Teacher Professional Development in a Complex and Changing World: Lessons Learned from Model Teacher Education Programs in Transnational Contexts

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges facing our global society is the preparation of teachers to teach in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms worldwide. This chapter reports on the author’s recent research focusing on the preparation of teachers to teach diverse student populations in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms across national boundaries; and in particular, focusing on the preparation of teachers to work with students from historically marginalized, disenfranchised, or underserved groups. Part of a larger study that looks at teacher preparation in four transnational contexts, this chapter focuses on the efforts of a U.S. and a South African teacher education program designed to prepare pre-service teachers to teach in complex classrooms and examines the teachers’ generative change after participating in a professional development institute focused on using writing as a pedagogical tool to affect teacher change. Building on generative change theories and Ball’s Model of Generative Change (2009), the work explores what teachers learn through participation in a professional development that used writing as a pedagogical tool to become metacognitively aware of their own identities and the identities of their students. The findings confirm that teachers’ discourses combine with their subsequent actions to give evidence of shifts in their beliefs and understandings. The chapter concludes by offering writing as a pedagogical tool that can be used by teacher education programs worldwide to assist them in gauging their effectiveness in affecting conceptual growth, depth of understanding, and change in teachers’ attitudes and perceptions concerning the students in their classrooms.