As teacher educators, we continually ask ourselves how to most effectively prepare our teacher candidates with the professional knowledge and critical consciousness to engage in meaningful work with learners who are marginalized by structures of schooling and turbulent mainstream politics. In this article, we discuss our critically conscious…

Mainstream westernised educational policy and practice continue to be firmly rooted in ontological and epistemological traditions that reflect what Gregory Bateson referred to as the illusion of our separation from the living world. In response, there has been a flourishing of innovation at the levels of educational philosophy, curriculum, and…

This article uses an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the reflections and insights that occurred during my teaching of a subject in adolescent development on the Thai Burma border. This paper adopts a relatively descriptive style to a personal reflection of teaching on the border and how it transformed the way I teach and made me look at the…

Flexible pedagogies [Ryan and Tilbury 2013. "Flexible Pedagogies: New Pedagogical Ideas." York: Higher Education Academy] place learner empowerment at the centre of curriculum development. Learner empowerment requires students to feel that they belong and are active in the learning process. This paper illuminates how, through the…

The purpose of this article is to explore how pedagogical visions inform our work as former classroom teachers and current teacher educators in rural and urban regions of the United States. Specifically, we explore the instructional decisions we make as we work to meet these visions in higher education. Teacher educators are charged with the task…

This article presents a critical reflection on how we, instructors of a graduate-level course in higher education administration, sought to integrate theoretical and subject-matter content and research methodology. Our reflection, guided by autoethnography and teacher reflection, challenged both our assumptions about curriculum design and our…

"Bildung" is a complex educational concept that emerged in Germany in the mid eighteenth century. Especially in Germany and Scandinavia conceptions of "Bildung" became the general philosophical framework to guide both formal and informal education. "Bildung" concerns the whole range of education from setting…

The main objective of this article is to explore the relationship between internationalisation, creativity and transformation in the context of higher education. It is argued in academic theory that the process of internationalisation in higher education has two pillars: transformational learning and creative development, and that creativity is an…

This paper examines the role of critical mini-ethnographies as pedagogical tool in teacher education classrooms for transforming educators' narratives about immigrant and refugee communities. The process and the product of assigning critical mini-ethnographies in a graduate, teacher education course designed to help mainstream educators address…

This article advocates a radicalized theoretical construction of community service learning. To accomplish this radicalization, I initially take up a discussion of traditional understandings of CSL rooted in pragmatic/progressive thought. I then suggest that this traditional structural foundation can be radicalized by incorporating Deborah…

The field of science education has struggled to create robust, meaningful forms of education that effectively engage students from historically non-dominant communities and women. This paper argues that a primary issue underlying this on-going struggle pivots on constructions of nature-culture relations. We take up structuration theory (Giddens,…

An increasing challenge for teaching methods courses in the social sciences is the 'critical turn', which has encouraged some students to adopt an anti-empirical orientation. We present a case study of a compulsory undergraduate methods course in a political science department strongly influenced by post-structuralist philosophies. The first…

In this article, the authors consider how to use poetry to develop empathy for asylum seekers among their students in Malta, where asylum seeking is a present and divisive issue.

In this article, we describe our collaborative work with the Moçambique Ministry of Education in reimagining primary literacy teacher preparation through an initiative that promotes closer personal (literacy focused) relationships between preservice teachers (formandos) and primary-aged students during the formando's preparation program. Our work…

This article draws on and contributes to the body of knowledge on the development of cultural competence and study abroad experiences. The study program has been well established for several years and blends a 12-day intercultural immersion experience with preparatory classroom teaching and relevant assessment. This study builds on an earlier…