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Journey of “Becoming': Secondary Teacher Candidates’ Concerns and Struggles
In this study, the authors intended to focus on: (1) the development of teachers’ self-perception of their roles; (2) the major concerns of the teacher candidates; and (3) the reasons behind these concerns. The findings revealed that the participants considered their roles as teachers as being both the authority and facilitator in the classroom, and focused on both content delivery and student moral development. The authors claim that it is important for teacher educators to recognize teacher candidates’ struggles between the ideal and the reality of teaching, and their concerns with the ways they present themselves in front of the students.
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Interpretation as Adaptation: Education for Survival in Uncertain Times
This article draws together two strands of recent work in the philosophy of education. One elaborates the implications of a semiotic theory of learning. The other draws upon economic thinking, and has a particular focus on the parameters of human decision-making over time. The article draws on a framework grounded in the commonalities that underpin this convergence, bringing together strands from a number of areas of academic inquiry. The authors argue that curricular practices are for the long term, and have an importance at least equal to, and usually greater than, the environmental priority of the moment.
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A Conceptual Discussion of Lesson Study from a Micro-Political Perspective: Implications for Teacher Development and Pupil Learning
This article focuses on a micro-political discussion related to everyday stakeholder interactions that are endemic to the lesson study process. The authors aim to investigate issues pertaining to power relations that exist between teachers and their students, teachers and their peers, and teachers and external consultants. Their approach is conceptual in nature; simultaneously, we present several detailed examples revealing key issues related to lesson study implementation in Asian countries such as Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The authors have demonstrated that a post-structural theoretical perspective can illuminate the complex nature of lesson study, in relation to key concepts of power, identity, and discourse that need to be reflected upon by practitioners, school leaders, and consultants alike.
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Growing the Profession: What the Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) Offers to Emerging Scholars
This article describes the birth and success of Emerging Scholars program. This is a new program of Association of Teacher Educators (ATE), which designed to help graduate students and those new to teacher education develop a voice in the profession through research and publication. The authors conclude that new avenues of expression, such as the Emerging Scholars sessions at the ATE annual meetings and the publication of this special thematic issue of Action in Teacher Education, are continuing the long tradition of ATE's commitment to the professional development of all teacher educators and the continuous improvement of the teaching profession.
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Opportunities to Develop Adaptive Teaching Expertise during Supervisory Conferences
The purpose of this study was to identify the supervision styles and types of discourse used when addressing or failing to address the three specific problems. The findings suggest that student teachers and supervisors do not use critical discourse to capitalize on opportunities to develop adaptive teaching expertise. The author used three problems - (1) unquestioned familiarity, (2) dual purposes, and (3) context- as a framework to learn how university-based supervisors helped student teachers engage in conversations around these common experience-based problems.
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Crossing Borders by “Walking around” Culture: Three Ethnographic Reflections on Teacher Preparation
In this article, the authors present the idea of “walking around” culture. By “walking around” culture, they mean that teachers need to put feet to pavement and purposefully “walk around” the neighborhoods of their students, similar to ethnographic study. The authors describe how each of them has “walked around” culture ethnographically. As they describe their experiences, they write in their own voice. As they have analyzed their experiences, several common themes have emerged. They have combined these themes into five critical factors, which they have labeled as “key principles”: culture is communication, culture is personal, culture has boundaries, culture is perceived by those who stand outside the culture, and culture is defined by the people in that culture.
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