This article reports the outcomes of research on student teachers' situational engagement during their third-year teaching practice in university-affiliated teaching schools (teacher training schools) at the universities of Helsinki, Finland and Johannesburg, South Africa. We have explored situations that possibly engage the student teachers…

Recent research and reform efforts in science education have consistently stressed the importance of coherent science instruction, in which learning opportunities are connected and contextualized by meaningful phenomena, focus on a small set of core ideas over time, and generate a need-to-know about new ideas through a set of connected lessons.…

In this study, we examined student teachers' learning during their teaching placement period in Finland and South Africa. The setting of the inquiry in both countries was a 'teaching' school, affiliated to a university teacher education programme. The teaching school is also referred to as an educational innovation that was transferred from the…

In inquiry-based science education, there have been gradual shifts in research interests: the nature of scientific method, the debates on the effects of inquiry learning, and, recently, inquiry teaching. However, many in-service programs for inquiry teaching have reported inconsistent results due to the static view of classroom inquiries and due…