The Prior Knowledge of Global Education of Pre-Service Teacher Education Students

Abstract

This paper explores how pre-service student teachers, in New South Wales Australia, integrate new global education into their existing disciplinary knowledge frameworks. Student teachers learning to teach secondary history and geography or business studies, or primary student teachers learning to teach society and its environment bring with them existing knowledge schemas based on their undergraduate disciplinary study, prior experiences and skills. It was hypothesised that new global education knowledge will interact with existing knowledge schemas in complex and interrelated ways. The paper reports on surveys of 204 pre-service students on the major understandings, concepts, skills and attitudes of global education. The paper finds that new global knowledge is additive to existing knowledge frameworks in various ways for secondary student teachers and integrative for primary student teachers. The paper explores the community of practice lens of subject discipline prior learning and the role it plays in the way student teachers respond to new subject matter. The paper discusses how disciplinary study integrates global education knowledge and identifies the implications of this for developing teacher education courses and for teacher professional development and learning.

“My classroom is a bigger place”: Examining the Impact of a Professional Development Course on the Global Perspective of Experienced Teachers

“…It furthers this work by considering how awareness and transformative action can be stimulated in teachers. As well, it adds to the work that has been done on teacher change in the specific area of global awareness, an area not readily explored (Ball, 2009;Horsley et al, 2005). Further work will explore how this transformative change within the teacher might lead to an impact on students since we know that by providing focused, relevant professional development experiences for teachers, even with new concepts and in new settings, iterative change can take place (Stein, Smith, & Silver, 1999).…”

“…This research study is also important because it builds on the work that has been done regarding global perspective building in experienced teachers (Mundy & Manion, 2008) and preservice teachers (Horsley et al, 2005;Reimer & Mclean, 2009). It furthers this work by considering how awareness and transformative action can be stimulated in teachers.…”

“…As well, some work has been done in this area regarding the experiences of pre-service teachers (Reimer & McLean, 2009;McLean, Cook, & Crowe, 2008). Further, the differences in global education perspectives between elementary and secondary teachers have been examined (Horsley, Newell, & Stubbs, 2005). In the study which informed this paper, we do not distinguish between elementary and secondary school teachers, nor do we examine how subject specialists such as teachers of mathematics or history conceptualize global education.…”

Global Citizen Preparation: Enhancing Early Childhood Education through Indonesian Local Wisdom

“…Other local wisdom of Cireundeu that has been applied from an early age includes the values and attitudes of global education. The intended global education promotes the values of tolerance and equality, the teaching of the relationship between peace, cultural diversity, human rights and environmental sustainability, along with acceptance and empathy of other cultures [57].…”

Global citizenship training program for teacher candidates

“…When the literature is reviewed, measuring global citizenship level of teacher candidates (Engin and Sarsar, 2015), the qualities and standards of programs training global citizen teachers (Aktaş et al, 2017;Bates, 2008;Calle Díaz, 2017;Myers, 2006;Wang and Hoffman, 2016), knowledge and perspectives of teacher candidates regarding the concept of global citizenship (Horsley et al, 2005) are the topics studied in this area. Although in a limited scope, giving teacher candidates global citizenship training (Estellés and Romero, 2016) is another studied topic.…”