Integrated Curriculum Approaches to Teaching in Initial Teacher Education for Secondary Schooling: A Systematic Review

Demands that Initial Teacher Education (ITE) prepare teachers who can equip students to be agile real-world problem solvers are frequent. Guidance about ITE integrated curriculum approaches to achieve this aim is harder to find, a significant gap given increasing time and policy pressures for ITE educators. Drawing from an Australian context, this systematic review investigates how integrated curriculum is conceptualised and enacted in secondary schooling ITE courses. Three conceptions of integrated curriculum for ITE are highlighted – Interdisciplinary, Disciplinary Literacy, and Transdisciplinary approaches – alongside benefits and barriers to enacting integrated curriculum. Recommendations for further research and practice around integrated curriculum are proposed

Impact in education : A discourse analysis of interpretations and negotiations across the field

The recasting of accountability in teaching and teacher education as a problem of impact across many countries has seen a proliferation of policies and strategies that datify the work of students and teachers. The enactment of such policies can be interrogated from the perspectives of multiple policy actors to understand the effects of the ‘impact agenda’. We use the conceptual framing of policy enactment along with discourse analysis to investigate the interpretations and negotiations of the impact agenda by twenty teachers, principals, teacher educators, regulators and policymakers from across Australia. Ten discourses were evident across interpretive, material and discursive aspects of policy enactment. Key findings include a real tension between holistic views of impact and reductive views that rely on data analytics, as well as standardisation versus the importance of accounting for the contextual conditions that influence learning and teaching. We argue that educators must be positioned as key policy actors in driving the way impact is understood and measured

Teacher education and teaching for diversity : A call to action

Teachers around the world report a lack of confidence about working with learners who are regarded as ‘diverse’. This paper draws on mixed-methods research to explore knowledge claims that underpin the pedagogical work of teacher educators. Using our theoretical framing of epistemic reflexivity, we show connections between knowledge claims made across the broad literature of teacher education/diversity and those made by teacher educators about their practices and programs. Findings identified challenges with respect to existing practice which point to different ways of knowing about our work. This paper is a call to action for teacher educators to reclaim their accountability for teaching diversity

How epistemic reflexivity enables teacher educators’ teaching for diversity : Exploring a pedagogical framework for critical thinking

Recent research points to the importance of teacher educators teaching for diversity in initial teacher education programmes. Teaching for diversity is an approach to teacher education in which an understanding of specialist literature and a focus on critical thinking supports a social justice agenda as opposed to merely using different tips and tricks to prepare future teachers for teaching diverse learners in the classroom. In this study, we explored how Australian and New Zealand teacher educators negotiated a social justice agenda in teacher education programmes, using a new transdisciplinary framework of epistemic reflexivity. The Epistemic Reflexivity for Teacher Education (ER-TED) framework draws on epistemic cognition (Clark Chinn’s Aims, Ideals, Reliable epistemic processes – AIR – framework) and Margaret Archer’s reflexivity to explore knowledge claims in teacher educators’ pedagogical decision-making. The findings identified how teacher educators in our study discerned and deliberated with respect to epistemic aims for justification, which involve transformative critical thinking and critical thinking for self. They reported good knowledge (ideals) as being scholarly in nature, and reliable epistemic processes based on higher-order thinking (analysis and evaluating competing ideas) or engaging with multiple perspectives. The teacher educators in our study are clear examples of how strong overall evaluative epistemic stances enable teaching for social justice. We argue that the ER-TED framework can help us as a profession to address teaching for diversity in teacher education programmes based on the belief that the pursuit of social justice requires an evaluativist epistemic stance