Teachers consistently identify working with “diverse learners” as challenging. This raises questions about how teacher educators conceptualize and enact preparation of teachers for heterogeneous populations. This article provides a systematic review of literature relating to both “teacher education” and “diverse learners,” to identify knowledge claims regarding the way this “problem” and possible “solutions” should be framed. Analyzing 209 peer-reviewed journal articles (2009–2019), the article identifies groups most frequently described as diverse, three qualitatively different clusters of claims regarding how teachers can be prepared for diversity, and factors identified as constraining preparation. Analysis reveals a literature broad in focus—referencing many groups—but shallow in depth. The majority describe strategies for teaching about or catering to diversity with only few considering teaching for diversity. There is also limited engagement with specialist literature relating to concepts such as gender or race and little attention to teacher educators’ own knowledge. The article concludes with implications for teacher educators, arguing for enhanced critical epistemic reflexivity.
Teachers' beliefs about what it is (or is not) possible to achieve with digital games in educational contexts will inevitably influence the decisions that they make about how, when, and for what specific purposes they will bring these games into their classrooms. They play a crucial role in both shaping and responding to the complex contextual factors which influence how games are understood and experienced in educational settings. Throughout this article the authors draw upon data collected for a large-scale, mixed-methods research project focusing on literacy, learning and teaching with digital games in Australian classrooms, to focus explicitly on the attitudes, understandings and expectations held about digital games by diverse teachers at the beginning of the project. They seek to identify the beliefs about games that motivated teachers' participation in a digital games research project while focusing, as well, on concerns that teachers express about risks or limitations of such a project. The authors' aim is to develop a detailed picture of the mindsets that teachers bring to games-based learning environments, and the relevance of these mindsets to broader debates about the relationship between games, learning and school.
Studying the effectiveness of teacher education Report Principals and new teachers in Victoria and Queensland are invited to participate in a longitudinal study designed to investigate teacher preparation and induction. The project, known as Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education (SETE), is focusing on how well new teachers feel prepared for the variety of school settings in which they are employed, and also analyses graduate employment destinations, pathways into the profession and teacher attrition and retention. The SETE project is the first of its kind in Australia in terms of breadth and scope, involving up to 15,000 early career teachers and 1,600 principals. Its results will inform policies and practices for effective pre-service teacher education and induction into the profession. SETE emerged from, and is supported by, a strong partnership between Deakin University, the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD), the Queensland Department of Education and Training (QDET), the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT), the Queensland College of Teachers (QCT) and Griffith University. It has received funding from the Australian Research Council.
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