In the editorial of the September/October 2016 issue of the Journal of Teacher Education, Drs. Tatto, Richmond and Carter Andrews (2016) explore the role of research in teacher education.
They write:
“Globally and from a cultural and historical standpoint, teacher education has often involved the resolution of contradictions created by questioning, implementing, and reflecting on the system. The most prominent of these are what the goals and purposes of teacher education should be, who should teach and what should teachers know and be able to do, where and how should teachers be prepared, and how quality can be secured, evaluated, and reported.”
They go on to unpack these issues/contradictions and describe the significance of the papers in the September/October JTE issue to this current problem. JTE Insider has featured interviews with many of these authors on our blog:
The editors note many areas that need more “rigorous, relevant, innovative, and current” research; for example, “moving the field beyond unhelpful dichotomies and overly simplistic ideas and shin[ing] light on the highly complex intellectual and situated activity that is teaching and learning to teach”, in addition to “provid[ing] innovative answers to the challenging questions of who should teach, and where and how should teachers learn to teach” (2016).
To read more about how the authors frame the above questions and describe the connections to the papers in the current issue, please refer to the editorial in the September/October 2016 issue of JTE.