Section archive - Theories & Approaches

In this article, the author describes his experiences as a suburban high school humanities teacher struggling to engage students with issues of social justice. The author is influenced by Freiré (1974/1998), who encourages socially conscious educators to place issues of social injustice at the center of pedagogy. However, the author works as an educator in a school primarily serving affluent white students. He finds that his students resist this multiculturally based social justice approach to humanities education. In this article, the author has described how he changed his selection of texts in response to student needs.

In this study, the authors examined three typologies of teachers about motivations and beliefs. The participants were prospective teachers enrolled in a teacher education program in the U.S. The authors utilized cluster analysis to identify typologies of the prospective teachers based upon their self-report motivations for teaching.

The alignment of the teacher quality provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the transparency of low achievement of students who have disabilities under the testing mandates of NCLB have converged to create substantial renewed interest and activity in collaborative programs of teacher education. The goal of this article is to provide a conceptual framework to simultaneously make sense of and problematize the landscape of collaborative teacher education, based on a classification system of program models.

This study aimed to explore how a professional development cohort functions as a resource for new teacher support. The authors analyzed the data by using Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice social learning framework. The authors analyzed observation field notes of a single cohort which documented by the second author during one school year. The findings reveal three key insights for relating Wenger’s theory particularly to new and alternatively certified teachers in urban group induction experiences.