The aim of this research was to investigate stakeholder attitudes towards people, with dyslexia, training to be primary classroom practitioners. The study examined stakeholder awareness and understanding of the term dyslexia; their perceived strengths and challenges, of those training to be teachers, with dyslexia. The study explored the impact of attitudes on disclosure of dyslexia and the potential of their employability as primary teachers in light of inclusive legislation and whether attitudes, held by a range of stakeholders, were on a neutral to positive or neutral to negative spectrum. The research entailed the implementation of an online questionnaire completed by 214 current stakeholders (including Initial teacher Education lecturers, school staff, Initial Teacher Education students and parents) and 11 semi-structured interviews. Findings suggest that there is uncertainty and confusion about the term dyslexia, its associated characteristics and its causes. Many stakeholders perceive dyslexia negatively with key characteristics being linked, predominantly, to deficits in reading, writing and spelling. This research has found that stakeholders identify a number of strengths that those with dyslexia bring to the teaching profession. These key strengths include empathy, inclusive practice and ease of identification of children with dyslexia. The main challenges/concerns identified by stakeholders, of those entering the profession, with dyslexia, were - the demands of the profession; the inability to teach particular age groups/subjects and the level of support needed to ensure success and retention following qualification. This latter concern constitutes a key finding of this research, as the level of support afforded by universities is perceived as being unrealistic in the workplace. The ethical responsibility that universities have, in preparing students for the demands and reality of the workplace, has emerged. The notion of what constitutes ‘reasonable adjustments’ is questioned by many stakeholders. This research concludes that a number of ‘reasonable adjustments’ are perceived as being unreasonable within the teaching profession due to the professional roles, responsibilities and requirements of being a teaching professional. Furthermore, uncertainty about legislation exists with regard to reasonable adjustments, whose responsibility it is to enforce reasonable adjustments and how schools can actually support those with dyslexia, in light of professional standards. Overall, this research has found that 16.1% more stakeholders display attitudes on the neutral to positive spectrum than neutral to negative with regard to those with dyslexia training to be primary classroom teachers. However, this masks major differences between stakeholders and between responses to particular statements/questions. A significant majority of stakeholders demonstrated a negative attitude towards the notion of people with dyslexia entering the teaching profession, believing that parents should be concerned if their child is being taught by someone with dyslexia. Both of these findings could have serious implications on the future disclosure of those with dyslexia. This research has found that a fear of stigmatisation and potential discrimination, which deter those with dyslexia from disclosing on course and job applications are justified and real. This research concludes that employability chances are lessened upon disclosure of dyslexia.

This thesis examines students’ experiences of learning to teach mathematics as they complete a primary Postgraduate Certificate in Education to gain qualified teacher status. The research data are drawn from students’ accounts of learning to teach mathematics, which include email communications during their studies and interviews with eight students at the end of the course. Analysis is informed by post-structuralist feminist understandings of discourse, power and knowledge. These tools are used to explore the complexities of learning to teach, the ways in which beginning teachers are ‘produced’, what counts as mathematics and the effects of power relations within pedagogical encounters. I use a reflexive approach to methodology, acknowledging the ways in which my own subjectivity permeates the enquiry, and the ways in which power permeates the research process. The study found performances of gender in students’ accounts of their experiences of the course, both on campus and in schools. Dominant discourses of teaching and mathematics create tensions for students and act as a form of control and categorisation as they strive to be recognised as legitimate mathematics teachers. It is argued that students’ subjectivities are shaped by discursive practices and peer and pedagogical relationships in the context of the course and that students are constituted as mathematical subjects often in inequitable ways. They are both powerful and powerless in different instances as they take up competing discourses, positioning themselves and their peers in shifting locations. Some students are silenced, categorised and marginalised within discourses of mathematics. Most report complying with the established practices of the school and class teacher and focused on the struggle to achieve legitimacy as successful student teachers. They 2 demonstrate both compliance with and resistance to dominant discourses as they are caught between the tensions and inconsistencies of competing and conflicting discourses. A key implication of this study is that teachers, teacher educators and student teachers need opportunities to explore their own gendered subjectivities as learners and teachers and to acknowledge that learning to teach mathematics is not solely a cognitive endeavour but one deeply located in social relations and contexts. Within teacher education more spaces need to be opened up to enable student teachers to embody themselves as mathematics subjects and primary teachers differently.

