Conference Agenda

‘School choice fever’, or the over-heated competition for school choice, has become one of the most pressing concerns of Chinese society. Parents rush to get their children into top schools to give them an edge on a series of entrance examinations. The huge school choice fees and high-priced school district housing turned school choice-making into a game of power and money, which adds a heavy burden on the low- or middle-income families (Wu, 2013). Such fervent competition is believed to have corrupted the educational system and reproduced the social class inequalities (e.g., Liu and Apple, 2016; Zhou et al., 2020). In recent years, the school choice fever has spread from large and medium- sized cities to counties and rural areas of China, where quality educational resources are in striking shortage compared to urban areas. Though school choice is vital for rural families, previous research suggests many of them cannot choose the school they desired due to the restrictions of policies and their lack of economic, social resources.

Bourdieu's theory has been widely applied to school choice research across various context, offering a theoretical framework for understanding the differential school-choosing experiences undergone by families with different SES, the perceptions of school choice policy by parents, and the link between school choice and social reproduction (Ball & Gewirtz, 1997; Khalil & Kelly, 2020; Yoon, 2020). Applying Bourdieu's theory to China's school choice situation is especially relevant given the increasing demand for educational opportunities and the imbalanced distribution of educational resources, which particularly hinders lower socioeconomic status families from meeting their educational needs.

Though Bourdieu’s theory has been widely applied in school choice studies across the world, previous analysis is mainly focused on the middle class and urban contexts, lacking explanations for the motivations of, and strategies used by rural parents, who are generally in lower socioeconomic status in China (Lu & Chen, 2004). Researching the school choice of disadvantaged groups is crucial for understanding the reproduction of social inequalities and protecting the rights of education for marginalised children.Therefore, this ethnographic research aims to fill the gap by investigating Chinese rural families’ school choice. The research aspires to answer the following questions:

• How do rural families articulate their motivations, experiences, and decision-making processes regarding school choice?
• Are there any difference in making school choice among rural families of different socio-economic status?
• What types of support do rural families find beneficial in making school choice decisions?

This study addresses socially-induced inequalities in educational attainment, highlighting how higher education and associated life opportunities are not equally accessible to all societal groups. Parental freedom in educational decision-making plays a crucial role in determining their children’s educational outcomes. These decisions are influenced by educational aspirations, which are strongly correlated with the actual educational achievements of children. In Germany's highly stratified education system, research has underscored the immense importance of parental aspirations during the transition from primary to secondary schools, with early selection processes impacting variously across social classes. While numerous studies, predominantly quantitative, have shown a strong correlation between parental education and aspirations, with a historical focus on the father's occupational status, recent interest has shifted towards exploring the impact of maternal education on educational inequalities. This shift is partly due to mothers – despite egalitarian role models in Germany – still assuming the majority of caregiving and educational responsibilities, but it is also closely linked to social advancements in women's rights to education and employment. Therefore, this study focuses on maternal educational aspirations for their children during the transition to secondary education. An additional crucial factor is the family's migration background. Germany, faced with multiple migration waves, serves as a pertinent context for this study. There are significant educational inequalities between migrants and natives and the European Union plays a pivotal role due to its legal provisions and agreements in migration and free movement. Two EU decisions are particularly relevant for this study: first, the freedom of movement for workers, enabling EU citizens to work and live in other EU countries without needing work or residence permits. According to Eurostat data, 10.2 million EU citizens of working age (3.9%) live in a member state other than that of their nationality, a significant increase from 2.4% in 2009. Second, EU programs fostering education and research mobility, enhancing the diversity of residence rights and conditions for mothers in Germany, thus creating a heterogeneous group of migrant women. Considering migrant experiences is therefore essential in researching educational inequalities and informing targeted educational policies beyond Germany. While the influence of parental educational aspirations on children's actual educational attainment is undisputed, the processes and mechanisms underlying this connection remain unclear. Of high interest is how these aspirations are successfully implemented and why some social groups are better at translating high aspirations into reality than others. This study investigates maternal biographies to holistically capture and qualitatively locate maternal educational aspirations. The study's theoretical framework follows two key implications: rational decision-making and implicit capital transmission. Rational choice approaches center on the idea that individuals consciously make decisions to maximize their utilities, as proposed by G. S. Becker, and invest in human capital to promote long-term household economic success. However, migrants often face lower educational levels, work experience, and language barriers, suggesting a lower human capital as a plausible explanation for disparities between immigrant and native populations. Extending monetary approaches, Pierre Bourdieu's concept of capitals considers various resources, including economic, social, and cultural capital. Bourdieu highlights a crucial oversight in economic theories: the transmission of capital within families and social groups, arguing that cultural capital, encompassing knowledge, skills, and cultural competence, is acquired and passed down within the family through informal processes such as social interactions, upbringing, and cultural practices. In the context of the diverse socioeconomic and migration backgrounds of the mothers in the present study, this theoretical combination establishes a framework for analyzing the interplay between individual choices and societal structures offering significant explanatory potential.

Research background

Parents take the central part in all spheres of their children’s lives, including education. Historically, parents were the ones who educated their offspring or chose the governors for them. In the beginning of 20th century, with the expansion of formal education, however, schools became the primary places to cultivate knowledge and develop skills (Scully, Barbour, & Roberts-King, 2015). Since then, family-school collaboration underwent dramatic changes (Epstein & Sanders, 2002). Initially, there was a clear cut between the roles families and school performed: schools aimed at developing basic literacy, calculation, and sciences, whereas parents taught their children culture, moral and religion (Hill & Taylor, 2004). Today’s curriculum has further expanded to incorporate many aspects which were traditionally considered as a family responsibility to foster, leaving the majority of parents uninvolved (Scully et al., 2015).

Most commonly, parental involvement is identified as a critical factor to accelerate students’ academic achievements. A substantial body of research confirms the relationship between parental involvement and academic achievement (Castro et al., 2015; Hill & Tyson, 2009; Jeynes, 2012); however, the results vary greatly from low-moderate positive to negative and non-existent (Mattingly, Prislin, McKenzie, Rodriguez, & Kayzar, 2002; McNeal, 2001). The consistent positive effects of parental involvement, according to Borgonovi and Montt (2012), are most commonly noted in the US and the UK, where it has been most thoroughly researched. Parental engagement has also been investigated in such varied cultural contexts as Mexico, Korea, Egypt, Iceland, Greece, Hong Kong-China, Italy, New Zealand, Germany, and the Netherlands. However, empirical research on parental involvement in Central Asia is rather limited.

Research problem

OECD report on Parental Involvement in Selected Countries and Economies participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) states that parental involvement might be successfully used as a mean to ease financial pressure on the education budget through minimizing the number of students who fail to complete the annual academic program and need additional subsidizing from the government to repeat the year (Borgonovi & Montt, 2012). Parental involvement is also reported to increase the level of the school completion rate, which is pivotal for children’s future economic success, especially for those coming from low-income families (Barnard, 2004).

Parental involvement is beneficial to practically every group of stakeholders involved in education. Sung (2010), however, claims that effectiveness of parental involvement interventions is closely related to the cultural context it is taking place. A considerable number of countries and policies worldwide have acknowledged the value of parental involvement and committed to launching intervention programs (Domina, 2005), whereas engaging parents in education is still an unexplored terrain in Kazakhstani context. It is yet to be found out what the parental involvement beliefs and practices in Kazakhstan are, which factors affect parents’ choice to become involved in their child’s schooling and what the relationships between parental involvement and academic achievement are.

