Within this issue of "Teacher Education Quarterly," the authors examine the social justice knowledge of teachers, reflective practices, and predictors of performance on the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). This article is a response to those articles and offers continued probes into who should be allowed to teach our…

This testimonio, inspired by Anzaldúa's (2002) seven stages of conocimiento, is written in second person to highlight a series of counterstories aimed at guiding readers through the challenges of facilitating teaching conversations in higher education where deficit assumptions about students' potential are prevalent. Readers will gain insight into…

This article questions some of the premises undergirding the discourse of self-study, particularly focusing on its treatment of 'self'. We examine the ontology, authority and ethics of self as they emerge from Oren's reading of self-study literature in light of his scholarship of and experience in contemplative education. Having focused on…

Inspired by Freire's principle of dialogue, in this article we present a series of dialogues and critical syntheses between a science teacher-researcher with 35 years of experience and an early-career science teacher-researcher. We explore being in-between academic research in science education and high school teaching. Following Anzaldúa's…

Today, members of the various lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities enjoy many of the same rights and privileges as their cis-gender, heterosexual peers. Yet, the lived experiences of many queer-identified teachers in schools remain problematic, uncomfortable, and tension-filled. Given the rise of 'No Promo Homo' laws…

Resisting a deep-seated technical perspective of education, I attend to the notion of attunement as a key concept with which to imagine curriculum as a complicated conversation. As fully appreciating the meaning and potential of attunement requires an embodied sense of the word that is deployed by working from within our bodily, social, and…

This semi-structured interview is an attempt to examine how an experienced scholar (Ian Westbury) of curriculum might interpret both recent developments and the current atmosphere of curriculum by paying attention to the history that has taken it to the present. During a career that spans more than five decades, Ian Westbury has established…

The author has taught writing/communication for five years and consecutively for four. Preceding both periods of teaching were very informative and groundbreaking years as a tutor in two amazing communication centers. To say that these centers had a profound impact on the pedagogy of the author, is an understatement. The author has always strived…

Thomas Farrell is widely known for his views and publications on the topic of Reflective Practice, which is key to the professional development of teachers in 21st century classrooms. He is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Brock University, Canada. Farrell has been a language teacher and teacher educator since 1978 and has worked in Korea,…

In this Thinkpiece, the author, who is a Fulbright Teaching Assistant, examines what it really means to have mutual cultural exchange. She reflects on her experience as an American working in a university in Bucharest. In this paper she describes how some of her assumptions about academic life were challenged, and how being open to these…

As teachers, we are always reflecting on and refining our craft. In this article, the author shares how her understanding and implementation of comprehension strategy instruction has evolved over the past ten years. These shifts include her current thinking about the gradual release of responsibility instructional model, how content and big ideas…

Because higher education brings members of academic communities in direct contact with students, the reflective higher education student is in an excellent position for developing two important intellectual virtues: confidence and humility. However, academic communities differ as to whether their members reach consensus, and their teaching…

The author began his first year teaching at an open-enrollment university with the belief that "most students can learn to do intellectual work, if they are only given the opportunity." This belief is inspired by the research on teaching and learning and is rooted in the characteristic idealism of teachers. He had seen the principle borne out in…

This paper is a summary which explores the effectiveness and evaluation of my development as a reflective practitioner. It focuses on development with two useful theories about learning and teaching. They are about deep learning & surface learning and levels of teaching. Actually, when I put these theories to practice reflectively, the result…

In the pseudo-documentary "The Age of Stupid" (Armstrong 2009), a historian from 2055 scans the remnants of civilization and asks why, in the early twenty-first century, people did not save themselves when they had the chance. The film serves as a motif for issues raised in this article. Why do people continue to believe that education plays an…