This thesis reports the findings of a research study conducted in an initial primary teacher education college in Dublin, exploring how teacher education students experienced and constructed meaning from a pre-service RE course which recognized the importance of a focus on their inner lives. The study, which adopted a qualitative interpretive approach, was conducted using semi-structured interviews with twelve past students from a recently-graduated year group of one hundred students. The study hoped to uncover how a focus on the inner life was taken up by the research participants in relation to their personal and professional wellbeing and their role as educators in general and religious educators in particular. While it did not seek to generalise as a result of the findings, confined as it is by time and circumstance, nevertheless aspects deemed worthwhile by the research participants may also be deemed worthwhile by the reader and indeed may not be confined to the domain of RE. The findings have been framed generally against the three themes of ‘particularity’, ‘inner-ness’ and ‘ongoing-ness’. The theme of ‘particularity’ relates to the participants’ epistemological journey, as it is concerned with how concrete elements of the course supported inner life work. The theme of ‘inner-ness’ relates to the participants’ ontological journey, as it is concerned with how participants experienced and made meaning from the space provided by the course for inner life work. The theme of ‘ongoingness’ relates to the total RE journey from primary and secondary school to college and into their teaching lives and its impact on participants’ inner lives. What is clear from participants’ responses is that the RE course, and particularly the elements of the RE course that had a focus on the inner life, had a significant impact on participants’ identity, both personal and professional, at an important stage of their development and personal story. The study demonstrates the importance of inner life work for teacher education students and contributes a level of insight into how students appropriate and construct meaning from a created and creative space that supports a focus on that inner life.

This study used Activity Theory (AT) as a lens to explore how administrative and academic activity systems worked in a university, in schools and in the university-school partnership to support Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Saudi Arabia. It examined the perspectives of partnership coordinators, university tutors, head teachers, cooperating teachers and student teachers involved in the ITE partnership programme at Umm Alqura University. The study was conducted under the umbrella of the interpretive paradigm. Case study was used as the methodology of the study. The study employed multiple methods of data collection: questionnaire, interviews and documentary evidence. Maximum variation sampling was used to select the participants to take part in the current study. The total number of the whole sample with all sub-groups was 187. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted with volunteer interviewees. The study yielded various findings. Participants’ expectations were influenced by their history and background. In addition, student teachers were supported in learning about teaching in the university, school and through the partnership between school and university. However, different kinds of challenges were identified. These included: extreme centralisation in running the partnership activity system, lack of awareness of the importance of the partnership and of the need to address contradictory points of view about teaching and learning to teach in a constructive way. These challenges were symptoms of unresolved contradictions inherent in the partnership activity system. Despite these contradictions, many opportunities for professional development were highlighted by all partners. Using AT as an analytical tool, several implications for all partners were identified. The study concluded with the idea that for effective teacher education, not only is it important to understand the interaction between university and school but also how, within each, administrative and academic activity sub-systems operate and interact. This is because clear understanding of all aspects of the academic and administrative elements of the partnership, and of their relationship, is essential for a successful teacher education.

