The stubborn dominance of objectivity in child observation in pre-service early childhood education warrants letting go of as we confront its limitations as outdated, problematic, Eurocentric, neo-liberal and even racist. In the context of recent aims to establish 'critically reflective' practices, such as 'pedagogical documentation' and…

The history of Canadian preservice teacher practicums demonstrates that great effort has been put forth to bridge the perceived divide between university teaching programs and classroom practice. Although innovative theory and practice is often researched at the university, this can fail to transfer for a number of reasons resulting in a…

A quality education for all children and youth is required for the continued advancement of modern civilization. But this outcome is threatened by a growing international teacher shortage. Increased rates of teacher attrition and reduced rates of enrollment in teacher education programs are driving this shortage; however, research suggests that…

This article empirically examines the ways in which Initial Teacher Education in Scotland and Alberta, Canada, seeks to 'get students in', 'get them out and into the workforce', 'get on with teaching future teachers' and how it should 'get on with students'. Using Adams' (2016) policy heuristic, which posits that policy can be discerned in three…

What creative approaches might be harnessed to encourage social critique and action in pre-service Geography teacher education? By reflecting on an assignment in Casey's Introduction to Teaching Geography class where pre-service teachers (including Allen) visually mapped a worker's labour for a day on unceded and unsurrendered Wolastoqiyik…

We give an unconventional, mythopoetic response to the question of Why teach mathematics to all learners in school? In our work with pre-service teachers, we attempt to teach how to value the vulnerability of the multispecies world in a relational, anti-colonial way through passionate immersion, and to use mathematics education towards the ends of…

To create a truly regenerative future, simply reforming teacher education to prioritize Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) will not create the wide-ranging changes in the education system needed to meet the environmental challenges facing humanity. A holistic strategy involving community collaboration with teacher education stands a…

This essay explores the integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into pre-service teacher education amidst contemporary debates on technology in education. It highlights the cautious stance taken by educational authorities, such as the Alberta Teachers' Association, which advises against involving students directly with AI tools.…

Directors of Student Teaching from teacher preparation programs across Canada were surveyed and then interviewed in follow-up focus groups to determine the opportunities and barriers they perceived during processes of placing pre-service teachers with disabilities into practicum settings. These data are interrogated within three theoretical…

Longstanding impressions of children as innocent to human frailty, alongside the emphasis on efficiency and management in schools, play undeniable roles in the way teachers engage with children experiencing death and illness. This paper draws from a larger study of 116 written childhood memories from prospective teachers and practitioners enrolled…

Funded by Thinking Historically for Canada's Future, a research partnership supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this article considers how, and the extent to which, contemporary research within the area of citizenship education for preservice teachers advances the creation of more genuinely democratic and…

In this paper, we, four students with diverse social locations, explore the development of preservice educators' professional identities as political resisters. Through our experiences in an Ontario college, we found commonality in our emerging need to resist "alarming discourses" (Whitty et al., 2020, p. 8). By dissecting and analyzing…

The Preservice "Teacher Education Reciprocal Learning Programme" has been developed on a vision of bridging the East and West dichotomy by harmonising Eastern learning with Western knowledge. This programme is one of the two foundations for Xu and Connelly's 7-year Canada-China Reciprocal Learning Partnership in teacher education and…

As a Black feminist scholar who teaches in an early childhood studies program, the author has witnessed how dominant theories and methods used for pre-service early childhood education and care disconnect students from their lived experiences. The detachment of social location in theoretical text, and particularly in developmental discourse, is…

This article engages in an autoethnographic analysis to offer an argument for the importance of bringing mad studies to pre-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs. Through both analysing reflections on two "maddening moments" during pre-service teaching as a mad-identified pre-service ECEC educator and discussing…