Teacher Education in the Trump Era and Beyond


Book Description

This book aims to start the conversation about how the consequences of the historic 2016 election can be addressed in the teacher education classroom. Taking as its starting point the Trump administration’s dramatic influence on education, educational policy, the culture in schools, and the safety of children, contributors demonstrate how teacher educators across the United States are adapting their curriculum. The chapters represent a variety of aspects of teacher support and preparation, and address practices such as rejecting xenophobia, developing critical thinking, and responding to children’s emotional lives. The issues addressed in this volume are a continuation of conflicts and challenges with which educators have long grappled, and the contributors’ insights will be valuable under a range of future political circumstances.




Values and Professional Knowledge in Teacher Education


Book Description

Values and Professional Knowledge in Teacher Education provides distinctive insights into potential strengths to develop trainee teachers’ values within school-based training. Looking at the personal moral and political values of trainees as fundamental to strategic and critical professional knowledge, the book considers a key question about training contexts: to what extent is teacher education embedded in the purpose and rationale of the school so that trainees’ values, and consequently their autonomy and identity, can flourish? The book is research focused and offers case studies that offer vicarious experiences which resonate with the professional needs and concerns of teacher educators. The book opens with a reflective narrative on the experience of a teacher educator in England. Further chapters explore international perspectives on values and professional knowledge in teacher education, applied theoretical principles for developing the relationship between trainee teachers’ values and their professional knowledge, the impact of university and school-based training contexts on the development of values-based professional knowledge, and the challenge of a values-based professional knowledge to current teacher education practice. Values and Professional Knowledge in Teacher Education will be of great interest to academics and post-graduate students in the field of education, university and school-based teacher educators, trainee teachers, researchers, policymakers and school leaders.




Agency in Teacher Supervision and Mentoring


Book Description

Offering an in-depth examination of field supervision and the role of the university supervisors in preparing teachers, this book addresses the challenges of providing novice teachers with quality supervision through the support and guidance of teacher education programs. Through a research-based lens, Bates and Burbank discuss the role, responsibilities, and opportunities of the university supervisor. Critically examining the supervisor as an agent of change who is positioned to empower early career teachers, the authors dissect the necessary preparation and support new teachers need in contemporary K-12 classrooms.




Research on Becoming an English Teacher


Book Description

Research on Becoming an English Teacher considers the process of becoming a teacher from a variety of perspectives, where the ambition is to consider how people can change themselves within that process. By pursuing an approach influenced by the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the authors consider practitioner research as an approach to professional and personal development, and how it might be understood as a strategy within both teaching and teacher education. Taking English teaching as the main example, this book explores the processes and discourses that shape the experience of English teaching in schools. Chapters consider the origin and development of English education, practice and theory in English education, the process of becoming a teacher in school-based environments and creating an analytical space for learning narratives in teacher education. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of teacher education, curriculum studies, educational theory and educational psychology.




Teacher Representations in Dramatic Text and Performance


Book Description

This book examines representations of the teacher on stage - in both theatrical performances and dramatic text - in order to demonstrate how these representations have shaped society’s perceptions of educators in and out of the classroom. At the heart of this book is the interaction between theatre and teacher education. By considering how dramatic portrayals reimagine, reinforce and/or undermine our understanding of the teacher’s personal and professional roles, this volume bridges the gap between truth in dramatic literature and truth in the classroom. Chapters critically explore the personas embodied by fictional teachers in well-known works such as Educating Rita, School of Rock and The History Boys and illustrate how educators might use dramatic literature and performance to interrogate entrenched ideas about the student-teacher dynamic. By bringing together a diverse set of contributors from the fields of teacher education and theatre, this book takes a critical look at performance, text, society and culture to promote a new understanding of teaching and learning. This unique book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics and researchers in the fields of teacher education, drama and theatre education.




