Craig Cheryl J., Prof.
The Best-Loved Self: The “Secret Sauce” of Teaching and Teacher Education?
In recent years, teacher identity, teacher community and the self-study of teaching and teacher educator practices have gained greater attention. A more recent addition to the conversation is the idea of the teacher’s best-loved self-igniting the students’ best-loved selves. In fact, the best-loved self may very well be the “secret sauce” – the special ingredient – fueling passion and excitement in teaching and learning.
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This lecture about Eros – the energy of desire – traverses the world as research conducted in the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Israel and shared at conferences in China and Finland merges with research thought in the United States. The work reaches back into the past and delves into the future as teachers’ personal and professional selves and their relationships with students and other teachers/professors are probed. The lecture’s major take-away point is that teachers and professors are more than the sum of the subject matters they teach and the roles they play in schools and universities. They are the only ones who work face-to-face with students. Hence, they are the sole individuals who can move students through Dewey’s “dead spaces” by professionally engaging them in ways that awaken their passion to learn.
Cheryl J. Craig is a Professor, Endowed Chair and Program Lead for Technology and Teacher Education at Texas A&M University. She is an AERA Fellow and a recipient of the AERA Division B (Curriculum) Lifetime Achievement Award and the Michael Huberman Award for Outstanding Contributions to Understanding the Lives of Teachers. In 2021, she became the first scholar to receive both the Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education Award as well as the Legacy Career Award from AERA’s Division K (Teacher Education). Her most recent honors are the HRA Janusz Korczak Excellence in Education Award and the School of Education and Human Development Senior Scholar Research Excellence Award from Texas A&M University.
Goldring Ellen, Prof.
Teacher Shortages: Explanations, Strategic Initiatives, and Implications for School Leadership
Teacher shortages, a long-standing point of concern in the United States and internationally, are newly exacerbated and heightened by the COVID pandemic. Labor market variation by region, grade level, and subject areas make the trends difficult to track and quantify, but few school systems have avoided current trends of teachers leaving the profession, with far fewer teachers entering teacher education and certification programs.
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The new teacher exiting trends move far beyond the typical hard-to-staff areas of teaching. The trends facing the teaching profession not only impact classrooms, but have implications for the future of school leadership as well.
The goals of this presentation are fourfold: 1) to describe the nature and trends of teachers exiting the profession, and fewer pre-service students entering the profession, 2) to examine the theoretical explanations and arguments for these patterns, including economic and labor markets, the social status of the teaching profession, and organizational working conditions, 3) to present innovative strategies and initiatives responding to these trends, and, 4) to discuss implications for the profession and practice of school leadership.
Montero-Sieburth Martha, Prof.
Reigniting the Passion in Teaching
Using my personal 40-year experience as an educator in various international contexts, together with the findings of extensive research reviews dealing with teacher professionalism, diversity, and inclusion during the past 20 years, this keynote addresses the current professionalism in teacher education and teacher training with respect to the needs of migrant and minority students, from an institutional, interpersonal, and individual perspective.
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Factors such as the number of students leaving school following the COVID pandemic, a war in Europe, growing racism, exclusion of migrants, and the global shortage of teachers in the Global South and Global North, raise questions about what teacher educational institutions can do to attract new talent, advance teachers, provide training, increase adequate working conditions, and make funding available for teachers to engage and remain in this critical profession.
While policies may foster long-term changes in teacher education, it is the interaction between parents and schoolteachers and administrators which creates a sense of belonging for children and families and it is the actual engagement of children that determines their educational chances.
We need to reformulate teacher education to meet these needs, and this demands responses and engagement from teachers, researchers, education professionals, entrepreneurs, and community leaders at the local, comparative, international, and entrepreneurial levels to work in tandem for such reinvention. Indispensable tools are research-based work practices created from the bottom up by teachers, educators and researchers that shape good teachers and identify how different discriminatory practices can be countered in schools, and how the cultures and languages of their classrooms from the stance of the “other” can be understood and honored.
Interculturality is essential as a contextualized learning experience that helps teachers acknowledge their own motivation, biases, positionality, and reflexivity in the process of engaging with students. By using practices grounded in the culture of children and families, the passion to teach and keep the flame alive can be reignited.
Keywords: teacher education, interculturality, research-based practices
Oolbekkink-Marchand Helma, Prof.
Teacher Agency as a Key for Regaining Passion
Changes in and around the educational system have put pressure on teachers over the last years leading to ‘constrained professionalism’. Teachers may experience a lack of professional space leading to less agency in their school context and less motivation for their valuable profession
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In this keynote lecture, we explore the concept of teacher agency in recent studies on teachers’ professional learning. In this exploration we will look at the process of teacher agency, the necessary conditions for teacher agency in the context of professional learning and the possible contribution to teachers’ passion for their profession.
Bio:
Helma Oolbekkink-Marchand is a professor at HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Her research areas are in teacher (educators’) professional development and she is especially interested in teacher agency. She is a member of the International Forum for Teacher Educator Professional Development (InFo-TED), and the chair of the Dutch Teacher Educators Association (Velon).