Extension personnel, agricultural companies, and contract researchers invest a great deal of resources through time, money, and manpower to educate crop consultants, producers, students, and new employees. Creating an in-field, real world, and hands-on learning environment affords an opportunity to engage individuals to learn in ways that cannot…

In recent years, teacher education has been charged with reforming programs to better align curriculum, clinical practice, and accountability. The sense of urgency for reform has been heightened by competition from alternative routes to teaching that jump straight to practice, often criticized for foregoing essential knowledge and theory. This…

Peace education provides for the development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions appropriate to effective peacebuilding. Therefore, the development of curriculum in degree programs which builds bridges by which students in conflict resolution/peace studies classrooms may cross over to the field of conflict transformation and peacebuilding may…

There have been persistent concerns over teacher pre-service education for decades. The basic model of university or college coursework plus practice teaching has been found wanting. Despite attempts to rectify this, beginning teachers in Australia rate themselves as not being well prepared when they begin full-time teaching. This article examines…

Not every teacher should serve as a mentor teacher (MT), and there are certainly those who are considered excellent teachers who did not find success in that role, often struggling to turn over aspects of classroom instruction to their mentees. With the current testing and accountability regime, some teachers are reluctant to leave their test…

This article focuses on the culture of human interchange, which is included as a component of the implicit curriculum in the current EPAS. It presents the use of the implicit curriculum concept in teacher and medical education as a context for its application to social work education. The authors argue that professional behaviors taught in the…

The Bradley PDS Partnership, about which we report in this article, was established in 1995 to promote academic and professional development for P-12 students, pre-professionals, practitioners, and professors. For twenty years, the partnership has been generously funded by the William T. Kemper Foundation-Commerce Bank, Trustee. In a grant…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development, implementation and outcome of a field-based learning flow-charting project that was conducted in an accounting information systems (AIS) course. The emphasis for the project was strengthening the students' critical thinking skills. This paper advances AIS education by sharing a field-based…

Changing demographics in the U.S. require a focus on educating future teachers on how to engage children and families with diverse backgrounds. Teacher educators have been charged to address teachers' cultural competence and provide pedagogical instruction for working with diverse populations. We bolster this line of inquiry by sharing activities…

The integration of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) serves to develop creative thinking and twenty-first-century skills in the classroom (Maeda 2012). Learning through STEAM promotes novelty, innovation, ingenuity, and task-specific purposefulness to solve real-world problems--all aspects that define creativity. Lisa…

This report studies the best practices necessary to rethink the skills, methods, and pedagogical evolution that teacher education must address. If we are to ensure great teachers are trained, mentored, and retained for our students--the programs themselves must emulate 21st century skills. The examples found in this report have unique elements and…

For the past two decades, scholars have advocated for reforms in teacher education that emphasize relevant connections between theory and practice in university coursework and focus on clinical experiences. This paper is based on our experiences in designing and implementing an integrated literacy methods course in a field-based teacher education…

This article describes an alternative venue clinical experience that provides advanced literacy specialist candidates and preservice teacher candidates at a small liberal arts university context for advancing their roles and understanding of effective teaching. The article situates our conceptual and pedagogical understandings of teaching and…

In this introduction to the special issue on evolving changes in our field, we have intentionally chosen to use the power of a vastly different metaphor to promote deep reflection. Specifically, we will introduce the notion of selection pressures and its impact on an evolutionary process, illustrating how special education teacher education has…

Professional development that scaffolds and supports supervisors is critical for quality field experiences and is our responsibility as teacher educators. The literature supports this statement and two ideas that conceptually frame our work: (1) quality field experiences are a critical component of preservice programs and (2) training and support…