Teacher Education

This article explores some emerging issues surrounding two teacher education courses in different parts of the world which share a similar purpose: preparing student teachers to become secondary school teachers of English. In one context the English language is the first language, in the other, the second. However, the distinction is not so neat when learner differences in levels of proficiency are factored in, and is even less neat with the influx in both contexts of immigrant students who are new to learning English. How are teacher educators and student teachers responding to this changing scenario while simultaneously acclimatizing to new national curricula, both placing an emphasis on developing students’ writing skills? The article refers to this one aspect of teacher education course - the teaching of writing skills to secondary school students - and compares the curricular implications in terms of how the PGCE teacher education courses respond.

This paper presents the story of John, a mathematics teacher, who embraced ‘change’ at a rather advanced stage of his teaching career. As part of this development, he managed to transform his largely traditional practices to practices that advance inquiry-based learning, a pedagogical approach that is aligned to the reform visions for mathematics teaching and learning. Moreover, John is now also committed to promote this ‘new’ approach among other mathematics teachers. Drawing on narrative research, his case was studied to shed insights on what facilitates or hinders teacher learning and change. The narrative was co-constructed between John and the author in the form of a ‘conversation’ that originated from a number of Messenger chats on Facebook. The thematic analysis of the data revealed four distinct phases, so far, in John’s journey towards becoming a teacher. The journey through these phases is of particular interest to anyone concerned about the impact that different teacher education initiatives have on teacher learning and change. Overall, John’s story suggests that teacher change, while possibly not linear and enduring, can happen and appears to be facilitated by certain factors. These include willingness and capacity on teacher’s part to change, the availability of opportunity to change, the development of a professional learning community, and the presence of someone at school who is capable and willing to lead and support teacher learning among colleagues.

This paper introduces learning spaces in two multilingual countries, Switzerland and Malta, with the aim to interpret space in terms of social practices related to teaching and learning. The visual study draws on schoolscape studies and the conceptualization of space in education. The comparative analysis of 913 photographs collected from two schools aims to bring to light the similarities and differences in the respective learning spaces. A comparative approach is taken in order to explore the strange in the familiar context and to prompt reflections about learning spaces. Further, based on the result of the visual study, this article discusses how schoolscape studies may prove to be a potentially useful pedagogical tool in teacher education.