Section archive - Trends in Teacher Education

This article explores the work of teacher education in England and Scotland. It seeks to locate this work within conflicting sociocultural views of professional practice and academic work. Drawing on an activity theory framework that integrates the analysis of these seemingly contradictory discourses with a study of teacher educators’ practical activities, including the material artefacts that mediate the work, the article offers a critical perspective on the social organisation of university-based teacher education.

Since the 1970s, the Chinese political, economic and social sectors have experienced significant transformations, which have caused educational challenges. The quality of education, of the teaching force and of teacher education has become a major concern in educational reform. This article examines the educational reforms conducted in China in the past 40 years. The Chinese Government has conducted a top-down reform of teacher education over the past several decades. This reform has established a relatively stable teacher education system, regulated teacher education programmes and curricula, and provided an opportunity for in-service teachers to be trained and to upgrade their educational credentials.

In this paper, the authors argue that teacher education needs to make a fundamental shift in whose knowledge and expertise counts in the education of new teachers. Using tools afforded by cultural historical activity theory and deliberative democracy theory, they argue that by recasting who is considered an expert, and rethinking how teacher candidates and university faculty cross institutional boundaries to collaborate with communities and schools, teacher education programs can better interrogate their challenges and invent new solutions to prepare the teachers our students need.

New Zealand teacher education has been major changes since 1974: to policy, the locus of programmes, quality control measures, entry standards and governance. Teacher education has been part of revolutionary systemic change to the school and tertiary sectors reflecting underlying assumptions about national direction. In 1974, it was believed that successful teaching experience in schools would fully equip new staff to be teacher educators. In 2014, with the bulk of teacher education carried out in universities, teacher educators are now expected to complete doctorates and take part in the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) quality evaluations. New Zealand teacher educators have found a home in the university sector, albeit one that values theoretical research more highly than investigation and improvement of practice and rates international, rather than local, publication as key.