This thesis examines what it is that enables postgraduate student teachers to promote the recently introduced curriculum innovation, dialogic talk, in primary classrooms. Drawing on literature relating to the way talk has been enacted in English classrooms for the last thirty five years, it suggests that patterns of verbal interaction have continued to prove resistant to change, despite policy imperatives and university courses. Adopting a collaborative action research approach, data were collected in three cycles over three years to investigate the perceptions of three successive cohorts of postgraduate students of the role of talk in learning, and the place of the teacher in developing it. Using a sociocultural lens, students’ conceptual and pedagogic understanding of dialogic talk, and their ability to promote it, is examined in depth through nine case studies, as are the factors which the participants themselves identify as enabling or inhibiting engagement with innovation. It is suggested that the lack of a commonly agreed definition, and of readily available theoretical guidance, has reduced dialogic talk to just another label. As such, it can play no significant part in developing practice beyond rapid question-and-answer routines of ‘interactive teaching’ and the potentially reductive IRF (Initiation, Response, Feedback) script recorded by researchers (Mroz et al, 2000; Myhill, 2006) before, and after the inception of the National Literacy Strategy (1998a). Turning to the role of the university, it questions the place of the ‘demonstration lesson’ and whole cohort lectures, urging that significant changes need to be made to the role of the teaching practice tutor, and the nature of ‘partnership’ between schools and university departments. Finally, it speculates that without a significant change in the way university departments examine, and address, the values, attitudes and memories of talk that student teachers bring with them from their own primary classrooms, there will continue to be replication of practice.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:42:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Adriana Parravano Neves.pdf: 1028496 bytes, checksum: 2e5a2cc2cdc758b411b3da5578f47a45 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-08-05 / The central object of the present research is the supervised internship in a pedagogy course as a guideline for the constitution of interdisciplinary experiences in initial teachers‟ education. This work analyzed a teacher-training course, Pedagogy, in the city of São Paulo, to confront theoretical aspects of the necessity of initiating an interdisciplinary posture in the orientation for initial teacher education. For this, it was made a bibliographic review, utilizing authors focused on themes about Teacher Education, Interdisciplinary Subjects, Curriculum and Supervised Practice Internship, in addition to field research, where I utilized the fieldnote as data collection tools, in which I registered the routine of the classes observed of the course. A five-question questionnaire was applied with the aim of reflecting about the ideas of the theory and practice developed in the course. During the analysis, it was possible to observe the difficulty students in pedagogical training have in relating theory with practice, using as an argument the lack of stimulus, the observed practice in formation and the perception of the current context. The internship was revealed as fundamental for the students to be exposed to projects and proposals, which gather reflections, and interdisciplinary analyzes during initial teacher education, becoming their formation more coherent in relation to the contemporary needs of a thought and an action more complex. Among results, it was perceived the student s perspective before the internship in this initial teacher education course, as well the significance of the interdisciplinary issue in the context of formation, cause, although students did not have the chance to experience the interdisciplinary challenge, they have brought concerns about it. / A presente pesquisa tem por objeto central o estágio supervisionado no curso de Pedagogia como eixo norteador para constituição de experiências interdisciplinares na formação inicial do professor. Foi analisado um curso de formação de professores na capital paulista para confrontar os aspectos teóricos da necessidade de desencadear uma postura interdisciplinar presente nas orientações para formação inicial de professores Para tanto, foi feita uma revisão bibliográfica, utilizando autores centrados em temas sobre Formação de Professor, Interdisciplinaridade, Currículo e Estágio Supervisionado; além da pesquisa de campo, onde utilizei como ferramentas de coleta de dados o caderno de campo, em que registrei a rotina e as aulas observadas do curso, além da aplicação de um questionário com cinco perguntas voltadas à reflexão sobre a ideia de teoria e prática e de documentos do curso de Pedagogia. Durante as análises da coleta, foi possível perceber a dificuldade que os alunos em formação pedagógica possuem em relacionar a teoria com a prática, argumentando falta de estímulo, prática observada na formação e percepção do contexto atual. O estágio revelou-se como fundamental para que os discentes sejam expostos a projetos e propostas que congreguem reflexões e análises interdisciplinares durante a formação inicial, tornando mais coerentes a formação em relação às necessidades contemporâneas de um pensamento e uma ação mais complexos. Dentre os resultados, foi possível conhecer o olhar dos alunos perante o estágio no curso de formação inicial bem verificar a importância da questão interdisciplinar no contexto de formação, pois embora não tivessem a possibilidade de vivenciar o desafio interdisciplinar, os alunos trouxeram inquietações nesse sentido.

