Teaching Priorities as Both Durable and Flexible: Writing Pedagogy Classes Across International Contexts

This article developed from a year-long inquiry into our practices as writing teacher educators. As new university faculty in two different countries, we drew on a previous literature review project to identify enduring priorities for teaching writing pedagogy. We then analyzed our developing practices in these unfamiliar places, specifically noting what also felt flexible enough to work across contexts, leaving space for local adaptation. For each of our classes, we explore how we expressed those priorities: discussing teaching practices as connected with theories and discourses of teaching writing, supporting teacher-student experiences through a cycle of writing, and facilitating appreciative views of student writers. Our findings suggest these complex priorities can be adapted to suit different contexts, and that ongoing analysis across different teacher education spaces can highlight new possibilities for evolving practices

Hope, engaged pedagogy, and educating teachers as transformative intellectuals

In this commentary article, the authors discuss the significance of conceptualising teacher education as critical, intellectual work both for student teachers and the educators who support their professional learning. As former classroom teachers and current researchers and teacher educators, the authors position the current socio-political landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand as concerning for the field of education, but also recognise that in moments of upheaval there are opportunities for hope and change. Rather than allowing shrinking resources to narrow our scope, we believe it is a significant moment to assert a belief that all students in Aotearoa deserve to be taught by engaged, transformative educators

An introduction to the Special Issue: Ngā Timatanga Hou: Fresh perspectives on education

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Unsettling language ideologies: Examples from writing teacher education in New Zealand and the United States

In this study, we use qualitative research methods to explore how discourses about language manifested within two university writing teacher education classes, one in New Zealand and one in the United States. We used a collaborative teaching journal and student work as main sources of data, which were analysed inductively at key points before, during and after the focal classes. Findings showed that in these two geographically and culturally distinct contexts, practices related to “correctness” and “academic” language or writing were similarly hard to displace, even when the underlying ideas were unsettled. Our analysis suggests teachers and teacher educators have similar struggles of balance—to both prepare students to succeed within the world as it is now and to prepare them to push against the systems that maintain inequities