This mini-ethnographic study explored virtual elementary student teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on mathematics instruction. It was framed using Ecological Systems Theory and Critical Pedagogy. Data were collected from interviews, focus groups, observations, and site documents. Thematic analysis methods were used to analyze the…

Based on concerns about the permanence of racism in our society and its impact on opportunities for children's equitable education, this empirical study used narrative inquiry to explore four preservice teachers' developing dispositions as they studied and implemented culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy (CR/RP) in an early literacy education…

Language usage in US K-12 classrooms and beyond continues to be an issue of equity (Navarro Martell, 2021; Palmer et al., 2019). Teachers expect racialized students who appear to be Latinx to know and perform as if their native language is Spanish, mientras a otros se les celebra sus intentos de usar el espan~ol; otro idioma colonizador. Some…

The policies and discourses of the Trump administration reflect such extreme examples of inhumane policies and racializing logic that they are easy to identify and call out. In this essay, I focus instead on the less obvious and more everyday processes of racialization and anti-immigrant sentiment that are taken up by various actors in schools. I…

Teach For America (TFA), a widespread and well-known route into the teaching profession, frequently partners with university-based education programs to prepare and certify its corps members. However, university-based teacher education programs frequently emphasize very different understandings of socially just education and priorities for…

Theory is taught to preservice teachers from the moment they enter the education program until they graduate. While theory serves as the foundation in many teacher preparation courses, these future teachers must also understand the relationship it has to practice. The focus of this article is on the journey of one group of preservice secondary…

Research indicates that preservice teachers' understandings of how to integrate technology into their classrooms are dependent upon experience in their university methods courses and in their field placements. These findings place a new responsibility on teacher educators for modeling effective integration of technology into methods courses. This…

In this article, Denise D. Cunningham presents a project that emerged from informal discussions with early childhood pre-service teachers during their content area methods courses at a large, Midwestern four-year university. Students stated that they needed personal experience with materials and practices that they will be expected to use in…

This article has two aims: (a) to offer a new model for a teacher preparation course that features reflection and teaching as integral, inseparable actions and (b) to provide empirical evidence from an exploratory ethnography to demonstrate teacher development possibilities with this model. The model, termed "Transformative Reflection,"…

In this paper, we present and apply a multi-level method for discourse analysis in science classrooms. This method is based on the structure of human activity (activity, actions, and operations) and it was applied to study a pre-service physics teacher methods course. We argue that such an approach, based on a cultural psychological perspective,…

In this article, we focus on the contributions that a simulated jury-based activity might have for pre-service teachers, especially for their active participation and learning in teacher education. We observed a teacher educator using a series of simulated juries as teaching resources to help pre-service teachers develop their pedagogical…

Connecting with others and experiences of dissonance are two factors identified as central to transformative learning in engaged teaching and research (Kiely, 2005). At the same time, these ways of knowing are unpredictable and come with the risk of actually disrupting rather than enhancing learning. This article reports the findings of a mixed…

As a proposed solution to the issues plaguing urban schools in the United States, Teach for America (TFA) continues to garner national attention and attract an increasingly competitive pool of applicants from the nation's most elite colleges. In fact, TFA has become the nation's largest provider of teachers to low-income communities and…

This paper presents an approach to preservice science teacher education coupling video analysis with dialogue as tools for fostering teachers' ability to notice and reflexively interpret events captured during teaching practicum with the intent of transforming classroom practice. In this approach, video becomes a tool with which teachers connect…

This article explores how preservice elementary teachers change their negative beliefs toward mathematics into positive ones after taking a mathematics methods course that follows the Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract (CPA) instructional method. Also explored is the relationship between those beliefs and sociomathematical authority. By administering…