Aim of the study

The study aims to investigate how the concept of parental involvement is understood and practiced in Kazakhstani context as well as to determine the factors which affect the degree of parental engagement.

Research questions:

1. How is the concept of parental involvement understood by Kazakhstani parents in elementary school?

2. Which types of parental involvement are typically practiced in elementary schools in Kazakhstan?

3. What are the factors which affect the degree of parental involvement in these settings?

4. What is the relationship between parental involvement and students' academic achievement in elementary school in Kazakhstan?

The present work, which is part of a larger doctoral dissertation project, stems from a series of questions regarding the reality of the Italian Primary School experienced by the researcher herself in the dual role of teacher and parent. The critical issues related to the participation of families in school life as well as the apparent lack of incisiveness of the Primary School in making a difference for those children who come from poor educational backgrounds, raised a number of questions about the underlying motivations behind the two phenomena and a possible correlation between the school-family co-responsibility variable and the fight against educational poverty in the Primary School. The main questions that have emerged are:

What are the beliefs, motivations, preconceptions, and emotions that shape the relationality of teachers and parents?

Through building a meaningful school-family dialogue in primary school, is it possible to trigger virtuous mechanisms to counter educational poverty?

A traditional literature review and empirical research were conducted to answer the research questions.

In this regard, after the literature review of publications related to both educational poverty and school-family educational co-responsibility, this study attempts to suggest a possible way forward that puts back at the center: dialogue, openness to the other's point of view, the generative resources of families (Amadini 2013, 2018, 2019; Maia, 2022) as well as the capabilities of each person (Sen, 1990, 2014; Nussbaum, 2006, 2011, 2014) as necessary and no longer procrastinable premises for concrete projects and actions that counter educational poverty, at school. A major source of theoretical inspiration for this work is the Reggio Children Approach (Edwards, Gandini, Forman, 2017), which makes family and community participation a foundation of its pedagogical thinking and educational action in the 0-11 range.

The complexity of the new social and family contexts, the recent pandemic and a widespread crisis of values represent, in general, a challenge for school worldwide. In Italy, the Primary school, in particular, due to a kind of its intrinsic conformation, shows, with some evidence, how complex it is for the actors involved in the educational process to be able to enter into relationships and create positive synergies and shared planning (Dusi, 2009, 2011, 2019, 2022; Epstein, 2018; Pati, 2011, 2019).

In this paper, through empirical research, we investigate school-family co-responsibility and its possible role in combating educational poverty by collecting the voices of parents, by collecting parents and teachers voices through online questionnaires and focus groups and by involving them in a shared micro-projectuality to be realized at school.

This paper will draw upon the first two years of my doctoral studies in order to address an overarching question: how can caring communities be co-created in our schools?

In the context of global conflicts, polarisation of political beliefs, rising inequalities and the climate crisis, learning to live together well and collaborate are arguably the ethical imperatives of our times (Booth, 2018; Samanani, 2022; IEA, 2022). School environments hold the potential to be sites of relational learning, in which both staff and students can learn experientially about coexistence, and how we might collaborate to address common issues. Dewey conceptualises the school environment as a ‘miniature community’: a participatory space, in which we can learn through processes of co-construction and reflecting upon our interactions (1941). As well as a co-learning space, the school community also holds the potential to be an invaluable source of social, emotional and wellbeing support (The Children’s Society, 2023).

Yet the extent to which our education systems are preparing young people to grapple, collaboratively, with the challenges we are facing, and enabling schools to support the social and emotional needs of those within their care, can be called into question by urgent calls to transform education globally in light of the climate crisis, and situated reports of alienation and unhappiness in English state secondary schools (e.g. Higham, 2021; Tannock, 2021; UNESCO, 2021; The Children's Society, 2023; McPherson et al., 2023; Haraway, 1988). In the face of these international and national challenges, this paper draws upon the concepts of care, agency and community to theoretically and empirically consider the role of school communities today.

This paper explores the potential for participation, support and connection at school through the lens of care: a broad and expansive concept that connects how we relate to each other and the world around us (Dobson and Higham, paper in progress). The theoretical framework for this paper also draws upon the literature review from the first year of my doctoral study, in which I brought together literature on care and agency to theorise an agential ethic of care, elevating our capacity to act together in care in education (references include: Tronto, 1993; Owis, 2022; Noddings, 1984; Higham and De Vynck, 2019).

In order to address the central question of how we might co-create caring communities in our schools, this paper will present initial findings from my Economic and Social Research Council-funded doctoral research, which explores: how care and community are lived and experienced in state secondary schools in England at present; barriers to and opportunities for co-creating caring communities in our schools; and emergent possibilities from care and community-centred collaborative research in schools. This field work will provide a situated example of knowing with staff and students in the English context – yet the findings hold international implications, in light of the global challenges we face (Haraway, 1988).

Current societies are characterized by their complexity and globalization, as they must face different global challenges that manifest themselves on a local and regional scale, such as the climate crisis and economic and social inequalities. In order to understand these situations, it is essential to learn how to adapt to these constant changes that seem to become more accentuated over time. Knowledge of these phenomena can help us to understand our attitudes and behaviors in the environment, to contribute so as to benefit it with favorable actions and change those that can harm it. Sustainability competencies are understood as the combination of cognitive skills, practical abilities, and ethical values and attitudes that empower individuals and communities to contribute to sustainability (Bianchi et al., 2022; Brundiers et al). The European Framework of Sustainability competences GreenComp was recently published in order to promote and enrich educational programs so that students develop habits, processes and attitudes in favor of sustainability and public health (Bianchi et al, 2022).

This research aims, on the one hand, to inform about the diversity of competences that have been assessed and plenty of instruments that have been designed, validated and applied to measure these competencies in school context and, in the other hand, to communicate about the role of climate school assemblies in the sustainability competencies students’ achievement (EDUCLIMAD project). The EDUCLIMAD project aims to implement school assemblies for the climate as an innovative, democratic and collaborative methodology to learn, deliberate, make informed decisions and search for solutions in a critical and committed way, to deal with climate change and promote sustainability at a local and regional level. Therefore, the school climate assemblies are considered as an innovative, democratic and collaborative methodology to learn, deliberate, make informed decisions and seek solutions in a critical and committed manner to address climate change and promote local and regional sustainability, as well as to achieve the competences in sustainability, established in the European GreenComp framework (Bianchi et al, 2022).

The main research questions guiding this doctoral research are: 1) What are the different sustainability competencies’ assessment approaches and tools used in Secondary Education? 2)How can effective assessment tools be designed to measure students' sustainability competencies?; 3) What is the influence of school climate assemblies in the development of sustainability competencies amongst students?. Following the PRISMA guidelines, a systematic review was conducted related to sustainability competencies’ assessment in secondary education. The evaluation resources used in the different investigations are interviews, discussion groups, workshops, drawings and pre and post questionnaires, being the latter the most used to evaluate sustainability competencies among students. These results also reflect the current state of evaluation and offer interesting implications for educators, teachers and researchers working on the development and acquisition of sustainability competencies in secondary education. Moreover, provides detailed information on the influence of climate assemblies on sustainability competencies’ assessment among students through a pre- and post-test instrument related on sustainability behaviors and contextualized situations related to the sustainability competences proposed by the European GreenComp framework (2022). To sum up, this research addresses the challenge of designing competence-based Education for Sustainability, where clear pedagogical and assessment strategies must be defined, tested and documented on how learners develop these competencies to contribute to a collective sustainable social transformation of our societies, specifically focusing on educational context.

