This thesis is based on a case study of the predicament of new primary teachers in a time of rapid and multiple change. It examines the proposal that emerging teachers should be supported as intellectuals in responding to the inherited collision of education policy and practice within postmodernity. Action research methodology was employed to investigate a small scale attempt to support student teachers as intellectuals in their final period of the BEd. Some participants were followed into the first year of teaching, using an ethnographic and autoethnographic methodology to evaluate and elaborate the initial proposal. The study shows that emerging teachers could function as intellectuals but there was little political or professional support for this. In particular there were neglected elements in both preparation and induction periods concerning professional purpose, vocation and orientation. The study contributes to our understanding of the dilemmas of tutoring emerging teachers as intellectuals. It also contributes to our understanding of the predicament of new teachers, which is typified as caught between the rock of the state and the increasingly hard place of the school. In this situation clarity of ideals and beliefs are required, and personal and social strategies are needed to carry these through in the problematic contexts of both policy and practice. It is recommended that the imbalance of preparation and induction programmes is reconsidered in order to allow for these neglected elements. Finall y the study offers a cultural rationale for professional purpose and vocation based on principles of equality, quality, diversity and democracy.

No description available.

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.

The thesis investigated the notion of ego depletion in children, on classroom-based, 'academic' type tasks. Two major studies conducted with primary school students, aged between 10 and 14 years explored how an act of effortful self-control can impact adversely on performance and volition on a second, seemingly unrelated task. A third study investigated teacher perceptions of ego depletion effects.

This teacher as researcher inquiry set out to negotiate a critical literacy curriculum in a grade 3 classroom in Nova Scotia, Canada. It suggests that the inclusion of texts with multiple perspectives alongside popular culture, media, and digital texts are key to enacting a critical literacy curriculum.

The EEdnaS study “Development and testing of digitally enriched science-related subject matter teaching in digital teaching-learning labs and university classrooms” aims to promote the professional competencies of prospective teachers that are needed for teaching science content in a world shaped by digitalization. To achieve this goal, university teaching units (seminars) that directly address cognitive components of a teacher’s professional competencies, which are important to teaching science content in primary school education, were developed. In addition, prospective teachers were asked to plan, implement, and evaluate primary school science education with a particular focus on digitization, as well as sharing the developed units as open-educational resources. This article reports on the impact of the first part of the seminar concept, in which the promotion of digitization-related, subject-specific teaching methodology, as well as content-related knowledge (TPaCK) was systematically promoted. In a standardized survey, it could be shown that the prospective teachers demonstrated positive developments, particularly in the components PCK, TCK, TPK, as well as TPaCK, regarding the self-efficacy in cognitive characteristics about one’s own ability within the reference frame of self. Furthermore, the development of knowledge, especially in the areas of TK, PCK, TCK, and TPK, could also be determined, but not in relation to TPaCK itself.

In this thesis it is argued that the fundamental goal of education is one of equipping students to think well, that is, to make decisions on the basis of arguments that are both logically cogent and ethically grounded. Moreover, the concern of the thesis is the role social and environmental education might play in fostering both the capability and the readiness to engage widely in such thinking. Drawing on relevant philosophical and psychological theory the study describes the development of an educational programme grounded in the procedures of ethical inquiry and taught via whole-class community of inquiry style discussions. The programme was trialled by way of a large scale, matched intervention study in South Australian upper primary classrooms. The findings from the research project indicate that participation in the programme produced significant gains in participants' logical and ethical reasoning and also that the programme fits within the constraints of prevailing educational structures.

In the information era, e-learning is considered as one of the means to increase the global competitiveness of a nation. Before e-learning is largely implemented in education system, it is important to assess the e-learning readiness of a society. However, previous research always focus on measuring the e-learning readiness of commercial organisations and tertiary institutions, leaving a huge research gap on the use and readiness of e-learning in primary and secondary schools. This thesis developed a model for identifying e-learning readiness levels of teachers in Hong Kong schools, with the aim of creating a general model which could be transferred to other countries which are less developed than Hong Kong, yet which all share common Asian cultures. This was a multi-stage research project, incorporating model building and empirical testing of a model based on the existing academic literature, through questionnaire surveys to both in-service and pre-service teachers triangulated by series of in-depth interviews.

In this thesis it is argued that the fundamental goal of education is one of equipping students to think well, that is, to make decisions on the basis of arguments that are both logically cogent and ethically grounded. Moreover, the concern of the thesis is the role social and environmental education might play in fostering both the capability and the readiness to engage widely in such thinking. Drawing on relevant philosophical and psychological theory the study describes the development of an educational programme grounded in the procedures of ethical inquiry and taught via whole-class community of inquiry style discussions. The programme was trialled by way of a large scale, matched intervention study in South Australian upper primary classrooms. The findings from the research project indicate that participation in the programme produced significant gains in participants' logical and ethical reasoning and also that the programme fits within the constraints of prevailing educational structures.