This article critiques the articles by Connor et al., Croninger and Valli, Pianta and Hamre, and Rowan and Correnti, by taking a cultural-historical perspective on reading and reading instruction. The author of this critique presents evidence that challenges each of these assumptions and argues that by accepting them, the authors of the critiqued articles institute an order that values the system above relational aspects of schooling and teachers’ informed decision making.

Publication Year: 2009    |    Updated in ITEC: February 1, 2010

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 article reports on the implementation and learning outcomes of a teacher preparation initiative in an Australian university called Refugee Action Support, which seeks to develop and enhance such awareness. The initiative provides targeted training to preservice teachers in the vital areas of literacy and numeracy tuition, with the specific aim of preparing them to tutor humanitarian refugee students in high schools in Western Sydney, Australia.

Publication Year: 2009    |    Updated in ITEC: January 31, 2010

In this study, a group of teacher educators converse about their teaching practice in light of a new provincial K-12 program of social studies. The most noteworthy feature of this new program is its explicit call for teachers to include Aboriginal and Francophone perspectives as they teach to the program's two central themes of “identity” and “citizenship”. The author reads teacher educators' conversations about their practice to identify a set of educational questions that the author argues speak both to and beyond this specific programmatic context.

Publication Year: 2009    |    Updated in ITEC: January 31, 2010

This article will discuss the work of a teacher educator who espouses critical race feminism as a means of fighting against a curriculum of oppression in teacher education. The article will conclude with an analysis of the power of language and dialect, a form of curriculum oppression, in teacher education with the need to fight against such oppression in the development of new teachers from a critical race feminist perspective.

Publication Year: 2009    |    Updated in ITEC: December 30, 2009