Section archive - Theories & Approaches

In this article, the authors suggest that current, ongoing changes in the nature and expectations of the university are causing the individuals who work in a UK School of Education to reconsider their identity. The paper proposes the formation of this identity to be a dynamic, career-long process. Diverse scaffolds for the development process are proposed, including opportunities for new teacher educators to be apprenticed into an academic role, the centrality of communities of practice and the importance of the supported development of academic skills.

This article examines the effect of a National Writing Project professional development model on a group of middle school writing teachers. Specifically, the authors examine how contact with other professionals in intensive week-long sessions as well as mentoring from the professional development coach affected the teachers’ concept of themselves as professionals, as writers, and as colleagues, as well as how this attitudinal change affected their classrooms and students. The findings reveal that through participating in the literacy academies, these teachers appear to have revived their interest in teaching and gained confidence in their expertise. The authors find that activities with more positive structural features tend to provide professional development with more positive core features, which in turn tend of produce more positive teacher outcomes.

This paper reports the findings of a PhD study, which offers comparative perspectives on teacher education in a period of reforms, inquiring into stakeholders’ perceptions in English, French, Italian and Spanish contexts as case studies. In the four case study contexts, the focus is on secondary teacher education; when a subject perspective is required, it concerns the area of modern languages, considering their transversal role in European education policies.

This review article aims to analyse the ways in which books within the SEDA series have contributed to thinking in higher education pedagogy over this time. The authors have approached the texts through three lenses, analysing them chronologically, thematically and by the orientation of the authors towards educational development. They demonstrate that the coverage of topics and the syntheses of ideas that the texts represent have holistically provided invaluable coverage of the key thinking in the field.