Activating Emotional & Analytic Engagement in Blended Learning: A Multicultural Teacher Education Example

The authors share their experience in designing a blended multicultural education course that they hoped would increase the likelihood that the teachers they were educating would take up socially just dispositions. They examined their own learning using a critical friend relationship with a colleague experienced in developing technological responses that honor relational aspects of teacher education within a framework of sociocultural theory

Faculty readiness for online crisis teaching: transitioning to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic

This mixed-methods study was designed to measure and elaborate constructs of faculty online readiness from pre- COVID-19 pandemic literature. Bringing together the validation of a scale to measure these constructs and insights from a focus group, findings suggest that the negative connotations of risk-taking and making mistakes while learning to teach online seem to have been mitigated by a combination of affective factors such as humility, empathy, and even optimism. Teacher educators explained that transitioning online in a context of a crisis contorts normal longitudinal perceptions of preparation and readiness. This new sense of temporality was connected to unexpected benefits of bringing them into partnership with their students. However, quantitative and qualitative results are interpreted to show that assessing students’ equitable access to online learning and managing the demands of scholarship and university-based and academic community service duties are areas in need of attention from professional development designers and policy makers

A critical reconceptualization of faculty readiness for online teaching

Online courses are mainstream throughout higher education. This pattern has been accelerated, temporarily or permanently, due to the coronavirus pandemic (Allen & Seaman, 2016; Arum & Stevens, 2020; Garrison, 2011). Tenure-track and contingent faculty’s willingness to teach online serves students, but little research critiques the forces that produce and constrain faculty’s efforts. Even the most current discussions of faculty readiness lack a strong grounding in criticality. Without such a critical orientation, the power and equity issues involved in the higher education marketplace of online teaching cannot be adequately examined. This critical integrated literature review of 44 studies documents themes of the affective dimensions and identity disruption surrounding faculty’s readiness to teach online and explores their professional vulnerability. Structural and cultural forces that produce and constrain faculty’s experiences transitioning to online teaching emerged from the analysis. This conceptualization of faculty readiness provides a foundation upon which to theorize faculty’s equitable experiences of online teaching

“I Think I’m the Bridge”: Exploring Mentored Undergraduate Research Experiences in Critical Multicultural Education

Although mentored undergraduate research has been shown to deepen student engagement across various disciplines, this type of extended learning opportunity is not a prominent feature of research and practice in teacher education.  Our article addresses this gap by analyzing the experiences and growth of a group of five preservice teachers engaged in a mentored undergraduate research experience in several sections of an introductory critical multicultural education course. Specifically, we examined how pre-service teachers’ personal, academic, and professional engagement with critical multicultural education is impacted when they are positioned as researchers and receive additional training outside the traditional class format.  Our findings indicate that their involvement as student co-researchers fostered a new awareness, sensitivity, and emotional investment in issues of social justice beyond what they gained in their introductory multicultural education course.  Pre-service teachers described navigating personal relationships with new awareness and sensitivity and adjusting future plans in accordance with their deeper understanding and commitment to educational equity.  We argue that mentored research opportunities are an innovative way to address professor/student power differentials in teacher education research and offer a unique model of critical multicultural teacher education that promotes deep engagement with issues beyond the classroom setting