In France and within the European Union, representative democracies are in crisis due to the rise of abstention and the erosion of public confidence in the institutions. The COVID health crisis and the social distancing measures have contributed to the deterioration of physical interactions in social life. Researches on civic engagement and political participation in educational sciences and psychology tell us what engagement is, what representations individuals or institutions have of civic rights and duties (Civic Knowledge Framework, 2023). Beyond these researches, how can research contribute to positive social transformation? What challenges awaits the researcher wanting to use research as a transformative channel? Grounded in a multidisciplinary approach, the research evoked in this paper seeks to accompany changes in posture, both among elected officials and citizens, at a municipal level to recreate a participatory culture and repair frayed local social bonds. It is a qualitative longitudinal research and we have been invited into this municipality via the mayor and some of the elected representatives to follow a local experimentation on a new participation project. This is a local policy set by the elected council to involve citizens in collective projects for the municipality. Using institutional analysis (Lourau, 1970), psychosociological studies on group, crisis and the collective imaginary (Guist-Desprairies, 2009), and certain studies in political science (Amnå&Ekman, 2014), we have designed a framework to accompany a participatory council made of volunteer citizens and elected officials, and we try to help them understand and overcome conflicts and contradictions to recreate a participatory culture. The theoretical framework is based on the institutional socio-clinical approach that “aims to think together about the singular futures of subjects (their practices, their subjectivities) and institutional and political transformations.” (Monceau, 2013).

It is necessary to say that I have been following the participative council since December 2022 and a lot of steps have been taken. At the beginning of the participation project, the municipality paid a service provider to apply a new method of scientific mediation inspired by the work of Bruno Latour. The citizens gathered for the workshops. A part of those citizens became members of the participative council that emerged from the first period of the participation project.

The pandemic experience has solidified the knowledge of how crucial it is to periodically pursue additional education and possess soft skills, as well as being able to adjust to changing circumstances (WEF, 2020; Deloitte, 2020).

The basic concept of human capital is typically used to frame discussions about involvement in continuing education, which is meant to accumulate this form of capital and so to give profits to its owner (Korshunov, Shirkova, Gorbunova, 2023). Therefore, researchers in continuing education concentrate on adult education providers and the demographics of those who take advantage of these opportunities (Korshunov, Gaponova, Gaponova, 2019). They also study the effects of additional professional training on salary (Travkin., 2014), job satisfaction (Karmaeva, Zakharov, 2021), and the smoothness of the education and employment transition (Du Bois-Reymond, Blasco, 2003; Machin, McNally, 2007).

However, taking into account the process of creating one's own educational trajectory is overlooked. For example, education can be used to "upgrade" a current position (either on one's own initiative or at the request of an employer), but it can also be used as a means of sidestepping to occupy a different position within the labor market's structure (Kosyakova, Y., & Bills, D. B., 2021). It turns out that the cross-sectional approach does not allow us to see structural changes: from whatever sector of work people are obliged to retrain and where they are heading, which path and level of education is more self-sufficient, or, conversely, demands (or stimulates) continued education.

Vocational schools in Portugal began their activities in 1989, but other forms of education influenced the impact of the creation of the current configuration to varying degrees. According to Martinho (2006), industrial education made it possible to rethink the education system in Portugal, firstly to bring the country into line with European educational standards and then to enable it to train staff who were essential to an industrial society with an impact on economic development. The industrial schools fulfilled the mission of training technical staff for the industries, also enabling the qualification of some young people who, for economic reasons, had to access the labour market without long academic training. Despite these advantages, they experienced the contradiction of being a less prestigious form of education than high school, which is why, after 25 April 1974, they were challenged and reconfigured (Alves, 2000; Pascoal, 2002; Afecto, 2022). Considering the latest study carried out by Costa, Leite & Monteiro (2023), one of the findings revealed that industrial education had a major influence on the creation of vocational schools, but in a more inclusive, better distributed, and less discriminatory way (Azevedo, 2008). Based on this background, the aim of this research is to understand the contributions that industrial education advocated and transferred to the current vocational education policy and the possible influences that this modality had during the molding of the policy to create vocational schools (Portugal, 1989). The study also aims to investigate other aspects from a historical point of view, namely issues related to the negative social image commonly associated with vocational education, and whether it has its origins in industrial schools. The main theoretical references mobilized for the study arise, as previously highlighted, from the very nature of the problem, the objectives and research questions, as well as the researcher's own epistemological positioning. The context of the investigation, in this case professional schools (PE) and vocational education in other educational institutions, was based on texts by Azevedo (2008; 2017), Doroftei (2020) and Barbosa (2023), which allowed justifying the interest of the study and understand the locus of the research as well as guide the possible theoretical framework. The analysis of this research is based on the perspective of the Whole School Approach (WSA), we use the Reference Framework of Skills for Democratic Culture, volume 3, published by the European Council (2018c), Alves & Varela (2012), Dewey (1976, 1997), Freire (1987), Rosvall & Nylund (2022) and Branco (2014). The theoretical framework defined for the analysis in the study also draws on the conceptual framework of Young (2010) and Baker et al. (2009) on issues of equality, including equity in access to education, considering this as “indispensable for the full exercise of capabilities, choices and freedoms in an information age” and for the “exercise of global citizenship”. The challenge stands out as equal access to educational paths (Lappalainen, Nylund, & Rosvall, 2019), maintenance in these respective paths and possibilities of continuity in the next path (job market; higher education; others). To what refer to Social Justice, the framework mobilises the concepts of Fraser (2002), as it links two dimensions of the social order, the dimension of distribution and the dimension of recognition, a situation reaffirmed by Sampaio & Leite (2016) when refer to teaching and learning in their democratic dimension, with the challenge being fair distribution.

Theoretical framework. Generic skills have attracted widespread interest in research. They have been conceptualized and operationalized in various ways, however, in this study generic skills are understood as a broad set of higher-order thinking skills such as communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills needed by citizens of 21st century in all professional fields (Tuononen et al., 2022). In the higher education context, generic skills have been considered as central skills for students, for example, in terms of success in both studies and working life after graduation (e.g., Tuononen et al., 2019). It has also been noted that generic skills are brought up as one of the key learning goals in various policy documents regarding higher education (Strijbos et al., 2015; Tuononen et al., 2022). Thus, assessment of higher education students’ generic skills has been increasingly emphasized internationally, for example by such organizations as the OECD (see e.g., Van Damme, 2022). In summary, it can be stated that alongside domain-specific skills higher education is expected to produce universally needed generic skills for its students.

