Section archive - Theories & Approaches

This article reviewed 10 papers. These papers demonstrated that those associated with teacher education, from the policy, research and practice arenas, are currently searching to ensure that the teachers who graduate from an increasing array of programmes, have the skills, attitudes and dispositions to support high levels of student achievement in schools. Several key issues that have emerged from the reviewed articles. The first issue is whether teaching is a craft or a profession. The issue whether the role of teacher is a profession or a craft has implications on how teacher educators view themselves, as practitioners or researchers. Finally, this review describes the lack of trust being shown by politicians and communities in number of countries to both teachers and teacher educators.

This work aims to present an alternative vision of teaching, one that the authors call “Teacher as Civic Agent.” This term marks an important theoretical shift from viewing quality teaching and learning as that which prepares students to succeed economically to that which prepares students to become self-actualized and critically empowered civic agents. The authors explore the “Teacher as Civic Agent” through the analysis of the Council of Youth Research. The study seeks to provide a new rationale for democratic teacher education and a revitalization of the civic purposes of schooling. The authors argue for new paradigm of teacher education in which teachers engage with local communities, become producers of knowledge, and work collectively in solidarity with their students to create social change.

The authors wanted to understand the challenges hybrid teacher educators face in efforts to foster third spaces in partnerships. They investigated the ways university-based teacher educators foster and mediate relationships to work toward a collective third space. The authors investigated the relationships encountered in partnership contexts, challenges and tensions faced in these relationships, and ways they negotiated tensions and worked to overcome impediments to developing third space over time. In addition, the authors propose a framework for moving beyond traditional notions of oppositional triadic relationships of student teacher, mentor teacher, and supervisor in recognition of complex social ecologies in the third space.

This article describes the results of a qualitative study that aimed to explore how one group of preservice English language teachers in Hong Kong constructed their identities as teachers. The findings demonstrate that the trajectory of the preservice teachers’ identity formation relied not only on connecting past and future but also on their perceptions of current English language teaching practices in Hong Kong schools. However, the participants evaluated many of these practices negatively. These negative evaluations resulted in a rigid division being discursively established between ‘traditional’ teachers on the one hand and ‘modern’ teachers on the other.