Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

This article focuses on the relationship between higher education, employability of graduates and students’ satisfaction with their studies. The article draws on European statistics, as well as on data collected at national and/or institutional level in Portugal and Sweden. Employability has been understood as a measure of higher education quality and one of the issues at stake within the Bologna process. The authors discuss if ‘Bologna’ makes a difference regarding graduate employability and students’ satisfaction with their studies, and how the differences between the countries can be understood.

Europeans have tried for decades to find a way to take a mutual stance on issues of higher education and its development. In terms of taking on the challenge of such a mutual commitment with respect to higher education, the Bologna process is a giant step for the European Union. The purpose of this article is to explore both mainstream and more tangential issues in order to cast a more critical spotlight on the outcomes of the Bologna process and its construction(s).

Using the narrative inquiry research method, this self-study of the author’s teacher education practices examines the influence of four simultaneous accountability reviews on her personal experiences and identity within academia. Drawing on evidence excerpted from journal entries, work samples, historical documents and meeting notes, the author reconstructs a series of changes concerning human subjects reviews, course syllabi requirements, student assignments, grading procedures and personal productivity. The self inquiry reveals individual and institutional compromises that were made to achieve acceptable measures of success as determined by external agencies.

This study examined the relationship between learning style, level of resistance to change, and teacher retention in schools implementing an intensive schoolwide technology and media integration model. The participants were 237 elementary and middle school teachers from 11 low-income schools in North Carolina. Researchers found that teachers with sensing-thinking and sensing-feeling learning style preferences had higher levels of resistance to change. Teachers with the ST learning style were also three times more likely to leave their schools, compared to teachers with other learning style preferences.