The experiences described above created an environment that allowed my understanding of education to change, not as accretion, but through a revolution. In the following pages, I will describe further anomalies, the accumulation of which eventually forced a paradigm change. My experiences allowed me to acceptance constructivism as a viable framework. In the next section, I describe the setting where my living contradiction became evident and subsequently …show more content…
This push for critical examinations of teacher education is evident in the special interest groups of the American Educational Research Association (See Chapter 2). The research reported within this document reflects the desire, described by Loughran (2004), to examine and learn how a teacher educator may “teach in ways that are commensurate with the learning intentions that they have for their students” (p. 3)
The history of teacher education reflects this continued pressure to evolve. An example of this evolutionary response is evident in the movement of the responsibility of teacher education to universities. 75 years ago the University of Alberta created the first Canadian university-based Faculty of Education where a coordinated effort began to improve the teachers content knowledge and the pedagogy skills (Wimmer & Kasamali, …show more content…
For example, DeLuca and Pitblado (2017) note that teacher education programs are “improving how they engage the next generation of teachers with meaningful ways to foster understanding and respect between cultures” (p. 263). This drive for improvement and evolution is echoed in Darling-Hammond’s (2012) identification of teacher education programs that have made the change from preparing “teacher who can learn from teaching, as well as learning for teaching” (p. 11). She argues that these programs help teachers to be adaptive experts who “know how to continuously expand their expertise, restructure their knowledge and competencies to meet new challenges” (p.