This paper attempts to answer a key question in teacher education: what does it mean to be a literacy teacher in K-12 schools in challenging times? The question emerges from a series of dialogues between student teachers and the instructor in a graduate course in education to prepare pre-service teachers to support students in elementary schools…

Managing the young learners at the elementary school level is not an easy task. Learners of the age five and above are very active in nature, show interest in playing and mingle with their peer group. At times they may not show interest in learning and may hate learning activities. Similarly, the teachers at elementary level may have practical…

This study critically addresses mentor and mentee understandings of mentoring primary education student teachers within existing operations of power in the context of Scottish Initial Teacher Education. Semi-structured interviews of mentors and student teachers were used to elicit relational understandings of the mentoring process within an…

The importance of sustainable education is increasingly being seen over the last decade. One way is by offering social entrepreneurship education (SEE): education that addresses engagement (empathy, compassion and care) and entrepreneurship. In a Dutch institute for primary teacher education, a pilot study was undertaken on SEE. Student teachers…

In 2014, the Ministry of Education in New Zealand funded innovative initial teacher education programmes using school/university partnerships to improve achievement for priority learners. My 'being' as a teacher educator would need to become a member of a professional learning community with student teachers and teachers in schools rather than…

Despite a drive towards more learning outside the classroom, teachers' confidence to teach outdoors has been identified as a barrier to regular and positive outdoor experiences. Initial Teacher Education (ITE) has been seen as one of the ways to increase teachers' confidence, yet such provision is variable and has not been studied extensively. In…

Growing evidence suggests that preservice candidates receive better coaching and are more instructionally effective when they are mentored by more instructionally effective cooperating teachers (CTs). Yet teacher education program leaders indicate it can be difficult to recruit instructionally effective teachers to serve as CTs, in part because…

This nonexperimental, exploratory, mixed-design study used questionnaires with 167 preservice secondary teachers to identify prior educational experiences associated with student-teachers' inquiry understanding. Understanding was determined through content analysis then open coding of definitions of inquiry and descriptions of best-experienced…

In a comparative study of student teachers in Finland and South Africa, the researchers aimed to capture students' views of how and what they had learned from practice in two university-affiliated primary schools. With data from survey questionnaires, we found that students in the two customized programmes accentuated different domains of teacher…

This article analyses how themes and problematisations concerning social justice presented in a pre-service English language teacher education programme in São Paulo, Brazil, resonate in student teachers' knowledge production processes. To do so, the case study is presented in two parts. The first one examines the theoretical foundations and the…

As in many other countries, Finnish primary school teacher education has reduced substantially the amount of music studies during recent decades. From the perspective of the National Core Curriculum, there is a reason to reflect on teacher education and primary school student teachers' skills to teach music. The present study investigates 392…

This study investigated how mainstream preservice teachers in educator preparation programs (EPPs) in the State of Indiana feel they are ready to meet the growing EL population's needs. Further, the study investigated how EPP faculty perceive the readiness to educate ELs of the mainstream preservice teachers they prepare. Additionally, this study…

This study explores how public-school teachers who host student teachers in urban, grade 7-12 classrooms (referred to as cooperating teachers or classroom mentors in this study) define their role in preparing pre-service teachers. This study is particularly interested in yielding insight into how participants describe the "practice" of…

This paper explores how the use of digital practice spaces (DPSs) can inform teacher preparation through a reimagining of clinical practice in teacher preparation by addressing the question: what roles might DPSs play in the ecology of apprenticeship opportunities for future educators? We leveraged AACTE's "Essential Proclamations and Tenets…

This study aims to find out how student teachers' meaning-oriented reflection can be enhanced with the help of video in a primary school teacher education programme. The study shows how student teachers (n = 10) and their supervisors (n = 9) followed the video-enhanced reflection procedure during one practicum period. The data were collected…