Professional Development through Mentoring


Book Description

In their book, Othman and Senom provide a unique insight into the challenges faced by novice English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and establish how mentoring can provide effective support for new teachers’ professional development. The book demonstrates the theoretical background for viewing mentoring as a process crucial to novice teachers’ development, particularly to the teachers’ ability to succeed and grow in a specific workplace environment. Using case studies from a Malaysian context, this book provides a comprehensive understanding of how mentoring can serve as a strategy to facilitate the transition of novice ESL teachers from a teacher education programme to life in real classrooms. Through its case studies, the book will examine both theoretical and practical issues for mentors, teacher educators, policymakers, and administrators when mentoring new ESL teachers. This book will be valuable to researchers who are particularly interested in exploring novice teachers’ identity development, and experienced teachers to help guide new teachers through the socialization process in their schools.




Geography Teacher Education and Professionalization


Book Description

This book focuses on how current and prospective teachers worldwide are prepared for the significant task of teaching geography, given the important role of teachers. It eschews a traditional career-centric framework (pre-service, in-service teaching) in favor of a topical approach toward issues that all teachers face. The book updates thinking on geography education subfields such as GI education and fieldwork and traces important contemporary discourses such as digitalization and sustainability. The book further explains the broad variety of institutionalization of geography teacher education in various political systems. In short, this book collects strategies for geography teacher educators worldwide to provide insight into the challenges, conditions, and solutions present at the classroom and institutional level. As such, this book is a must-have for teacher educators and geography teachers worldwide.




Language Teacher Education Beyond Borders


Book Description

This volume looks at the preparation of future critical language teachers in the face of an increasingly multilingual and transcultural contemporary world. This is seen through the lens of the collapse of Nation-State borders that crumble in the face of migration and the intense flow of languages that comes with it. It brings together international research that problematizes, theorizes, re-positions and re-conceptualizes myriad structural, systemic, ideological, political and pedagogical issues that intersect with the possibilities and impossibilities of the development of language teachers' agency. The volume examines the needs of linguistically diverse student populations and considers the socio-cultural and socio-political barriers that interfere with the exercise of teacher agency for social justice in language classrooms. It offers a theoretical and empirical overview of how language teacher education has addressed multilingualism and transculturalism in critical approaches in many complex countries in their diversity and/or postcolonial history, including Brazil, Qazaqstan, Scotland, and Thailand.




Writing Democracy


Book Description

Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era calls on the field of writing studies to take up a necessary agenda of social and economic change in its classrooms, its scholarship, and its communities to challenge the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing nationalism. Grown out of an extended national dialogue among public intellectuals, academic scholars, and writing teachers, collectively known as the Writing Democracy project, the book creates a strategic roadmap for how to reclaim the progressive and political possibilities of our field in response to the "twilight of neoliberalism" (Cox and Nilsen), ascendant right-wing nationalism at home (Trump) and abroad (Le Pen, Golden Dawn, UKIP), and hopeful radical uprisings (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring). As such, the book tracks the emergence of a renewed left wing in rhetoric and activism post-2008, suggests how our work as teachers, scholars, and administrators can bring this new progressive framework into our institutions, and then moves outward to our role in activist campaigns that are reshaping public debate. Part history, part theory, this book will be an essential read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in composition and rhetoric and related fields focused on progressive pedagogy, university-community partnerships, and politics.




Latinx Experiences in U.S. Schools


Book Description

This edited volume brings together voices of Latinx students, teachers, teacher educators, and education allies in Latinx communities to reveal ways in which today’s sociopolitical context has given rise to politically-sanctioned hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric. Contributors—key stakeholders in the education of immigrant Latinx children, youth, and college students—share how this rhetoric has exacerbated existing systemic injustices within K-Higher Education. They draw attention to counternarratives that speak to leadership and strength of community. Contributors include high school and college students and faculty, community organizers, and early career academics, whose voices are too often underrepresented in academic conversations. This book highlights professional and personal acts of courage, community organization, and the transformation of students and educators who are stepping into leadership roles to affect change. Understanding that teaching and learning are political acts, we call all those vested in Latinx communities to engage in small and large acts of agency to collectively impact change in our K-Higher Education systems.