This article examines how the crisis of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) became a crucible, or a means of transformation, for global educators. How teachers leverage their lived experience of teaching through the implications of COVID-19 to transform identity and practice is a new phenomenon and merits examination. Through a collection of…

Policy documents relating to teacher education in Ireland and Norway from 2008 to 2016, representing periods of change in teacher education in both jurisdictions, were analysed to explore the discursive construction of reflective practice. Employing a discourse analysis, the study found that, while reflective practice was seen as important in both…

The purpose of this paper was to examine Irish Physical Education teachers' views on curriculum change at the beginning of its implementation stage, with a particular focus on revision to the Physical Education curriculum and the new Wellbeing programme. In the light of these revisions, teachers were asked to make considerable changes to their…

Current international policy documents on teacher education are peppered with the word partnership and there seems to be an assumption that there is a common agreement regarding understandings of 'partnership'. Traditionally the university has been the decisive voice in educational partnerships which has often led to a power differential as well…

The needs of a globalized economy are rapidly changing what is legitimated as school knowledge and values, and calling up new understandings of teachers' role in stimulating democratic spaces. We have termed this "Teachers' Democratic Assignment." We examine changing notions of teachers' democratic assignment in Ireland and Sweden using…

Although primary teachers in the Republic of Ireland are generalist teachers, language teaching of both Irish and English, as well as the development of literacy skills across the curriculum is an integral part of their daily professional practice. This paper presents an analysis of the European Portfolio for Student Teachers of Languages (EPOSTL)…

This paper reviews the work of four early radical educators: the cultural nationalist Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Asia's first Nobel Laureate; Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Cambridge mathematician and philosopher; the Irish educationalist and insurgent Patrick Pearse (1879-1916) and Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1975), co-founder of Dartington Hall…

Teachers play a crucial role in promoting more equitable educational outcomes for marginalized students from low socio-economic backgrounds. Correspondingly, there is a clear warrant for preservice teacher education to work toward the development of teachers who are socially just in their beliefs and practices. This article comprises a systematic…

Although teacher education has undergone radical reforms in many jurisdictions, who teacher educators are, their lives, and their work, continue to be a somewhat underexplored area internationally, while remaining a "secret garden" in the Irish context. In order to address this lacuna in Irish research, this paper adopts a life history,…

A student-centred approach to learning encourages students to have more responsibility for their learning and is a process that relies heavily on professional confidence to "let-go" of traditional teaching responsibilities. This paper describes the introduction of a student-centred approach within one further education college in…

Does teacher professional development make a difference? How do we know? While researchers and policy-makers acknowledge that teacher professional development (PD) needs to be assessed and evaluated, there is often little clarity as to how this can be achieved. Evaluation of teacher PD by schools has been described as the weak link in the PD chain…

This article offers an analysis of the rhetoric of education policy text during the timeframe from 2000 to 2012 in the Republic of Ireland. The study was framed within two different discourses of the role of the teacher: one discourse regards the teacher as a professional within a dynamic system of democratic relations (Anyon, 2011; Apple, 2012;…

The primary aim of this article is to identify and interrogate the lay theories of contemporary student teachers and to indicate and illustrate the manner in which these "theories" manifest both continuity and change when contrasted with teaching archetypes and previously articulated lay theories of student teachers in the setting. It is…