle ill-formed problems, integrate multiple perspectives, and use higher order thinking. These outcomes were among the goals of a redesign of online courses in an early childhood education degree program.

In this article, the author argues that we live in a postmodern world in which the pace of the change accelerates daily. The Western world experiences a“crisis of education', in which schools become more irrelevant than ever to real life and teachers lose their authority and influence on the children's lives. This crisis should be addressed by a responsible professional educator, who questions the moral basis of the society and suggests that solidarity and communality are no less significant than individuality, privatization and competition. The author had initiated a teacher education program whose aim is to promote this vision in prospective teachers. ACE [Active-Collaborative-Education] is a teacher education program for post-graduate students conducted in Kaye Academic College of Education in Beer-Sheva.