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…

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…

A defining feature of honors education is meaningful engagement within and across disciplines, yet significant challenges for creating and sustaining meaningful transdisciplinary research remain. One such challenge involves a nuanced understanding of a discipline, or what educational researchers call "disciplinary literacy." This article…

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…

This article explores the evolving trajectory of the Teaching Practicum (TP) models within a selected South African teacher education institution (TEI) to accommodate the localised challenges of shifting from face-to-face support of professional learning towards online modes of delivery during COVID-19 times. Over time, even before the onset of…