Limited studies illustrate the significance of a transformative perspective on pre-service teachers' assessment practices during their study in higher education institutions (HEIs). As such, the need to prepare pre-service teachers for the transformative realities of the workplace has been widely acknowledged as a crucial element of contemporary…

Principal preparation programs use various components to develop candidates, including coursework, core assessments, and field-based internships or practicums. The internship represents an exceptionally high leverage learning opportunity (Lochmiller, 2014). The success of the internship depends highly on the abilities of a mentor via informal…

Becoming a teacher involves more than the acquisition of a new set of skills and knowledge. It involves a change in one's identity, and this change is often precipitated by tensions experienced during a teaching practicum (Mezirow, 2000). This multiple case study explores the points of tension experienced by 18 student teachers during practicum in…

A balanced interrelation between theory and practice is still often missing out in many (language) teacher education programs (Esteve, 2018; Lantolf & Esteve, 2019). Hence the need to critically analyze teacher educators' professional practice and rethink it. This paper presents a deep reflection upon the difficulties and the possibilities of…

Reflective teaching practice has long been seen as the cornerstone of early professional growth among pre-service teachers. This article reports on pre-service teachers' reflective practice during a teaching practicum in which pre-service teachers engaged in peer observation, self-reflection, and student teacher-mentor teacher conferencing.…

This paper reports on a study that investigated Australian pre-service teachers' (PSTs) experiences in mobility programs undertaken in Santiago, Chile. Through the methodological lens of sense-making, our analysis aims to further current understandings of international teaching practicums and to examine how discursively (re)produced binary…

This paper examines Chinese (n = 11) and Spanish (n = 11) student teachers' learning-to-teach experiences during the teaching practicum or placement period through the lenses of transformative learning theory and third space construct. We traced student teachers' transformative learning experiences through observation, interviews, reflective…

Metaphors are powerful windows to gain insight into EFL teachers' professional identity constructions. This study examined 33 Chinese EFL student teachers' (STs) self-generated metaphors about teaching before and after their student teaching. Before their teaching practicum experience, they were: (a) optimistic, but had naïve perceptions about…

Changing initial teacher education and lifelong learning experiences has become a real challenge for education as we strive to cultivate 21st-century skills in our students to ready them to become new cosmopolitan learners and knowledge professionals. The concepts inherent to transformative education and reflexive pedagogies, even though they are…

Despite a surge of research interest in pre-service teachers' identities over the past years, scant attention has been paid to the "process" of their identity construction during their teaching practicum. Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study seeks to fill this gap by examining the identity construction experiences of…

The present study investigates the nature of Iranian student teachers' reflections and their professional development in the context of teacher education practicums. The participants were student teachers (N = 41) enrolled in teacher education colleges at Farhangian University in Tehran, Iran. A total of 620 reflective writing excerpts were coded…

The spread of COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in schools' closing. Egyptian prospective teachers did not have enough time to continue the actual teaching practicum in schools as a prerequisite of their preparation program. The current study aims to explore the effectiveness of online transformational learning in developing EFL prospective teachers'…

This paper examines a cohort of Chinese preservice teachers' (PSTs') (n = 13) international teaching practicums (ITPs) experiences in Canada from the perspectives of complexity theory and boundary-crossing. Through semi-structured interviews and reflective journals, we positioned PSTs' ITPs within multiple layers, including biographies, the…

There has recently been much criticism, at government level, of the role of universities on the training of teachers in the UK. This paper investigates the effects of an initial teacher education programme (ITE) at a higher education institution (HEI) on trainee modern foreign language teachers. Seven modern foreign language trainees teachers were…

This paper examines how Chinese (n = 11) and Spanish (n = 11) preservice teachers reflect on their learning-to-teach experiences during the teaching practicum period through the lenses of transformative learning theory and third space conceptualisation. Specifically, the authors adopted the five-stage transformative learning model and collected…