Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

The article proposes an approach to teacher development that situates learning in its context of development, with attention to what is learned, what tools are appropriated, and how teaching and learning are mediated in practice. The authors present the social design experiment which are cultural historical formations designed to promote transformative learning for adults and children, as a tool for imagining and designing robust learning ecologies. The authors illustrate how cultural historical concepts of learning and development and situated practice become the means for university students to gain distance and reflect on the beliefs and practices that have informed their understandings of teaching.

In this article, the author challenges the notion that boldness is an inherently good thing. The author argues against the pursuit of boldness per se. In fact, the author argues that bold ideas are part of our problem, for by definition they are unrealistic. Ultimately, bold ideas fail because they don’t take real circumstances into account. The author examines four versions of the concept of boldness and show why each ultimately offers false hope.

In this article, the author argues for a reconsideration of the teachers college tradition within teacher ed curriculum. The author’s thesis is that we must return to the teachers college tradition if we expect to flourish as a real profession and contribute to the civic health of our nation. The author will make three points to explain the teachers college tradition. 1) We need a different and better understanding of our past. 2) The future of the teaching profession depends on our repairing our moral foundations. 3) The author wants to demonstrate how the revival of the teaching profession depends on the individual acts we take on our home campuses and within our local communities.

Currently the press to make policy and practice decisions on the basis of evidence is being coupled with recognition that real change requires shifts in organizational culture. In this article, the authors problematize the notion of a “culture of evidence” in teacher education. Then the article identifies four key aspects involved in efforts to create a culture of evidence at one institution over a five-year period. The authors suggest that building cultures of evidence has the potential to be transformative in teacher education, but only if challenges related to sustainability, complexity, and balance are addressed.