Despite the above, several studies have found that there is remarkable variation in higher education students’ generic skills (e.g., Evens et al., 2013; Hyytinen, 2015; Ursin et al., 2021). The socioeconomic background of students has been found to be one of the factors explaining this variation among first-year undergraduate students (Kleemola et al., 2022). From the point of view of educational (in)equality, it is worth considering if socioeconomic background is reflected in learning outcomes, such as generic skills, even in higher education. However, there is still relatively little information on the topic at the level of higher education, especially regarding students at the final stage of their undergraduate studies. Previous studies on the generic skills of higher education students have often focused on first-year students (e.g., Evens et al., 2013; Kleemola, 2023; van der Zanden et al., 2019). Additionally, more research is needed on the extent to which socioeconomic background is associated with the generic skills of students in different higher education sectors. In the Finnish context, previous research has, for example, shown that there are differences in the mastery of generic skills between students from universities and universities of applied sciences (UASs). This can partly be explained by the different educational and socioeconomic backgrounds of the students representing these two higher education sectors (Ursin et al., 2021).

Objectives. Since the assumption and universal goal is that students achieve certain generic skills in higher education, it is important to investigate in more detail which factors explain the variation of generic skills between the individual students. The aim of this study is to explore associations of Finnish final-stage undergraduate students’ generic skills with their socioeconomic background. In particular, the study aims to examine the extent to which socioeconomic factors explain the differences in generic skills between students from two higher education sectors. In this study, we focus on specific three generic skills that students are expected to learn during their higher education studies: analysis and problem-solving (i.e., the ability to utilize, analyze, and evaluate the information provided and the ability to reach a conclusion), writing effectiveness (i.e., the ability to elaborate and to provide arguments that are well-constructed and logical), and writing mechanics (i.e., the ability to produce a well-structured text).

Research in higher education (HE) has become a centre of attention for the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination as well as for its effectiveness for higher education institutions (HEIs) and contribution to societal progress (Altbach, 2013). Nevertheless, in the modern world research development is seen as a complex and multifaceted process. It requires comprehensive understanding of globalisation and internationalization trends, geopolitical circumstances, national and organisational conditions including individual aspects and cultural contexts when policymakers are involved in adopting specific reforms and making transformations in HE. It is especially important for developing countries in which universities are seen traditionally as places of teaching, training, and service (Altbach, 2009). Yet with increasing competition among HEIs globally and regionalally, the emphasis on integrating research development and knowledge production at universities intensified.

In the context of Uzbekistan, national research policies play an instrumental role in shaping the research landscape of the country because HEIs are centrally controlled by the government (Ruziev & Burkhanov, 2018). Yet, over the years the HE sector witnessed the erosion of physical infrastructure and human capital because of decades of neglect and underinvestment after the country gained independence in 1991 (Ruziev & Mamasolieva, 2022). Driven by a common belief that economic growth is highly influenced by a nation’s ability to compete in the global knowledge economy (Lane, 2012), the government of Uzbekistan also started to develop research capacity of HEIs and make investments in research infrastructure with an ambitious plan of establishing an education hub in Central Asia by 2030 and creating the foundation for so-called ‘‘The Third Renaissance Initiative’’ (President Decree No. 5847, 2019). In view of these developments, this research study focuses on the government’s initiatives since 2017, a turning point in the liberalization of many sectors, including HE. These initiatives aim to enhance research productivity, stimulate innovation, and drive economic growth within the country and encourage university academics in their pursuit of research engagement and raising research productivity.

This research project aims to examine the effects of internationalization efforts in Uzbekistan, specifically regarding how academics produce research. The objective is to investigate various internationalization initiatives such as the introduction of research metrics and global rankings, international collaboration, academic mobility, and international publication, and how they influence the research landscape and orientation of HE in Uzbekistan. An important aspect of this study involves the changing boundaries of the academic work and profession in response to national research policies, including influences from the Soviet era, Western norms, and nation-building on academic practices. By exploring these aspects, the research aims to identify any shifts and tensions within the current academic environment, highlighting the challenges that need addressing to enhance research engagement at universities.

Using a qualitative research method, this study aims to gain insights into changes and continuities experienced by academics in Uzbekistan. The research addresses three main questions: 1) What are the main international trends observed in the higher education sector? 2) How are these internationalization agendas translated and adapted to the context of the strong Soviet legacy and current geopolitical tensions? 3) How do Uzbek academics experience the changing research landscape and what strategies do they adopt in planning and conducting their research and publications?

The study will utilize the sociology of quantification and Stephen Ball's (2004) performativity to expand understanding of changes and continuities in the current academic environment and to gain insights into how the quantification of performance (control by numbers) impact the behavior and practices of academics. The theoretical framework will aid in comprehending how internationalization trends are contextualized to accommodate the Soviet legacy and understand the mechanisms through which these changes occur.

Teacher quality and quality teaching are crucial when we talk about quality matters in education. It has been exemplified by policy developments in many countries, including Australia and the US, through the adoption of standards-based reforms relating to teachers and teaching (Lewis et al., 2019). A variety of university-based teacher training and professional development initiatives are emerging worldwide in response to the policy vision. While the attempt at standardization can never be fully realized in practice, as they can never use the easy-to-measure characteristics to assess complex, ever-changing classrooms with unavoidable uncertainty (Biesta, 2014). This explains a turn toward practice-based teacher education (Zeichner, 2012) and a shift from passive and intermittent professional development to that which is “active, consistent, based on the teaching environment, supported by peers in a professional learning community” (Stewart, 2014, p. 28).

Educational Design Research (EDR) is a genre of research that fits the substantive aspects outlined above, for its being situated in real educational contexts, focusing on the design and testing of interventions, using mixed methods, involving multiple iterations, stemming from a partnership between researchers and practitioners, yielding design principles; and concerned with an impact on practice (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012). With these characteristics, EDR can involve teachers and researchers collaborating throughout the process of studying teaching and learning in a specific subject area, to improve both teaching practices and theoretical understandings through cycles of testing and refining (McKenney & Reeves, 2019). Accordingly, we can assume that EDR can be a form of teacher professional learning during this process (Juuti, et al., 2017). It has been proven in some studies (e.g., Dunn et al., 2019; Lim, 2022) but there is no paper that reviews the studies on this topic.

It is not easy to improve teacher quality and teaching quality. According to the review, using EDR as a viable alternative can change teachers and their practices over a long-term, deliberately designed process. As a counterbalance to the performance-based professional development in the past that is evidence-based, manageable, and sustainable, this research advocates more integrated, job-embedded professional learning, demonstrating “the power of protest” as seen in teacher education discourse. In this study, we suggest design heuristics or learning principles for EDR or other EDR-like professional learning initiatives that can be used by policymakers, teacher educators, and school leaders. A further contribution of this research is to examine the existing knowledge base of EDR and build up knowledge of EDR as a form of teacher professional learning. This can inform future research to systematically explore teachers’ learning in the context of EDR or to notice teachers' learning as a vital aspect alongside their EDR studies.

