Jane McNicholl – författare

As economies across the world continue to struggle, there is growing evidence that the vulnerable in society, especially children, are paying the greatest cost in terms of reduced opportunities for access to equitable life chances, the most vital of these being education. Juxtaposing the ongoing failure of education systems to address disadvantage with the widespread belief in the vital importance of the training of teachers raises another issue, namely that remarkably little is known about the effective preparation of pre-service teachers to ameliorate educational disadvantage and, additionally, that little attention appears to be given to this in most teacher preparation programmes. This book attempts to redress this balance and is structured by three themes that focus on national policy, pre-service teacher preparation programmes and individual pre-service teachers. The book reveals a disheartening picture of complex patterns of inequality across and within individual countries, together with an incomplete understanding of the intersectional mechanisms - political, ideological, social and cultural - that link poverty and educational disadvantage. Contributions from five different countries, however, provide evidence of positive signs that interesting, innovative and intellectually sound developments are happening at a local level and offer a valuable contribution to the debate about how teacher education can create levers for change. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Education for Teaching.

As economies across the world continue to struggle, there is growing evidence that the vulnerable in society, especially children, are paying the greatest cost in terms of reduced opportunities for access to equitable life chances, the most vital of these being education. Juxtaposing the ongoing failure of education systems to address disadvantage with the widespread belief in the vital importance of the training of teachers raises another issue, namely that remarkably little is known about the effective preparation of pre-service teachers to ameliorate educational disadvantage and, additionally, that little attention appears to be given to this in most teacher preparation programmes. This book attempts to redress this balance and is structured by three themes that focus on national policy, pre-service teacher preparation programmes and individual pre-service teachers. The book reveals a disheartening picture of complex patterns of inequality across and within individual countries, together with an incomplete understanding of the intersectional mechanisms - political, ideological, social and cultural - that link poverty and educational disadvantage. Contributions from five different countries, however, provide evidence of positive signs that interesting, innovative and intellectually sound developments are happening at a local level and offer a valuable contribution to the debate about how teacher education can create levers for change. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Education for Teaching.

Teacher education has a central role in the improvement of educational systems around the world but what do the teacher educators in universities and colleges actually do? Day-to-day, how do they support the learning and development of the thousands of new teachers we need every year? And why does this matter? Drawing on recent research by the authors, situated in the growing international literature, Transforming Teacher Education puts these questions in cultural and historical context and offers a practical answer in the form of an original agenda for the transformation of current conditions in teacher education with future designs for practice.Viv Ellis and Jane McNicholl argue that the academic work of teacher education needs to be reconfigured in order to stimulate the renewal of the profession of teaching and to develop new modes of educational research that will have impact on practice as well as building the discipline of Education within the universities. They offer suggestions for future designs for teacher education, drawing not only on the latest research in teacher learning and development but from across the social sciences.