Abstract: This Winter 2013 issue of Teacher Education Quarterly draws attention to a very broad and important topic in teacher education: What pre-service teachers and practicing teachers know and develop about pedagogy in general, as well as content pedagogy in diverse classroom contexts. Over the past 25 years, scholars of teaching and teacher education have sought to deepen understandings about the range of teacher knowledge needed to ensure optimal cross-disciplinary and within-disciplinary learning. Much of the early work in teacher knowledge focused on merging teaching content with theoretical ideas about teaching and learning. In recent decades, the research base has sought to include to curriculum and student knowledge, all mainly from a learning perspective that only indirectly accounts for the local practices and prior knowledge of teachers and students. This issue of the journal focuses on some of what beginning teachers need to know and develop not only to teach the various academic disciplines using pedagogically sound principles, but also to do so in ways that lead to student learning, especially for linguistically diverse learners. Theoretical foundations of teaching and learning range from constructive theory, including Vygotkian social learning theory, to information processing that pays attention to ways that learners process, organize, and access information gained through visual, oral, and textual sources. These theoretical foundations provide pre-service and practicing teachers with sophisticated explanations for how and why students in their classroom learn to talk, write, and enact the practices that are valued and reinforced academically and socially in schools. The reality is, however, that students who enroll in teacher education programs, as well as teachers who graduate from them, also bring in their own social and personal understandings of how children learn, and how to teach them the learning standards across the disciplines and grade levels. These prior understandings may be misinformed and are informed by the kinds of experiences pre-service and practicing teachers have had throughout their K-12 classroom experiences, as learners themselves. That is, students entering credential programs bring with them, along with their disciplinary knowledge, a host of other understandings based on how they were schooled and the kinds of experiences they have had with students from other language, socioeconomic, and ethnic groups. These personal understandings contribute in no small way to students' identity formation as teachers. Accordingly, in addition to preparing teachers to teach students academic content in ways that enable them to learn that content well, teacher educators must endeavor to develop students' identities as teachers with pedagogical content knowledge as well as knowledge and practices about and in support of the students they teach. A focus on teacher identity and teacher knowledge that includes teaching content as process, socially just teaching, and understanding diverse learners is at the core of the articles in this issue of the journal. Cinthia Salinas and Brook Blevins explore the use of intellectual biographies with pre-service social studies teachers as a way to promote teacher identities that challenge the power structures and institutional barriers to democratic participation. They report on pre-service teachers' intellectual biographies as a means to examine experiential, official, and subjugated knowledge, with an eye toward unmasking the their own experiences with each of these knowledge sources. Their work points to the power of reflective writing and teaching for understanding and promoting counter-narratives to the dominant discourse often presented in social studies curricula. Sharon Vegh Williams presents an autobiographical case study of a non-native teacher who gains knowledge and practices that incorporate Mohawk students' cultural, social and language backgrounds into teaching and the curriculum. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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