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Although preservice teacher education comprises only a small part of student teachers' socialization into the teaching profession, it nevertheless has an important impact of student teachers imagination through an educative world it renders both possible and the intelligible. Anchored in a secondary social studies methods course at the University of British Columbia, and following six of its student teacher participants through their university- and practicum-based experiences, this year-long ethnographic study explores the production of knowledge and knowing in presevice teacher education. As such, it examines how particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are made possible as well as on what they, in turn, make possible for prospective social studies teachers learning to teach. Exploring how teachers' ways of being are dependent, in part, on student teachers' ways of becoming, this study examines what happens to student teachers during their preservice education and, as a result, what they make happen because of what happens to them. Examining the complex relationship between the knowledge student teachers are given and the knowledge they themselves produce, this dissertation considers not only what student teachers choose to say and do but also what structures their choices. Disturbing the practice of teacher education by examining how discourses use and are used and what, in the process, gets covered over, silenced, and ignored, this dissertation attempts to extend the traditional exploration of how prospective social studies student teachers learn to manage ideas and theories in the teacher education classrooms to the examination of how the use of ideas and theories in those very classrooms manages those who attempt to engage them. Organized as a multivocal text in which the running narrative is interrupted and interrogated by the researcher's own reflexive comments about the impossibilities of knowing and those of the participants about the study and its textualization, this dissertation focuses on the problematics and possibilities in the process of learning to teach, highlighting and publicly engaging them in order to bring more of what we do in university-based teacher education classrooms into the fold of the discussion both about and in teacher education

This study arises out of research on teacher beliefs and practice with regard to the social, political and economic conditions affecting English Language Learners (ELLS). Specifically, it examines how student-teachers in an introductory course to cross-cultural education at a state university in California reflect on their own beliefs about cultural, linguistic, racial, ethnic and socio-economic diversity; whether they examine the socio-political context of schooling language minority students; their beliefs about appropriate strategies and methodologies for ELLs; and if and how these beliefs have been influenced by the course. Forty-two student-teachers completed pre- and post-course questionnaires, and two completed interviews. The results from this study show that teacher education coursework can change teacher beliefs about issues of diversity in positive ways and can lead to greater teacher awareness about the socio-political context of schooling ELLs. The next step in the research agenda will be to investigate how teacher beliefs about multicultural issues affect their practices in teaching ELLs.

In recent years much has been said and written concerning the widening gap between the newer developments in mathematics and that which is traditionally taught in secondary schools. Not unnaturally, leading scholars in mathematics have looked at the school programmes and found them wanting in many respects. [...]

The purpose of this study was to investigate the dilemmas pre-service science teachers encounter in relation to their participation in a project which sought to establish a constructivist and collaborative model of teaching and learning. I also explored the strategies the pre-service teachers implemented to manage the dilemmas they encountered, as well as how they perceived those dilemmas to have influenced their teaching practice and their personal philosophies of teaching and learning (PPoTaL). Since the construct of voice was an important factor in this study, I used a research method that I refer to as intercontext. This method has three major components: stimulated linkage, reflexivity and the dialectical conversation. To enact this research method, I conducted five interviews with each of the six pre-service teachers over the 12-month period of their professional preparation. In addition, I had many informal conversations with them and observed them several times during their university and school practicum experiences. I argued that social constructivism provides a fruitful theoretical framework to interpret the results of this study, because this orientation to teaching and learning is based on the notion that knowledge is socially constructed and mediated by.cultural, historical and institutional codes. In this light, three broad dilemmas were identified in relation to the students' experiences with the teacher education program's course content and design and six dilemmas were identified in relation to the roles the participants felt they needed to perform during their school practicum. The variety of dilemmas the pre-service teachers encountered and the direct and indirect strategies they implemented to manage those dilemmas could be explained in terms of two overarching issues. The first had to do with the difficulties associated with bridging the theory and practice of learning to teach in two distinct communities of practice (i.e., in the university and the school communities). The second general factor had to do with the type of relationship the pre-service teachers established with their school advisor(s) or/and faculty advisor; that is, from the the students' point of view they wondered to what extent they could trust their advisors to allow them to take the risks associated with asking questions, trying innovative approaches in the classroom, and exploring their own teaching identity without any of these reflecting negatively in their final evaluation reports. Finally, a number of suggestions for practice and further research are provided.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between divergent thinking and Schmidt's schema theory of motor learning in a population of first year University physical education students. / Problem solving teaching methodology was used as the intervention program in this study and the main sources of data were the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and tests of Schmidt's schema theory designed by the researcher. Descriptive data were used to explain the intervention program. / A mixed model analysis of variance was used to compare the pre-test and post-test performance on Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), and the Pearson product-moment correlation technique was used to compare the results of the TTCT post-test and the Schmidt test. / Results showed minimal differences attributable to the intervention and no relationships between the two tests. Analysis of the descriptive data suggests several limitations to the intervention program and some suggestions for further research are offered.