Modern curriculum making can be perceived as a social practice undertaken in different sites across the education system (Priestley et al., 2021). Research has shown that teachers are defined as key actors in education reform, and they are expected to participate in curriculum work and to act as agents of change (Priestley et al., 2012). Thus, participatory approaches to macro curriculum making and involvement of teachers in reform work is becoming increasingly common internationally (Almeida & Viana, 2023; Soini et al., 2021). Yet, a well-known issue in participatory approaches is that they can give the illusion of symmetrical relationships. The process can create the appearance of equal influence among the participating actors, when the reality is that government institutions have more power, which gives them more influence over the outcome (Vaillancourt, 2009). Thus, such processes can conceal hierarchies and power structures that are inherent in them. The current study focuses on a central part of macro curriculum making, namely government-appointed curriculum committees consisting of teachers and subject experts who work alongside government officials in the development of a new curriculum. The article zooms in on a recent curriculum making process in Norway. In 2020, Norway introduced a new national curriculum, called the Knowledge Promotion Reform 2020 (LK20), where co-construction and partnerships with the education sector were important policy elements of the development process. From the literature, we know that national curriculum development processes are highly governed and controlled by central authorities (Humes, 2022; Levin, 2008; Westbury et al., 2016), and teachers’ role in such processes is not always clear. We also know that even when teachers are involved in macro curriculum making, they do not necessarily have any significant influence over the outcome of the process (Finnanger & Prøitz, forthcoming; Theodorou et al., 2017). Thus, the aim of the study is to investigate how documents present the teachers’ mandate, and to explore how these findings resonate with the teachers’ understanding of the mandate and their perceived contribution to the final national curriculum. The research questions that have guided the investigation are:

How is teachers’ mandate as national curriculum makers described in documents? How does this resonate with teachers’ understanding of the mandate and their perception of contribution to the final national curriculum?

Theoretically, the study is guided by the understanding that curriculum making is a social practice. Modern curriculum theorists argue that curriculum making is a complex, interactive, non-linear, social practice that occurs and flows across various contexts (Alvunger et al., 2021; Priestley et al., 2021). It is a dynamic and transactional process of interpretation, mediation, negotiation, and translation, involving different actors, activities and sites across the education system (Alvunger et al., 2021). Central to this heuristic is that curriculum making happens in sites, and that it is the type of activity and not the involved actors, that determines the site. This way of conceptualizing curriculum making infers that actors can move between sites. The process is shaped by the beliefs, values, and professional knowledge of the involved actors, as well as by their room to manoeuvre and the interplay between actors, contested spaces, contextual factors, and power relations (Alvunger et al., 2021).

Have AI tools found their way into schools using the freely accessible ChatGPT tool as an example? How eagerly do students use the new tools for their school work? How uncertain are teachers about their role as initiators and facilitators of the learning process?

AI tools have not only existed since February 2023, when the ChatGPT tool was made available to the public. Zhang & Begum Aslang (2021) and Feng & Law (2021) summarized several years researching the use of AI applications in schools and universities and their implications for education. Zhang & Begum (2021) report having reviewed 40 empirical studies on AI in education published between 1993 and 2020. Feng & Law (2021) reviewed more than 1800 articles on artificial intelligence in education from 2010 and 2019.

However, since the release of the ChatGPT tool, the topic has reached a wider audience and gained a new emotional intensity. People of different professions, ages, and educational backgrounds have felt compelled to engage with it more intensively. Artificial intelligence has become part of our everyday lives. It has changed them, and it will most likely continue to change them. VanLehn (2011) was able to show that personalised, digital 1:1 support and fine-grained feedback lead to similar learning outcomes as human support. The change that has already begun has aroused emotions such as curiosity, enthusiasm for the new possibilities, but also fears about whether and how to keep up with the change. In many cases, schools have also responded with concerns about the role of the teacher and the learning effectiveness of school homework in the future. The uncertainty seems justified. After all, the ChatGPT chatbot is a technology that can process natural human language and generate a response, and it can be used for tasks such as content generation in both native and foreign languages, explanation, translation, and much more. Even if the tasks are not part of everyday school life, it is assumed here that the AI tools are used in a school context at home. This has an influence on the institutionalised educational processes, which are not independent of the processes that take place outside. The question of how their benefits affect learning outcomes remains under-researched (de Witt, 2023).

In this contribution I will first present the theoretical background. Then I will present the first results of the survey I conducted for my PhD thesis. The aim of the survey is to take a closer look at the use of ChatGPT among students.

Due to the high number of young vulnerable people in need, residential care still occupies an important place in the Czech social care system, even though it is often criticised by all. The adoption of Act No. 189/2016 Coll. has renewed the discussion on the current form of institutional re-educational care, which has been ongoing in the Czech Republic for several decades. The widest possible range of educational resources is being sought, and forms of appropriate institutional action are constantly being discussed.

The paper presents my dissertation that contributes to the above-mentioned discussion by turning to the past, as it examines older models and looks for the possible application of some of their elements in the contemporary context of re-education practice. The dissertation presents projects from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that were successful in their time. This historical period was chosen as it was a time of all kinds of experiments. A close examination of the older projects shows that their founders often had to face the same challenges that accompany today's institutional re-educational care of a child. The same issues were present and had to be addressed so studying the operation of historical projects can provide examples of good practice in re-education even for today. The dissertation, in the form of qualitative historical research, follows the development of institutional care for at-risk children. The focus is on a detailed description of eight innovative projects created at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The paper focuses on Junior Republic (USA), Ford Republic (USA), Little Commonwealth (UK), Baumgarten (Austria), Boys Town (USA), House of Orphans (Poland), Gorky Colony (Soviet Union), and Summerhill (Great Britain) – as these models are only briefly described in Czech scholarly literature.

Looking back and describing successful solutions to care issues in the past can contribute to the current discussion on the effective form of institutional care for at-risk youth in the Czech Republic. To achieve its goals the research relies on the combination of a direct method and a multiple case study. For triangulation, various primary data sources are used. Topics that have emerged in the past relate to the present situation via Standards of Quality of Care (2015), with 17 inspection reports from residential institutions caring for at-risk children, and 17 annual educational plans.

When exploring the history of care for vulnerable young people with focus on selected residential care projects from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries I ask these questions:

• On what pedagogical concepts were the projects based?
• What elements of successful re-education emerged in the projects?
• What elements of successful re-education were specific to a particular project? Why?
• What elements of successful re-education can work in contemporary residential care education in our country?

To meet these objectives:

• To describe the history of care for vulnerable young people up to the mid-1920s.
• To describe inspiring projects from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries dealing with the re-education of children and young people.
• To identify common features that made the projects successful.
• To find possible links between inspirational projects from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and current practice in education in residential care

The role of history of education as an organizational framework for educational knowledge has been pivotal in the creation and diffusion of educational knowledge. However, there remains a gap in empirical research concerning the semantic structure of history of education knowledge and its transnational transmission. This study addresses this gap by employing complex network science and natural language processing techniques to construct semantic networks for history of education textbooks in German and Chinese. The goal is to explore the early development of the discourse system within the field of "history of education" and investigate the aspects of stability and variability in the process of transnational transmission.

This abstract is based on a a PhD project to be conducted by three researchers from the KU Leuven. The PhD Project is interdisciplinary, bringing together the fields of Pedagogy, Arts and the Sciences. In doing so it hopes to make connections that go beyond just an enriched curriculum, and that are to be found in the very fiber of the different disciplines. It is this what a pragmatic view on STEAM entails, to avoid a bifurcation between the Sciences and the Arts and see them both as sensory ways of being in and getting to know the World.

The starting point of this research project is not to investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of STEAM education as a vehicle for the acquisition of predefined learning outcomes. Rather this project aims to investigate how STEAM, as a composition of science and arts, carries the potential to reconsider it through the lens of an Education of the Senses (EoS). Approaching STEAM as an educational design that activates students' imaginative engagement with the world and with the future, and that allows the student and the teacher to get away from a predefined understanding of it. Theoretically, this project builds further onto the sociological approach of Bruno Latour (2018), starting from the claim that today’s environmental and social problems are a consequence of the irreversible destruction we ourselves have brought to the world we inhabit through our post-enlightenment endeavours. Hence, what we take away from Latour is that we will have to learn to relate to the world differently. Investigating this new form of learning is precisely what we want to perpetuate with our refashioning of STEAM.

