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Towards diversity-responsive teacher educators: reflections of a professional development initiative
The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged us to rethink about the long-lasting implications for teacher education and how the traditional approaches to educate teacher candidates have evolved. This unexpected scenario has become a living laboratory for teacher educators who have had to transfer to solely relying...
As a teacher educator of 13 years of experience, I have learned a great deal since Covid-19 took its grip on the UK in March 2020, with the pandemic providing me with time to reflect on and review my previous and current practice (Bain et al 2002).The personal and professional became inextricably intertwined, prompting me to engage with my practice in more depth. I am a teacher educator, a parent, an assessor, and a former school teacher. These roles once separate, have become interwoven, leading me to look at my engagement in the teacher educator landscape through a different lens.
The current Covid-19 pandemic has, and will continue to, significantly influence the way in which teaching and learning are experienced in schools (Kaur, 2020). As some governments begin to consider plans and protocols for a safe return to schools, as a physical education teacher and physical education teacher educator respectively, we raise the concern that physical education...
It has been a decade since the highly influential report Teaching Scotland’s Future, also known as the Donaldson Report, was published. This document set out a blueprint for developing teacher education in Scotland. I know this report well, because I read it cover to cover, in preparation for my current job in Teacher Education. The interview presentation asked me to consider the recommendation: “All teachers should see themselves as teacher educators...”
On March 12th, 2020, the HEIs closed. As work moved from our educational institutions, complete with offices, corridors, lecture theatres, tutorial rooms and staff rooms, to our homes, we also moved from the physical world to the virtual world of work. In designing these new...
Our identities have changed somewhat as a result of the many changes to our professional routines, norms and practices coupled with changes and adjustments in our personal routines. Our omni-presence at home means we ‘wear many...
As a teacher educator and Assistant Dean Research I believe it is incumbent on me to examine, suggest and explore initiatives amongst teacher educator colleagues in helping in identifying and initiating how best to consider ‘spaces’ where teacher education colleagues can harness...
Mentoring is acknowledged as a means to support professional development for teachers. However, mentoring has multiple meanings and may be practiced as supervision, support or collaborative self-development for new as well as experienced teachers. As researchers we were curious to find out what expectations newly qualified teachers, their mentors and their school-leaders have to mentoring and professional development and thereby to identify what kind of mentoring is needed...
It’s April 2020 and I’m writing this at home in lockdown during the Covid 19 pandemic. In these terrible times, one of my ways of maintaining a semblance of ‘normal life’ is to take refuge in my research, an enjoyable and – usually - productive process for me. But this was not always so. In my early years as a teacher educator, I struggled to research and write. A brief autobiography will explain why.I entered teacher education, straight from school teaching...