South African teacher education policy expects initial teacher education programmes to introduce integrated and applied knowledge to underpin a teacher's practice in diverse classroom contexts. This paper explores how a one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education responds to this expectation in terms of training prospective teachers to teach…

Background: During their university studies, student teachers are equipped for the teaching profession in various domains of knowledge and practice. In addition to learning pedagogic skills for practice purposes, they also expand their knowledge of the subjects that they will teach. In mathematics teacher education, one important principle is that…

Background: National and international assessments show South Africa's underperformance in mathematics. As many learners already fall behind in the early grades, where foundational number sense should be established, addressing the challenges of number sense in the Foundation Phase (FP) is important. Research recognises the need to better develop…

The ability to use modern technologies, and particularly the integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) into subject teaching, has become one of the fundamental graduate attributes for many teacher education (TE) programmes as they prepare future teachers for the 4th industrial revolution (4IR). Research suggests, however,…

Background: A digital literacies short course, rooted in a pedagogical model of authentic learning and mapped against the TPACK model, was conceptualised and implemented to enhance the existing digital literacies and technological pedagocial content knowledge of student teachers and to promote an awareness of technology-enhanced curriculum…

Some pre-service mathematics teachers in South Africa are nervous about the content of Euclidean geometry because they did not study Euclidean geometry in high school but will be expected to teach same when they start their teaching career. Because of this, graduating pre-service mathematics teachers were enrolled for a six-week intervention…

Recently, the question of which version of content knowledge (CK) is suitable for pre-service teacher (PST) development has gained prominence in teacher education research. A version of CK argued to be appropriate for science PST development has been introduced and referred to as teacher-related science content knowledge (TerSCK). This CK version…

This study, located in a School of Education in South Africa, explores English Education pre-service teachers' perceptions of preparedness to teach grammar and the influences that shape such perceptions. To understand the knowledge gap in English Education pre-service teachers' readiness to teach grammar, the study employed an interpretive…

The study's main aim is to explore the preparedness of a sampled group of South African pre-service teachers at a Higher Education Institution (HEI) to teach adequately in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4iR) classroom. The study employed a case study research design to ascertain the level of preparedness of pre-service teachers (n = 22) to use…

Developing science identity in pre-service science teachers is important as it influences their perceptions about science teaching and learning. Pre-service teachers' science identity can be developed in their specific modules where they obtain content knowledge. Grounded in the notion of pre-service teachers' learning agendas, and identity…

Background: There is a concern in South Africa that pre-service teachers do not have the required knowledge to teach mathematics in primary school and to develop learners' number sense. In this study, pre-service teachers taught the mental strategy of bridging through ten through a structured teaching sequence from the Mental Starters Assessment…

Research suggests that there is not enough integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) into subject teaching by graduate teachers across a variety of school settings. This points in part to the inadequacy of preservice teacher preparation. Hence, this research explores the question of how preservice teachers develop the…

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many traditional contact higher education institutions, such as the institution where the study was based, transitioned abruptly to remote online learning. Students in the School of Education at the institution who are predominantly from the lower end of the socioeconomic digital divide in South Africa had no…

The Primary Teacher Education (PrimTEd) project was established in response to concerns about the pre-service preparation of primary teachers in South Africa. In order to inform the development of appropriate pre-service mathematics courses, an initial need in the PrimTEd project was to establish the nature of the mathematical knowledge of…

Instructional practice plays a significant role in revealing how well teachers understand the subjects they teach. Many studies have been conducted in South Africa on the relationship between teachers' knowledge of well-established subjects like Science and Mathematics and how well teachers apply their knowledge in the classroom. However,…