As Dutch educationalist Gert Biesta (2006) asserts, to find sustainable pedagogical answers to these ecological and social issues, it is thus needed to look at educational practices through a different lens. To do so, we want to distance ourselves from education as being singularly associated with 'learning', as often happens, by rethinking ‘the school’ as a place where one is allowed to start relating to the world and society in the face of daring challenges. The school is then an intermediary space where efficiency logics are held at a (relative) distance to make way for questions such as "what is the subject under study trying to say to me?" (Vansieleghem, 2021). In this way students may develop a caring sensitivity to said world.

To realise such a world-oriented approach of education, this research project wants to look at a more general educational reconceptualization of pedagogy that goes beyond the limits of instrumentalist logic, on the basis of pragmatic ideas such as those of the educationalist scholar John Dewey and the importance he places on practice-bound learning through experiencing.

Drawing on pragmatic frameworks linked to experiential learning, particularly influenced by John Dewey, our focus extends beyond conventional socialization, emphasizing an education centered on familiarity with and sensitivity to significant matters. Building on this, our second objective [RO2] takes a practical turn, aiming to conceptualize education as an 'Education of the Senses' (EoS). This involves developing protocols and maxims, integrating the efficacy of lab and studio practices through an ArtScience co-creation. Such a convergence of scientific and artistic methods contributes to the formulation of a comprehensive EoS thinking framework. In pursuit of our third objective [RO3], we aim to devise a concrete curricular design for a radical reimagining of STEAM education rooted in EoS. This design, crafted collaboratively with field practitioners, aims to offer a practical and applicable STEAM solution for Flemish schools, with broader implications for addressing global environmental and social challenges.

Internationalisation in higher education was primarily defined as the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions or ways of delivery of tertiary education (Knight, 2003). Hence, internationalisation can be assumed either as a response to globalisation or as an agent of globalisation itself. In this context, the internationalisation of teacher education, which is considered a sub-field in teacher education, seems to derive from international/global education in general and particularly from the internationalisation of higher education (Koh et al., 2022). It emerges together with the recognition of teaching as a cosmopolitan work and profession amidst critical and economic relations to flows, contexts and consequences linked to the globalisation of dimensions centred on economy and culture (Luke, 2004). Apparently, the internationalisation of teacher education has become imperative in the last decades, with important global players in education, such as UNESCO and the OECD, devoting themselves to developing and endorsing policies to enhance education and societies (Sieber & Mantel, 2012). Obviously, while internationalisation is comprehended as a means to develop society as a whole, in light of an international competence that reveals to be critical to the cultural, technological, economic and political health of nations, institutions and individuals (Yemini et al., 2017), different organisations influencing its processes certainly detain varied, if not opposing, purposes (Sieber & Mantel, 2012). Within this scenario, more recently, the internationalisation debate has also shed light on a different nuance – the idea of internationalisation at home, i.e., the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal curriculum for all students in the scope of domestic learning environments (Beelen & Jones, 2015). Internationalisation at home is realised as promoting the development of international/global understanding and intercultural skills (Wächter, 2016) while equipping students with transversal competencies essential to thrive in a globalised world (Beelen & Jones, 2015). The approached theoretical framework is the basis of the project DITE – Diverse Internationalisation of Teacher Education, which focuses on the element of internationalisation (at home) to increase the capabilities of future teachers by sensitising Teacher Education students to international perspectives. The project network comprises six partners, namely, two networks specialised in the theme of internationalisation, and four higher education institutions spread over three countries - Portugal, Spain and Poland. In the project's first phase, an empirical study was led to explore the current state of the internationalisation of teacher education in the participating higher education institutions. In this communication, we explore the results of this study, organising how different stakeholders (course directors, teacher educators, students, etc.) conceptualise internationalisation and associated values, challenges, enablers and barriers.

In this presentation, a developmental case based on a project named The Theory-Practice Balance in Teacher Education (TEPATE) will be introduced. The project is funded by Finland’s Higher Education Institutions Institutional Cooperation Instrument (HEI ICI) that supports cooperation projects between higher education institutions in Finland and the developing world. The project started in 2020 and will run for four years, ending in August 2024. The TEPPATE project is designed to tackle the problems related to alarmingly low learning outcomes in Mozambique by enhancing the theory-practice balance of teacher education at two Mozambican Higher Education Institutions: Universidade Pedagógica de Maputo (Pedagogical University of Maputo) and Instituto Superior de Educação e Tecnologia–One World (ISET One world). By doing this, the project contributes to the aim of the Government of Mozambique to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 4 of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. In other words, TEPATE project aims at improving the quality and relevance of initial teacher training at the Mozambican partner HEIs and by so doing, support the efforts of the Mozambican government to improve the overall quality of education in the country.

The teaching profession requires theory-based pedagogical thinking, which is embedded in the teacher's daily activities (cf. Zanting et al., 1998). Often, teacher training is considered too theoretical and does not provide graduating teachers with sufficient pedagogical skills to apply learner-centered pedagogy in practice (Allen & Wright, 2013; Hoy & Woolfolk, 1989). The TEPATE project focuses on improving the balance between theory and practice in teacher education in Mozambican partner universities, and the presentation focus on teaching practice. Internships are an essential part of teacher education, as they provide prospective teachers with an authentic environment in which to practice the pedagogical skills.

In Mozambique, school attendance has improved significantly over the last decade, but unfortunately school completion rates and learning outcomes have not improved at the same pace (Chimbutane, 2013). According to the most recent household budget survey, Inqurito sobre Orcamento Familiar (IOF) 2014/2015, two thirds (68%) of young people aged 13-17 do not complete primary education (UNICEF, 2020). Moreover, the Ministry of Education and Human Development (MINEDH) published similar statistics, showing that in 2017 only 29 percent of all students had completed primary school and 13 percent had completed secondary school (MINEDH, 2019). In addition, 94 percent of girls attend primary school, but more than half drop out of primary school before completing the 5th grade (MINEDH, 2020).

The analysis confirms that the older the child becomes, the less likely he or she will stay on track, with the possibility of not catching up to their more successful peers diminishing every year. This may lead to the loss of motivation, one of the reasons for lack of attendance, age-appropriate skills and knowledge, which in turn leads to school dropout leads.

The teacher Education System in Mozambique is guided by the general principles of education, culture, training, balanced and inclusive human development where everyone has equal rights. It is responsible for promoting education, as an integral part of educational action in the terms defined by the Constitution of the Republic, aiming to provide fundamental skills, general knowledge about the world around them, and the means to progress in work and lifelong learning. This system is guided by the pedagogical principles of capacity development and personality in a harmonious, balanced, and constant way, as well as the Freedom to learn, teach, research, and disseminate culture, thought, art and knowledge. Currently the whole country has 15 Universities, six state universities and nine private universities.

