Section archive - Teacher Educators

This study investigated the knowledge and experiences of practicing teacher educators and learn from them regarding what they believe they needed to know to do their work well. The authors use Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s theorizing about “relationships of knowledge and practice” to understand knowledge essential to teacher educating. The findings reveal that practicing teacher educators often feel unprepared to assume their role. The implication is that much work is needed in the academy to help both experienced and novice teacher educators become conscious of their own biases and subjectivities, develop skills and sensitivities that can support social justice teaching and researching, and build confidence as advocates for all learners and communities.

The present study investigates the interaction between transformative processes in which a group of teacher educators became a professional development community (PDC) and the individual progress of these instructors through the professional development course on the topic of thinking education. Findings show that both breaking of isolation in the group and talk about student learning were essential in promoting individual progression toward change that entailed developing awareness of the possibility of infusing thinking into college-level teaching and the development of dispositions to do so in their courses.

This article examines the experiences of Black science teacher educators when they attempted to include multicultural education, equity, and social justice in their teaching. The findings reveal that the participants shared challenges that occur in the academy when they dealt with their Blackness as a faculty member and attempted to infuse multicultural science education, equity, and social justice in their classes. Many of these faculty members decided to incorporate multicultural education, equity, and social justice in their courses. Furthermore, some of them have attempted and stopped due to student evaluations and the need to gain promotion and tenure. The authors suggest that these shared experiences can assist other science educators by understanding Black faculty members’ struggles with the infusion of multicultural science education, equity, and social justice in their teaching.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how particular mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) use knowledge in their practice. Furthermore, this study also examines how they use this analysis as a tool for understanding the knowledge demands of work with preservice elementary teachers and how this knowledge is different from that required to teach K-12 students. The authors describe different forms of knowledge observed across different mathematics teacher educators’ practice and discuss how the observed knowledge forms are different from knowledge used by K-12 teachers in their practice. They argue that there needs to be more of a focus on understanding the knowledge drawn on by teacher educators as they teach content to preservice teachers.