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This thesis examines the potential for pre-service teacher training of video portfolios of elementary students doing school tasks. Study 1 investigates pre-service teachers' use of such records to assess student progress. Ten undergraduate education students each viewed two video portfolios, one for mathematics and one for reading. Each portfolio consisted of four video records. Participants watched the four records in an incorrect order and attempted to put them in their original order. Their orders by-and-large were correct. Most ordered the records according to task characteristics and provided detail interpretations and justifications for their ordering. Since the usefulness of video portfolios in teacher training rests on their ability to highlight characteristics of student learning, Study 2 further analyzes eleven mathematics video records selected from Study 1 to investigate whether the task condition constructed in the adult-student interaction allows sufficient presentations of student achievement. Potential threats in task administrator's instructional behaviors to video quality were discussed.

The study explores trainee teachers' perceptions and experiences of sexual harassment in Teacher Training Institutions in Ghana. Guided by the research literature on sexual harassment and a feminist framework, the study seeks to understand how sexual harassment and its subtleties are experienced by trainee teachers in Ghana. It particularly throws light on the coping strategies of these trainee teachers in different sexual harassment scenarios. The study also seeks to increase awareness of sexual harassment in the Teacher Training Institutions and the population at large. This study is also a contribution to the scanty literature in the area of sexual harassment in Africa and has recommended options available to enlighten educational and policy planners on areas of priorities for action and to ensure a more effective response to sexual harassment in the Ghanaian society. / Extensive review of the pertinent literature on sexual harassment was undertaken to support a critical analysis of the expressed perceptions and experiences of these students. Methods such as focus group discussions were employed with semi-structured interviews (open-ended questions) and memory writing as qualitative data gathering techniques to conduct group interviews and individual sessions with a random sample of 40 participants from two teacher training institutions of the country, the University College of Education in Winneba and Bagabaga Training College in Tamale. Female participants were engaged individually in memory writing using procedural guidelines. / The study found out that the main factors predisposing trainee teachers to sexual harassment in Ghanaian Teacher Training Institutions are Institutional practices by both teachers and students and the Institutional environment created from inadequate or complete absence of physical structures aimed at preventing sexual harassment and assaults. The lack of explicit policies to check sexual abuse, including sexual harassment, work in concert with the aforementioned institutional characteristics to create conditions that facilitate sexual harassment of female trainee teachers in the Ghanaian context. All these accumulate into an apparent institutional framework of sexual harassment that supports a regime of blatant disregard of the safety concerns of female trainee teachers. / Based on the testimonies of the students, it would appear that the problem of sexual harassment perpetrated by people in positions of authority is widespread in Ghana. Female student teachers are regularly exposed to a range of sexually motivated abuses within the learning environment, and these abuses are often carried out by tutors, professors, administrative staff and senior students. These three categories of agents of sexual harassment take advantage of available or perceived institutional power to abuse vulnerable female students. Also, perpetrators of sexual harassment against female students are not held accountable for their acts, thus perpetuating these abuses. By their very nature, the institutions of learning in Ghana are very hierarchically structured, such that power, might and right are often easily accorded to tutors over students, administrative staff over students and senior students over their junior counterparts. Most often they abuse the power and influence of their positions with threats of reprisals when the females refuse to consent to their sexual demands. The victimized females suffer untold consequences, which are minimized at every step in this structured power system.