<p>This study follows student teachers from initial teacher education into their first teaching jobs, with the aim of gaining insights how student teachers become teachers of mathematics and science. The study has in two stages. In the first part focus, the focus is on the beliefs and conceptions – termed here as ’personal didactics’- that student teachers have about teaching and learning mathematics and science. These are captured by open-ended interviews on completion of initial teacher education. Stage 1 is thus subject specific. Findings indicate that student teachers have an applied approach to mathematics and science. Findings of the study challenge teacher education to develop mathematics and science as a more democratic, moral and cultural enterprise. It is suggested that closer connections are needed between different parts of initial teacher with a continued discussion about how and in what areas subject teaching can develop in teacher education. The second stage of research - two years later – involved data collection through observation, field notes and post-observation interviews. This stage is a follow-up study building on the stage 1 and has a more sociological emphasis inspired by Bernstein’s concept of educational codes. The research shows how the structure of schools influences teachers and their possibilities to enact teaching that is consistent with their understanding of mathematics and science as school subjects. Schools have different codes and teachers’ practices were constrained by the opportunities that each school offered as well as each teacher’s personal didactics. Most of the teachers in the study worked in schools organised in such a way that new teachers have considerable autonomy over their own teaching. After two years of practise teachers generally felt freer to organise science teaching and put more planning and preparation of science lessons as compared to mathematics. The overall study illuminates the relationship between initial teacher education and school practice, and suggests an enhancement of initial teacher education and professional development as a unity.</p>

This study follows student teachers from initial teacher education into their first teaching jobs, with the aim of gaining insights how student teachers become teachers of mathematics and science. The study has in two stages. In the first part focus, the focus is on the beliefs and conceptions – termed here as ’personal didactics’- that student teachers have about teaching and learning mathematics and science. These are captured by open-ended interviews on completion of initial teacher education. Stage 1 is thus subject specific. Findings indicate that student teachers have an applied approach to mathematics and science. Findings of the study challenge teacher education to develop mathematics and science as a more democratic, moral and cultural enterprise. It is suggested that closer connections are needed between different parts of initial teacher with a continued discussion about how and in what areas subject teaching can develop in teacher education. The second stage of research - two years later – involved data collection through observation, field notes and post-observation interviews. This stage is a follow-up study building on the stage 1 and has a more sociological emphasis inspired by Bernstein’s concept of educational codes. The research shows how the structure of schools influences teachers and their possibilities to enact teaching that is consistent with their understanding of mathematics and science as school subjects. Schools have different codes and teachers’ practices were constrained by the opportunities that each school offered as well as each teacher’s personal didactics. Most of the teachers in the study worked in schools organised in such a way that new teachers have considerable autonomy over their own teaching. After two years of practise teachers generally felt freer to organise science teaching and put more planning and preparation of science lessons as compared to mathematics. The overall study illuminates the relationship between initial teacher education and school practice, and suggests an enhancement of initial teacher education and professional development as a unity.

Assessment for Learning (AfL) has been seen as a key aspect of teaching and learning for almost two decades, since the seminal review by Black and Wiliam (1998a). However, the research has largely been conducted with practising teachers rather than student teachers. This thesis attempts to fill this gap in relation to AfL, and illustrate that understanding how student teachers learn to use conceptual resources, such as AfL, can inform the work of all those who support the learning of teachers in training. The present study investigated how four secondary geography student teachers on a one year post-graduate training programme in England worked with ideas associated with AfL in their teaching during two school placements. The study asked how and why they used AfL or, as became evident, Assessment of Learning (AoL) in their teaching and what their use of AfL might tell us about their learning to teach in schools. The thesis adopted a cultural-historical approach to investigate the actions in activities of the student teachers as they learnt to teach. The four students were followed over two terms in their two placement schools to gather data on their trajectories as learners and beginning teachers. Data collection methods were: (i) semi-structured interviews with the four students; interviews with their teacher mentors and other school staff; and (ii) regular post-lesson interviews with the student teachers, following observations of their teaching. The cultural-historical approach led to examining AfL as a potential tool to be used by the student teachers in their teaching. Engestr&ouml;m's (1990, 1999, 2007) work on tool use and mediating artefacts was deployed to analyse the student teachers' use of AfL and what they saw as its purposes. The attention to purposes of tool use in the study was also informed by Hedegaard's (2012, 2014) work on motives in institutional practices, the activities in the practices and the actions taken by student teachers. This approach pointed to how the institutional motives and demands embedded in school practices influenced their learning. The study also paid attention to the identity work being done by the student teachers. This work was most apparent when the student teachers moved from their first to second placement school and worked with a different set of demands in institutional practices. One early finding was that although school colleagues and student teachers were using the label AfL, closer examination revealed that they were actually using AoL. Key findings from the final analyses were as follows: there was considerable variation in how the geography specialist teacher mentors interpreted and used AfL; some mentors were strongly mediating the AfL/AoL expectations evident in the school inspection system in England; there was evidence of some strong and challenging mentoring, but it was not consistent across the experiences of the students; the students' own sense of the kind of teacher they wanted to become could be tracked in ways which revealed how they coped with the different school demands and what they saw as university expectations; the transition between placement schools was significant for the student teachers in ways that had not been anticipated by the design of the programme. Following the student teachers as learners offered insights into their experiences in the black box of school placements during teacher education. Consequently, the implications for the design of teacher education programmes are a key part of the discussion stimulated by the findings.