Making appropriate use of the students’ home languages (HLs) has been one of the greatest challenges English as an additional language (EAL) teachers face in linguistically diverse classrooms (Flores & Aneja, 2017; Hall & Cook, 2012). Because of the lack of research on HL use in Nordic contexts, but also because the topic is rarely discussed in teacher training programs, teachers often assume that students prefer an environment that makes little to no use of their HL (Haukås et al., 2021; Shin et al., 2020). Research undertaken thus far in Norwegian settings illustrates that while HL use is quite prevalent as the medium of instruction, teachers feel guilty about its presence (Neokleous & Ofte, 2020). However, with classrooms becoming increasingly multilingual and multicultural, students along with their teachers do not seem to share a common language and are encouraged to adopt a multilingual approach to teaching with HLs being actively present (García & Wei, 2014; Lin & He, 2017). The updated Norwegian curriculum for the subject of English in primary education (Norwegian Directorate of Education & Training, 2020) states that the students’ HL should have a role in the classroom particularly in identifying linguistic similarities and differences between two languages. However, it does not state the classroom purposes and functions it should serve. As a result, Neokleous and Krulatz (2018) argued that this dearth of more specific guidelines can prompt teachers to adopt an approach that favours almost-exclusive usage of the TL (Neokleous & Krulatz, 2018). Trying to unearth Norwegian teacher attitudes towards HL usage in the classroom, Neokleous and Ofte’s (2020) study revealed that while the four teacher participants acknowledged the potential of HL usage, they also felt guilty about making recourse to Norwegian, particularly since their reported use did not always reflect their classroom behaviours.

The lack of empirical studies that would shed light on how teachers should foster multilingual approaches has left teachers confused as to whether they should use the majority language in the classroom or not and for what purposes (Singleton & Aronin, 2019). The purpose of this presentation is to broaden the research lens by focusing on the perception of EAL in-service teachers and students on HL use and the pivotal role teachers could serve in adopting multilingual pedagogies. Thus far, studies venturing to explore the topic in Norwegian settings primarily focused on the teacher perspective through surveys and questionnaires (Haukås et al., 2021; Krulatz, et al., 2016; Neokleous & Krulatz, 2018). Neokleous and Ofte’s (2020) study was the first study that brought classroom and interview data together to explore how in-service teachers perceived HL integration, compared this perception to their actual practice, and also how they interpreted the lack of clear teaching guidelines in the curriculum. This presentation delves deeper into the teacher perspectives on the topic but also explore the student voice. The study explores the attitudes of four teachers and their students in EAL classrooms situated in geographically different parts of Norway. Trying to elicit the views of in-service EAL teachers and young EAL learners in Norway, the purpose of this article is to address the following questions: a) What do students think of the general presence but also their teachers’ use of the HL in the classroom? b) What is the value of using the HL as a resource for learning English as seen by the participants? c) How do in-service EAL teachers in multilingual environments address the presence of different HLs in the classroom? Do they make recourse to the students’ HLs? If so, when?

This study is part of a larger project that investigates how teacher educators (TEs) conceptualize/operationalize teacher-educating for social justice in university-based teacher preparation programs in the United States. We intentionally focus this sub-study on the state of Florida within the US because of ongoing divisive concepts legislation to fight against “woke” indoctrination, defunding and censoring ideas related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs higher education and K-12 schools. Examples of this include signing legislation banning DEI initiatives, eliminating books from school libraries, and prohibiting public school educators from discussing systemic racism and gender. While attacks to this degree may not be widespread in Europe, the concept of “woke/wokism” has been used with right-wing media outlets and conservative parties in the UK (Cammaerts, 2022). The state of Florida is, in some ways, the canary in the coal mine—a warning of possible danger to come for TEs and teacher preparation programs in other countries who may, in the future, experience censorship legislation from their conservative politicians.

Two research questions guide the study: 1) What are the experiences of Florida TEs with self-identified commitments to equity and social justice? 2) How has the current political climate in the state of Florida impacted TEs' commitments to social justice and equity in teacher preparation programs? Consistent with the conference’s theme about education in an age of uncertainty, this study sheds light on Florida TEs’ efforts to teach for social justice amidst a time of unpredictability and fear. As they navigate this uncertainty, this study can help the field better understand how these TEs continue to persist with critical hope to work toward a better society despite the challenges they face.

More than “what, when, or how teachers do things,” teaching for social justice is connected to “how teachers think about their work and interpret what is going on in schools and classrooms; how they understand competing agendas, pose questions, and make decisions; how they form relationships with students; and how they work with colleagues, families, communities, and social groups” (Cochran-Smith, 2010, p. 454). Our study is informed by Bondy et al.’s (2017) justice praxis framework, which acknowledges the evolving ways of understanding and enacting justice in teacher education.

While space limitations prevent us from elaborating on all seven contours of the framework, surrounding “justice” is Duncan-Andrade's (2009) notion of critical hope, or what Bondy et al. (2017) refer to as “radical hope.” Radical hope reminds educators that the path toward justice is a painful one but "despite the overwhelming odds against us making it down that path to change, we make the journey again and again because there is no other choice” (p. 191). Within this framework, justice must be enveloped in democratic practices (Ayers, 2009) that include listening deeply, discussion, and dissent. The remaining contours—critical sociological (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012), restorative (Ladson-Billings, 2015), wholly engaged (hooks, 1994), liberatory (Freire, 1970), and immersed in inquiry (Freire, 1970; Kumashiro, 2015)—offer TEs ways to think about transforming injustice within their contexts.

Our study is also informed by Santoro and Cain’s (2018) notion of principled resistance, “a necessary and ethical response to mandates that conflict with [educators’] understandings about quality teaching and the role of education in a democracy” (p. 1). There are three general categories that engender principled resistance: pedagogical, professional, and democratic. Principled resistance is useful for our work because the TEs experience ethical dilemmas regarding teaching for social justice in a state that prohibits it. Our participants’ beliefs about the purposes of their work stand in direct conflict with the policies and practices they are expected to implement.

The aim of the study is to explore:

How can mentoring and coaching be used to support the transition of new teacher educators into higher education?

The importance of the role of teacher educators cannot be under-estimated, and their impact on the outcomes for teacher trainees in initial teacher training provision is imperative to ensure that the future generation of teachers are well prepared for their roles. At a time where teacher retention is of great concern in a English context, where 30% of teachers leave the profession, as outlined in the Teacher Workforce Data Report (2022,23). Internationally, UNESCO reported similar concerns regarding teacher retention. It is imperative to develop high quality teachers,. The Teacher Educator's role is imperative in this process, especially at a time of uncertainty, where teachers can give children life-chances and hope.

However, for many teacher educators, there are very few opportunities to develop to be able to make a smooth transition into their new roles and contexts. Czerniawski (2018) highlights that the term teacher educator implies all those involved in the development of future and current teachers. Czerniawski (2018) and Murray (2002) make the point that becoming a teacher educator can be a painful experience whereby the teacher educator needs to shed their former identity as a teacher and develop their novice identity as a teacher educator. However, during this transition period there is often no support in place to ensure that teacher educators can make the transition from their previous roles into their new role.

This qualitative case study, evaluates how mentoring and coaching can be used as an intervention to provide a supportive transition for teacher educators into their new contexts, to enable them to flourish. Connor and Pokora (2017) define mentoring and coaching as learning relationships, and the study seeks to gain insights into how these learning relationships can help to create a sense of trust, belonging, and safety to enable teacher educators to engage effectively with their learners.

