Preservice Teachers' Beliefs About Family Involvement: Implications for Teacher Education

Connecting Attitudes Toward Teaching and Pedagogical Formation Courses: A Study of Turkish Pre-Service Teachers

“…While examining pre-service teachers' attitudes, researchers tend to analyse their concerns about teaching. In addition to the concerns related to teaching a specific subject (e.g., Campbell & Thompson, 2007;McDonnough & Matkins, 2010), researchers also emphasized the pre-service teachers' concerns about the adequacy of their preparation (Baum & McMurray-Schwarz, 2004) and show how pre-service teachers' attitudes and concerns change as they gain more classroom experience and progress through their preparation program (Lamote & Engels, 2010, Smith et al, 2013). Yet, lesser examined in the current research is the impact of university-offered classes on pre-service teachers' attitudes toward the teaching profession, suggesting the need to further analyse this area in different educational contexts around the world.…”

Preparing for parents: how Australian teacher education is addressing the question of parent-school engagement

“…In the United Kingdom, for example, researchers have noted the significant shift in expectations placed upon graduate teachers, whose understandings of parental involvement are likened to 'a laundry list of things that good parents do for their children's education' (Calabrese Barton, Drake, Perez, St Loius, & George, 2004: 3). Similar issues have been raised in the American context (Baum & McMurray-Schwarz, 2004;Brand, 1996;Epstein 2001;Ferrara & Ferrara 2005). Hargreaves (1999) points out the anxiety experienced by teachers about their relationships with parents, identifying 'the problem of unpreparedness' as a particular issue in accounting for why 'the more pervasive reality is often very different' from the rhetoric and research concerning partnerships.…”

“…However, researchers in the United States, in particular, have provided examples of how such experiences might be gained by pre-service teachers, and have shown that such activities can have significant impacts on pre-service student beliefs and attitudes about parents (Baum & McMurray-Schwarz, 2004;Epstein 2002;HiattMichael 2001). As we discuss in following sections, Australian teacher education programs struggle with the complexities outlined above, with those we interviewed often lamenting the difficulties of making room in a crowded curriculum for a topic that students, and indeed some schools, may see as superfluous to the work of classroom teaching.…”

“…Despite the potential promise of such policy agendas, it is important to recognise that across Anglophone nations, concerns have been raised about whether the policy ideal of parent engagement is realised at the school level (Baum & McMurray-Schwarz, 2004;Bingham & Abernathy, 2007;Epstein, 2001;Lawson, 2003;Nakagawa, 2000).…”

Learning from Families: Pre-Service Teachers’ First Interactions with Parents

“…Many pre-service teachers express concerns about the quality of the teacher-family relationship and the role of parents in education (Baum & McMurray-Schwarz, 2004). The language and cultural barriers that often exist only intensify pre-service teachers' reservations.…”