One of the major priorities that should guide teacher education programs in preparing teachers for their work in a democratic society is to develop a commitment to knowledge that embraces complexity and to place this knowledge into competition with the mainstream vision, which results from a deep reliance on standardized testing and controls much…

Negotiating authority, a multifaceted, on-going process of mutual bargaining over the power to determine or the right to control, permeates all facets of teaching experience. Considered by many educational theorists to be an outgrowth of collaborative dialogue and decision-making that helps foster active student engagement and investment in…

This study explores a labelling feature that allows students to tag parts of their online messages. Data comes from four sequentially offered sessions of a graduate education course. Students engaged in two to three online activities in groups of three or four. Students (n = 53) contributed from 0 to 56 labels (M = 12.42, SD = 13.50) and 18 to 114…

Higher education, as well as the larger society appears to be experiencing a serious decline in civility. In this article the author presents the case for introducing civility education in first-year general education courses. After citing some of the research documenting both faculty and student perceptions of incivility in the university and…

In search of strategies for increasing their pre-service teachers' thoughtful engagement with content and in an effort to model connection between choice of technology and pedagogical goals, the authors utilized collaborative software during class time. Collaborative software allows all students to write simultaneously on a single collective…

Research on current discourses on educational change in general and teacher education in particular have identified reasons why some teacher education courses fail to connect with trainees. This study sought to investigate factors that underlie pre-service teachers' resistance to an innovative religious and moral education course. A descriptive…

A graduate level education course utilized ee-learning (the combination of experiential and electronic learning) to break down barriers between theory and practice, and knowledge and experience. Students shared and reflected on experiences at volunteer sites, their personal lives, their individual school settings and coursework, to create a…

The goal of this study was to explore whether differences in student academic indicators exist between taking a course face-to-face (F2F) and taking a course via distance education (DE). Three hundred and eighty five students were enrolled in a course offered, both, as F2F (n = 116) and as DE (n = 269). Course content, instructor, textbook…

The most pressing need in early childhood mathematics education in the United States is to improve early childhood teacher preparation. A Web-based video system, "Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL)", is a novel and effective approach for teacher preparation integrated into early childhood mathematics education courses. With…

Pre-service teachers' perceptions of their own learning are important to the ways they integrate technology into their practices. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the pre-service teachers' perspectives of asynchronous discussion board (ADB) as a tool of learning to teach. ADB was integrated into two literacy courses for 33…

This article used work from the writing assessment literature to develop a framework for assessing the impact and perceived value of written, audio, and combined written and audio feedback strategies across four global and 22 discrete dimensions of feedback. Using a quasi-experimental research design, students at three U.S. universities were…

Professional teacher communities appear to be positively related to student learning, teacher learning, teacher practice and school culture. Teacher collaboration is a significant element of these communities. In initial teacher training as well as in-service training and other initiatives for teacher learning, collaborative skills should be…

Teachers are searching for new venues through which they may meet stringent professional development requirements. Under competitive funding from NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Office of Education and the NASA Explorer Schools Project, U.S. Satellite Laboratory, Inc. created a series of live, online, interactive…

A discussion of how a tensor theory can be adapted to provide a fully quantitative analysis of a social system. A social tensor is developed from the physical analogue and used to analyze the structure of an education course. (Author/HB)

A discussion of the use of simulation in teaching a university education course. (HB)