Accountability mandates linked to state education standards and assessments have largely replaced play in early childhood classrooms. This approach limits educators' opportunities by preventing them from using play as a means of identifying and expanding children's diverse range of competencies. In this ethnographic case study, we explore how…

This longitudinal study explores how one university's practice-based teacher preparation program prepared literacy teachers to develop practical knowledge for teaching and how that knowledge was tested and adapted in the first years of teaching. To understand change, we identified and analyzed points of tension, challenge, or dissonance in the…

Asia literacy is a growing concern of the Federal Government in relation to the development of an Asia literate workforce. Despite 30 years of funded initiatives, the thought of teaching about Asia is a daunting one for pre-service teachers. This is due to the lack of Asia foci in university pre-service courses and complicated by the definition of…

In a world increasingly globalised, it is crucial that preservice teachers are equipped with a range of pedagogical knowledges, understandings and practices related to diversity and difference. This paper reports on the implementation and learning outcomes of a teacher preparation initiative in an Australian university called Refugee Action…

This article describes introductory practices used to prepare future urban teachers to implement critical literacy strategies in their classrooms. Based in a teacher education program designed to prepare teachers for urban multicultural settings, the authors provide an overview of critical approaches to literacy instruction, a rationale for why…

This article reports a study of literacy instruction in our own elementary preservice program. It examines the views and practices of both the preservice faculty who teach literacy and a sample of graduates of the program during their first three years of teaching. The new teachers reported learning many things from their preservice program,…

This Yearbook begins with the article representing Ellen Jampole's presentation to the CRA membership. In her presidential address, Ellen had the audience alternately laughing, considering, and reminiscing about how she and other academics understand and develop the knowledge they carry. She shares these same themes in her narrative, "Traditions,…

The authors detail technology-based active literacy strategies that they employed with preservice teachers to enhance their skill and comfort level in providing appropriate technology-supported literacy instruction to future students. They examine four theoretical and pragmatic threads to include in course design: active learning, open-ended…

This article describes a collaborative and cross-curricula initiative undertaken in the School of Education at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. The project involved developing an integrated approach to providing professional year pre-service secondary teacher education students with experiences that would assist them to develop…