Teacher Education for World English Speaking Pre-service Teachers: Making Transnational Knowledge Exchange for Mutual Learning

This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 26, Issue 6,
Author(s): Michael Singh and Jinghe Han, “Teacher Education for World English Speaking Pre-service Teachers: Making Transnational Knowledge Exchange for Mutual Learning“, Pages 1300-1308, Copyright Elsevier (August 2010).

Pre-service teachers are taught that the funds of knowledge their students bring to school provide intellectual resources to be engaged through productive pedagogies. Teacher education may assist and/or hinder World English Speaking (WES) pre-service teachers in gaining access to the teaching profession by doing likewise.

This article presents an interpretative case study. The case study explores possibilities for teacher education programs to make transnational knowledge connections through WES
pre-service teachers.

Evidence from interviews with WES pre-service teachers and their Anglophone teacher educators are analysed to elaborate issues confronting teacher education programs involving World English Speakers.

The findings indicate that teamwork which is constructed to privilege the knowledge of Anglophone pre-service teachers over their WES peers is questionable.
Further, WES pre-service teachers are not only structurally disadvantaged by teamwork practices that privilege local knowledge, they are also challenged by teacher educators’ assessment procedures.

The pressures created on teacher educators’ workloads, may lead to ‘lean and mean’ assessment procedures which serve to contain excessive demands on their labour, but do not necessarily resolve the dilemma of how to use assessment practices that minimise WES pre-service teachers’ learning.