Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

In this article, the author explores the role of the arts in education through the lens of current research in cognitive neuroscience. The article explains that although arts education has largely used multiple intelligences theory to substantiate its presence in classrooms and schools, this relationship has ultimately hindered the field of arts education's understanding of the relationship between the arts, human development, and learning. The author argues that as we strive toward the new theory of whole-mindedness, learners can be freed from their labeling - and so can the arts in education. The arts not only represent a wide spectrum of crafts and domains valued by society in so many ways, but also represent core modalities that align with cognitive constructs in the mind-brain - constructs that are critical to our development as individuals and to a society that has entered a visual revolution.

This article describes a 3-year qualitative study on a English language arts teacher preparation approach that places middle school students at the center and interweaves various technologies into the study of The Outsiders. Using the ever-popular young adult novel, The Outsiders, as a nexus of literature study and an integration of technology and music, the authors created The Outsiders Project. For three years the authors produced, directed, studied, and analyzed The Outsiders Project (TOP) to determine the impact of these experiences on their preservice teachers and to examine what they learned from the middle school students. The findings reveal that the preservice teachers were very surprised to discover that the middle school students really did want to learn. Another lesson the preservice teachers reported they learned about middle school students was that all students can contribute.

The goal of this article is to describe the process that was used to redesign the middle-grades program in a state university. The article describes the guiding framework that led the process, the data collected, how that data was used to make decisions about learning experiences, the politics of the curriculum change, and the process that will be used to evaluate the program changes. The author concludes that the evaluation of the new program reveals that middle-grades program meets all of the standards mandated by the governing organizations while also responding to the needs of current middle schools.

This article asks 'how can sociology of education speak into contemporary educational knowledge and construct vocabularies that re-open dialogue about social justice'? A mobile methodology is used to report on three knowledge spaces that locate sociological practice and frame sociological knowledge. The author argues that global transitions have re-scaled and re-ordered the relation between the sovereign and governmental spatial powers that previously centred education.