Despite the increasing racial diversity within British and Spanish societies, teacher education and school curricula continue to be Eurocentric and taught by predominantly White teachers. This quantitative research sought to explore the perceptions of student teachers in relation to their attitudes and preparedness to teach in ethnically diverse…

A theory-practice divide has beset initial teacher training (ITT) for many decades. In England, there are multiple ways to gain qualified teacher status, which can be broadly categorised into school-led or university-led, with underlying arguments about the relative importance of theory and practice, and how far learning to teach should be seen as…

This paper explores the extent to which student teachers, in their final year of a 3-year undergraduate programme teach phonics as part of a holistic reading programme linked to reading for meaning and for pleasure. It reports the results of surveys, lesson observations and interviews with a sample of students studying at one university in the…

Previous research has shown that a growth mindset can alter the way we think and learn. With teachers' retention being a problem in the United Kingdom, this article presents the findings of a study examining student teachers' mindset and resilience. The participants included student teachers across seven different Post Graduate Certificate of…

In 2019, the Department for Education introduced the core content framework (CCF) in initial education in England. The framework, which has been criticised for being heavily shaped by research from cognitive science, has, inadvertently, become the baseline curriculum for initial teacher education. This article explores how experiential learning is…

This paper tells a story of one student teacher's experiences as she considers the choice of fiction texts studied by young secondary learners of English, and how those texts are taught. Based on a series of interviews carried out in the South-West of England and Wales, the narrative provides a perspective on the limitations of current curricula…

Teachers and teacher education are often presented as "problems" to be solved, with policy solutions that focus on ways to make teachers "better" and improve teacher "quality" by introducing prescriptive strategies. We investigate the ways COVID-19-related changes to university and school-based facets of Initial…

This paper reports on a short project undertaken with student English teachers during their one year Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) teaching course that considered the potential inclusion of the novella "The Woman of Colour" into their teaching. The research considers how the student teachers received the text and the…

Teachers who mentor student teachers have a range of mentoring, coaching and teaching experience. Appropriate professional development for mentors takes consideration of this experience as well as the age phase, context (for example, main-stream or special education setting) and route that the student teacher is taking into teaching (school-based…

School-based placements are often used as a way of preparing prospective teachers for the demands of their future role. However, little is known about the impact of such situated learning experiences on prospective physical education (PE) teachers' confidence and competence. To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first of its kind to…

Michael Bird has a longstanding interest in the power of classroom dialogue, not only as a means of eliciting students' prior knowledge or checking their understanding of new ideas and information, but also as a powerful tool for generating new knowledge through a collective process of meaning-making. In this article, he first uses two extracts of…

This paper presents quantitative and qualitative findings from an interdisciplinary research project exploring student teachers' positive perceptions of people on the autism spectrum. The set of findings reported in this paper asked 704 student teachers from one university in England (n = 191), Finland (n = 251) and Sweden (n = 262) to write down…

The attitudes of student-teachers to Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) remains an under-explored topic in research literature. This mixed-methods study engaged student-teachers in focus group discussions at commencement and completion of Initial Teacher Education (ITE). These student-teachers were situated across England, Scotland, Wales,…

Policies on inclusion are being increasingly embedded within education systems and teacher education across the world, with schools and teachers called upon to add 'inclusion' to their already large set of skills and tasks. There is, however, no consistent definition of what inclusion means or how it can be best promoted. The purpose of this paper…

While there is now a considerable body of work on teacher identity in the area of language education, much less attention has been given to the question of the extent to which student teachers are enabled to construct identities that are consonant with the opportunities and challenges of current multilingual classrooms. Drawing on a recent…