In this paper, we deploy M.M. Bakhtin's notions about how language works to understand aspiring teachers' struggles about the intersecting roles race, class, gender, language background, and sexual orientation play in students' school lives and learning. Through life-history interviews and document analysis, we investigated the authoritative and…

Using first-person accounts of classroom experiences, five professors examine the intersection of social foundations and borderland theory and their efforts to move students through resistance to understanding and affirmation of sociocultural diversity. The authors present this paper in two parts, the first providing examples of using a borderland…

The article features a graduate literacy teacher education course that compelled students to think in terms of design and multimodality. In an effort to innovate our own literacy teacher education work, we came together to devise a course that encouraged students to adopt a design lens to their thinking, planning, and assessing of literacy…

In this paper we describe the creation of an eclectic case pedagogy based on case-based methods, sociocultural learning theory and visual studies successfully used in a university teacher education course designed to help students acquire sociocultural knowledge about schooling and teaching. Using qualitative data collected across three semesters…

This research essay is intended to situate the curriculum in my multicultural education courses--of talking back through autobiographical inquiry--within real schools, a site where curriculum theorists rarely situate their work. The literature by curriculum theorists that precedes my study generally has focused on how pre-service teachers in…

This article is a summary of comprehensive units on gender and sexuality diversity that the authors have used in teacher education courses in undergraduate and graduate social foundations of education classes over several years. The course lesson plan includes a five-part analysis of the following categories: biological sex; gender identity/sexual…

Three teachers, who held extreme preferences for the ways they learn, participated in a year-long professional development course, designed to sensitize teachers to their own and colleagues' individual learning differences (ILDs). The case study focuses on their extreme learning preferences and discusses the impact of these preferences on their…

Under the principles of critical pedagogy, this article examines the process and experiences of 22 pre-service teachers enrolled in a required teacher education course, "Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice", who collaboratively developed and taught the course syllabus to one another. Through surveys, observations, and informal meetings,…

A graduate course in fundamentals of curriculum is described. The discussion-centered course seeks to provide a historical/conceptual framework for treatment of curriculum issues, present a variety of approaches to curriculum construction, and help students create their own approach to curriculum. An appendix describing a paper assignment is…

This article describes an in-service training program in action research designed for mature teachers returning to college to upgrade their teaching diplomas and complete their BEd degrees. The initial impetus was the need to develop a student-oriented pedagogy based on and enhancing the extensive professional experience of these teachers,…

While many teachers and teacher educators agree that it is important to integrate new literacies and technologies into their teaching, educators are often perplexed about how to begin thinking about this task. Research reveals that educators use technologies for personal and communicative purposes, but teachers, for the most part, have not yet…

Historically, teacher education in special education has focused on identifying characteristics of various disabilities and promoting best practices for intervention and remediation. This article introduces a disability studies approach to teacher education in special education. Disability studies is an interdisciplinary area of study that…

The transition from a disciplinary to an interdisciplinary approach to teaching the history of education is discussed with regard to course development, content, activities, student evaluation, and teaching techniques. (IAH)

This article, based on an interpretive study, examines what happens when a team of teaching fellows and their supervisor attempt to address what they have identified as a "pedagogical crisis" in a social foundations of education course. Student proclivities had resulted in extreme polarization regarding contested social issues. By using a…

Student characteristics, course content, class activities, evaluation, and teaching methods are described for a graduate course in educational administration at University of New Orleans. Major issues considered include: organizational behavior and theory, the educational effectiveness and reform movements, leadership, and ethics. (IAH)