Anna Houmann
Professor
"The Ideal School - The Ideal World?" : Teacher Education moving towards glocal understanding
Author
Summary, in English
According to Sahlberg (2011) educational reforms in different countries follow similar patterns as well as educational systems. Sahlberg calls this Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) and its symptoms are: More competition within education systems, which leads to accountability (inspections, standardized tests, assessing teacher effectiveness) and less cooperation, increased school choice (charter schools, free schools, private schools) which according to OECD (2012) leads to both a decline in academic results and an increase in school segregation and finally a stronger accountability from schools and related standardized testing of students which leads to an educational system that focus on subjects and content that can be tested.
‘The Ideal School’-project at Lund University serves as a capstone project in a course for teacher students in their final year of teacher education. Its overall objective is to create conditions for the students to sum up previous learning experiences from their ITE and use that as a focal point in creating a vision for a school, a workplace, that they would call ‘ideal’. In connection to Sahlberg (2011) this study focuses on the impact of GERM on ‘The Ideal School’ project and on teacher students dreams and thoughts on necessities and possibilities for public education from both a national and international perspective.
Thirty master-level teacher students, in their final semester, took part in this study. In groups of four to five students, they created websites with an in-depth description of their school. Each description consisted of a school plan (overall objectives and vision) where the orientation of the school (sociological, philosophical, theoretical, pedagogical etc) was stated. The school description also contained: a curriculum with learning outcomes, grading and assessment for one or more subjects; school organization; psychosocial environment with action plans; equality plans focusing intersectional perspectives and an overview on teachers and pupils influence and responsibilities in their everyday work life. The course was carried out in a PBL setting and students queries, questions and curiosity led to both national and international interactions with students, teachers, researchers, guest teachers and lectures in collaboration. The described schools go beyond policy and the administrative and engage with education as experienced. They address contemporary educational issues and recognizes routine rhetoric of judgment and demarcation which are seen as bounded and divisive and counter to ideas of equality, fairness and justice.
This presentation describes ‘The Ideal School’ project from the students’ experiences and discusses the idea about global identity as part of the discourse about cohesion of ‘global’ and ‘local’ in the new type of ‘glocal citizens’, teachers who think ‘globally’ and act ‘locally’. Each poster describes one of the ‘ideal’ schools that the students created, in the above-mentioned study and capstone project. The formation of teacher identity can be understood as the conscious formation of meta-knowledge and meta-skills, allowing for preserving one’s initial values and obtaining a new vision of the world. This structured poster session addresses that learning to learn with and from each other might be an effective way to engage in continuous change and to reach beyond institutional silos in teacher education.
‘The Ideal School’-project at Lund University serves as a capstone project in a course for teacher students in their final year of teacher education. Its overall objective is to create conditions for the students to sum up previous learning experiences from their ITE and use that as a focal point in creating a vision for a school, a workplace, that they would call ‘ideal’. In connection to Sahlberg (2011) this study focuses on the impact of GERM on ‘The Ideal School’ project and on teacher students dreams and thoughts on necessities and possibilities for public education from both a national and international perspective.
Thirty master-level teacher students, in their final semester, took part in this study. In groups of four to five students, they created websites with an in-depth description of their school. Each description consisted of a school plan (overall objectives and vision) where the orientation of the school (sociological, philosophical, theoretical, pedagogical etc) was stated. The school description also contained: a curriculum with learning outcomes, grading and assessment for one or more subjects; school organization; psychosocial environment with action plans; equality plans focusing intersectional perspectives and an overview on teachers and pupils influence and responsibilities in their everyday work life. The course was carried out in a PBL setting and students queries, questions and curiosity led to both national and international interactions with students, teachers, researchers, guest teachers and lectures in collaboration. The described schools go beyond policy and the administrative and engage with education as experienced. They address contemporary educational issues and recognizes routine rhetoric of judgment and demarcation which are seen as bounded and divisive and counter to ideas of equality, fairness and justice.
This presentation describes ‘The Ideal School’ project from the students’ experiences and discusses the idea about global identity as part of the discourse about cohesion of ‘global’ and ‘local’ in the new type of ‘glocal citizens’, teachers who think ‘globally’ and act ‘locally’. Each poster describes one of the ‘ideal’ schools that the students created, in the above-mentioned study and capstone project. The formation of teacher identity can be understood as the conscious formation of meta-knowledge and meta-skills, allowing for preserving one’s initial values and obtaining a new vision of the world. This structured poster session addresses that learning to learn with and from each other might be an effective way to engage in continuous change and to reach beyond institutional silos in teacher education.
Department/s
- Teachers (Malmö Academy of Music)
Publishing year
2019
Language
English
Document type
Conference paper: abstract
Topic
- Educational Sciences
- Other Social Sciences
Conference name
27th EAS Conference/7th European ISME Regional Conference in Malmö, Sweden
Conference date
2019-05-15 - 2019-05-18
Conference place
Malmö, Sweden
Status
Published