Section archive - Theories & Approaches

This case study examines the perceptions of a group of trainees on the employment-based graduate teacher programme (GTP) towards the close of their initial teacher education. Seven trainees were selected to participate in the study. Data were collected by conducting a series of semi-structured interviews. Findings suggest that GTP trainees were able to identify ways in which 'theory' had positively influenced their practice. However, the authors claim that most workplace learning occurs on the job and that this masks an uncertain interplay between formal and less formal elements of how trainee teachers learn on the employment-based GTP route studied here.

This article explores the educational decision-making process of one Mexican American family. The author takes a phenomenological approach to examine human agency in specific familial decisions about this child’s schooling that supports the parents’ own vision of education. This is a narrative inquiry based on interviews and observations that took place with one family and one focal child through the course of a calendar year. The author concludes that immigrant and other urban parents may be actively engaged in their children’s education, asking important and valid curriculum questions in ways that remain invisible to educators. The author suggests alternatives to deficit theories that render parents’ perspectives invisible.

This paper proposes a philosophical reconstruction of the subject of the educator as the agent of curriculum. This political ontology of the subject suggests a process of reconstruction consisting of several stages: the disclosure of ideology and complicity, the investigation of the process of interpellation, and the creation of a fundamentally collective educational practice. It is only on the basis of the effective staging of this crisis at the heart of the teaching subject that a meaningful critical pedagogy and curriculum can be articulated.

In this study, the authors investigated how beginning teachers’ ideologies were constructed and reconstructed by closely examining teachers’ discourse expressed in one graduate multicultural literacy course. This study took place at a large university in a southwestern city in the United States. Eight beginning teachers, with a range of teaching experiences participated in this study. This study emphasized the role of language and social interactions and highlighted the ways in which beginning teachers struggled with dominate discourses about culture and literacy instruction.