Section archive - Teacher Educators

This article describes the ways opportunities and constraints in online mathematics teacher education (OMTE) and the authors' view of learning encouraged a deeper consideration of the role of environment in their teaching practice. Central to this discussion are the authors' values and the understandings mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) bring to OMTE and the conflicts between understandings of the online environment and views of learning that undergirded the instructional activities created. This article focuses on the MTEs’ development as teachers in online environments.

In this article, the authors will introduce the notion of selection pressures and its impact on an evolutionary process, illustrating how special education teacher education has changed or evolved. They discuss these changes in the context of the 21st century and contextualize this explanation by representing special education teacher education as an avatar, thereby borrowing from the virtual world. They borrow concepts from natural science and the virtual world to help promote a new understanding of the nature of special education teacher education.

In this article , the authors sought to determine how instructors are actually assessing student participation, or what leads to the decision to grade or not grade students on their classroom participation. The findings suggest that the majority of instructors across disciplines do incorporate a “participation” factor into students’ final course grades. One impetus for the this study was the desire to identify the circumstances in which students are expected to be “active participants” in their undergraduate courses. This was determined by the percentage of instructors who reported including “participation” among the stated requirements on the course syllabus. However, some differences may be observed by discipline. Instructors of Math and Science courses were found to be less likely to grade participation than their colleagues teaching in other disciplines.

The main purpose of this article was to understand the activities, social organisation and material conditions of higher education- based teacher educators. The article also explored the teacher educators’ own accounts of their work. This study shows how, under conditions of academic capitalism, these teacher educators were denied opportunities to accumulate research publications and grants and were proletarianised.