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No. of bitstreams: 1 vicente_mf_me_prud.pdf: 1395528 bytes, checksum: 62b3104008210aa4edcc417b94498034 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-04-10 / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Partindo de uma concepção de professor crítico – reflexivo, a presente pesquisa encontra-se vinculada ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da FCT/UNESP na linha de pesquisa “Políticas Públicas, Organização Escolar e Formação de Professores” e teve como objetivo geral investigar as contribuições do PIBID para o processo de formação inicial e para a aprendizagem da docência de alunos que cursam Licenciatura em Matemática na Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia – FCT/UNESP, campus de Presidente Prudente/SP. Com enfoque qualitativo, do tipo estudo de caso, teve como objeto de estudo o Grupo PIBID do curso de Licenciatura em Matemática da Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”. Dessa forma, tivemos como sujeitos os integrantes que participam diretamente do processo de elaboração e desenvolvimento de atividades pedagógicas em escolas públicas da Rede Estadual em Presidente Prudente (SP). Realizamos entrevistas semiestruturadas com 17(dezessete) sujeitos, sendo 1(uma) professora coordenadora do grupo PIBID e 16(dezesseis) alunos bolsistas. Também adotamos o procedimento da observação, divididas em dois momentos: observações das aulas em que as atividades elaboradas pelos bolsistas eram desenvolvidas e os momentos de reuniões na universidade com todo o grupo PIBID. Foram analisados alguns documentos que respaldam legalmente a implantação deste Programa na universidade, bem como os documentos oficiais que norteiam a criação e o desenvolvimento do PIBID. Os dados obtidos, por meio da análise documental, da observação e da entrevista revelaram contribuições do projeto para que o aluno da licenciatura possa ter mais segurança e um olhar crítico para as situações de ensino aprendizagem. Os resultados evidenciaram a importância de propor ainda no processo de formação inicial de professores, situações em que possibilitem a aproximação dos acadêmicos com o contexto escolar, uma vez que contribuiu para a constituição da identidade profissional. Também apontou possíveis medidas que podem contribuir efetivamente para uma melhor articulação entre conhecimento especifico e conhecimento pedagógico, tendo a escola como sendo o lócus da formação e aprendizagem docente. / Starting from a concept of teachers as critical and reflexive, this study is associated with the Education Graduate Program at FCT/UNESP in the line of research “Public Policies, School Organization and Teacher Education” and its general objective was to investigate how PIBID contributed to the process of initial training and the learning how to teach among students from the Mathematics teaching degree at the School of Science and Technology – FCT/UNESP, campus of Presidente Prudente/SP. With a qualitative approach and being a case study, the object of the research was the PIBID Group in the Mathematics teaching degree at the São Paulo State University “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”. Thus, the subjects were members of the group who participated in the process of preparing and developing pedagogical activities in public schools belonging the the State Education Network in the city of Presidente Prudente (SP). Semi-structured interviews were done with seventeen (17) persons, and one (1) of them was the PIBID group coordinator and sixteen (16) students who were scholarship holders in the program. I also adopted the procedure of observation, divided in two moments: class observation in which the activities prepared by the scholarship holders were conducted and the moments when the entire PIBID group got together in the meetings at the university. Documents that legally support the implementation of this Program at the university were reviewed, as well as the official documents that serve as the guidelines for the setup and development of PIBID. Data collected by means of documental review, by observation and by the interviews revealed contributions of the project so that a teachingdegree student may feel more secure and hold a critical view of the teaching and learning situations. Results highlighted how important it is to work, in the early teacher training, on situations that get the students closer to the school ambience, which helps in acquiring a professional identity. Measure that may effectively contribute to better articulate specific knowledge and pedagogical knowledge, as the school is the place where someone is trained and learns how to be a teacher. / FAPESP: 2012/24188-6