SpringerBriefs in Education

This book addresses the complex issues that arise in school-university collaborative action research projects. Employing sociocultural perspectives on examining professional practices of in-service teachers, it examines the complexities of negotiating beliefs, identities and interpersonal relations when educators from two different institutional cultures collaborate. Specifically, the book explores issues such as the discourses that are operative in school-university collaboration for English language teacher education; the way in which beliefs, interpersonal relations and identities are negotiated in school-university partnership; what tensions and complexities operate in collaborative action research discourse in an educational context; and how school-university collaboration can be achieved. The book adopts a critical perspective and provides arguments from a non-Western sociocultural perspective.

This book presents evidence of a longitudinal study in teacher preparation utilizing a threefold multicultural (TFM) model of immersion. It establishes the need for culturally responsive teachers in classrooms, and outlines a proven model that can be employed to prepare them.
Through the TFM model elements, pre-service teacher candidates participated in class-based, cohort fieldwork experience, and reflective journal writings and discussions. Evidence was gathered from pre- and post-questionnaires, interviews, classroom discussions, and journal writings, along with the inclusion of student voices. Pre-service teacher attitudes, beliefs, and degree of cultural responsiveness changed post-study, and candidates became more effective in the classroom, highlighting the effectiveness of the TFM model.
This book is an invaluable resource for universities, under- and postgraduate students, and teachers across the globe as it provides a teacher preparation fieldwork model that helps to prepare culturally responsive teachers for children in any classroom.

This book examines the evolution of schooling from bureaucracy and hierarchy to post-industrial schools, and places teachers’ leadership on center stage at the same time. That is, it asks teachers to deepen leadership in their classrooms and with other teachers. The book carries education and schooling from formal control to a social influence process and addresses the deeply rooted difficulty of focusing too much energy on content. It reveals the strong power of internal and external context and helps educators implant the idea of the school not as a fixed, immutable home, but as a relatively deep social process. It shows how co-leadership comes alive in schools.

Communities of schooling is one of the three most critical developments in education in the last 140 years. When it is linked with the two other fundamental reorientations in schooling - “dispersed ownership” and “constructivist work” - it becomes the most powerful force in education since the 1700s.  This book shows how communities of schooling replace the earlier pillars of “learning as telling,” “hierarchy of control,” and “non-democratic influence.” 

The work also explains the meaning and understanding of school work as a social influence process where all school-based educators exert power, but at different levels. The idea of enhancing individual and collective capacity through interdependency, shared work, and collective responsibility is unpacked.