This study examines the work of teacher educators who strive to prepare teachers who can capably and equitably educate the next generation of young people for an increasingly complex, uncertain and inequitable world. Through our research, we seek to address the following question: How do teacher educators in university-based teacher preparation programs located in different contexts, conceptualize and operationalize their work to educate and nurture social justice-oriented teachers?

In answering this core question, we focused specifically on:

a) the concepts and language these teacher educators choose to describe their work and why;

b) the impact and influence of context (programmatic, institutional, political) on their practice;

c) challenging or “hot” moments in their work preparing social justice-oriented teachers; and

d) key pedagogies and practices these teacher educators incorporate into their teacher preparation curriculum.

Our research participants are all located in the U.S., but their aspirations for teacher candidates and the issues they are tackling transcend national borders and are global in nature. In 2021, UNESCO’s report Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education, called for “a new social contract for education that can repair injustices while transforming the future…grounded in human rights and based on principles of non-discrimination, social justice, respect for life, human dignity and cultural diversity” (p. iii). Similarly, the European Commission urges member states “to tackle inequalities from early years and to decouple social, economic, and cultural status, ethnic and racial background from educational attainment and achievement” (n.d.; https://education.ec.europa.eu/focus-topics/improving-quality/about-improving-quality para. 5). They echo educators across the globe who express commitments to equity (Cochran-Smith, et al., 2020; Darling-Hammond, 2017) and seek to “address the existing web of inequalities that perpetuate educational and social exclusions” (UNESCO, 2021) through social justice-oriented teacher preparation (Author et al., 2023).

Internationally, it seems then that “Equity is a fundamental value and guiding principle of education policy,…[and yet]…it is not necessarily actualised in education systems around the world” (OECD, 2018, p. 22), whether in Europe, Asia, Africa, North or South America. Indeed, the latest progress report indicates that progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: Ensure Inclusive and Quality Equitable Education and Promote Lifelong Learning Opportunities for All (https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4) is fair at best, with no targets met (UN, 2023). Societies around the world share much in common, including a collective and shameful past of historical inequity and discrimination such that all children have not received the care and education they need and deserve. These same societies have signed on to SDG #4, and are engaged in “the reality that the drive for societal improvement is an ongoing process that draws on a past, is explored in the present and seeks to influence the future” (ECER Call for Papers, 2024). As a global community, we must address two, intertwined imperatives: quality education and equitable/inclusive education for all, both of which need quality teachers as “key figures on whom possibilities for transformation rest” (UNESCO, 2021, p. 80). Yet quality, justice-oriented teachers depend on teacher educators, so understanding how and what teacher educators do in their work of educating teachers, is essential.

Thus, our study aims to build this understanding of teacher educators’ social justice work with teacher candidates, using two theoretical frameworks as analytic lenses. First, we utilize Marilyn Cochran-Smith’s Theory of Teacher Education for Social Justice (2010), that specifies three aspects that are relevant to our study, namely: justice, practice and teacher preparation. Second, Bondy et al. (2017) offer a justice praxis framework adapted by Author et al. (2021), that allows us to deeply examine our respondents’ theorizing and practice in social justice-oriented teacher preparation.

This study is informed by the theoretical knowledge about formative assessment, teacher assessment literacy and teacher assessment conceptions, and it focuses on the conceptions and practices of assessment held by pre-service teachers and how the experience of the supervised practicum can influence it. An article with the study is currently under review by an international journal. In the next paragraphs we summarize and explain the main ideas of our framework and the purposes of the study.

It is well-known that assessment is one of the main strategies teachers use to facilitate learning, to certify student achievement, and to develop students' capacity to evaluate their future learning (Boud & Falchikov, 2006). Empirical studies in the area suggests that many novice and pre-service teachers do not have a wide knowledge about assessment, and they do not feel confident to do it effectively (Maclellan, 2004; Volante & Fazio, 2007).

For this reason, we wanted to analyze the influence of initial teaching education in the development of what researchers defined as assessment literacy (DeLuca et al., 2016), i.e., proposals for conceptualizing the essential theoretical knowledge about assessment and the consideration of factors that influence how teachers implement assessment. Specifically, we considered the influence of the supervised practicum, which we understand as the ‘teaching practice’ period when student teachers go to schools to implement theoretical learning about teaching. This is a decisive period because pre-service teachers have access to the teaching professional culture, via a set of experiences and knowledge inherent to the profession, including conceptions and assessment practices (Brito, 2020).

A few previous investigations have studied the impact of the practicum on conceptions of assessment. For instance, Xu and He (2019) and Prastikawati et al. (2022) reported an important change in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pre-service teachers due to the practicum, with an improvement in the knowledge about the assessment purposes (summative and formative). However, there is still much room for improvement and a need to further analyze the effects of this period in assessment literacy, considering different educational stages, disciplines, and educational systems.

Therefore, the purpose of our study is to analyze the impact of a supervised practicum on the assessment conceptions and practices of pre-service Physical Education (PE) teachers. The assessment conceptions we used were defined according to Brown (2008): a) assessment improves teaching and learning; b) assessment makes students accountable for learning; c) assessment demonstrates the quality and accountability of schools and teachers; d) assessment should be rejected because it negatively affects teachers, students, curriculum, and teaching. We chose PE for our study due to its great pedagogical importance in Spain in the last decade in relation to assessment studies, especially focused on formative assessment (López-Pastor et al., 2020), and the fact that the other studies had focused in EFL.

This project delves into and examines the shared responsibilities of higher education institutions and kindergartens/schools (K-12) as they collaboratively oversee the quality of students' practicum studies, a fundamental component of initial teacher education (ITE) (Munthe, Ruud, & Malmo, 2020). These ITE programs are mandated to uphold rigorous academic standards, ensuring a comprehensive and coherent integration of subjects, subject didactics, pedagogy, and practicum placements (Lund, Jakhelln, & Rindal, 2015). While the specifics of students' practicum studies (K-12 placements, duration, learning content, progress line, etc.) may vary among different ITE programs, there is a common expectation that practicum placements in all programs should be supervised, diverse, and subject to assessment. The practicum dimension in teacher education is intricately woven into a symbiotic relationship with the practicum sector, encompassing kindergartens and schools.

Since the 1960-ies, on behalf of the workforce, Norway has had institutionalized cooperation between employer organizations (here: for municipalities and county authorities), employee organizations (here: for the teaching profession), and the Government. Together, these three entities engage in discussions on political matters and provide advice on general economic and societal issues. However, to develop high-quality, research-based teacher education programs that are pertinent to the profession, it is imperative to expand this formal "tripartite cooperation" to include other stakeholders beyond its current scope. It becomes crucial to involve additional parties that hold a vested interest in teacher education, such as universities and university colleges functioning as teacher education institutions, along with the teacher students themselves. In an era marked by uncertainty, which also impacts the teaching profession, a collaborative effort that encompasses a broader spectrum of stakeholders can safeguard both the collective memory and future prospects for the development of robust and appealing teacher education programs.

In this study, to address these issues, we aim to address the following research question: How do the two sectors, namely higher education and K-12 schooling, collaborate and jointly shoulder the responsibility for educating the teaching profession in Norway?

To delve into our findings, we rely on a dual-layered theoretical framework. The initial perspective within this framework is grounded in the theory of practice architectures, as articulated by Kemmis et al. (2014). This theory offers a comprehensive framework for analysing the intricate interplay of elements within the context of students' practicum studies in initial teacher education. It provides a lens through which educators in both sectors can better understand, interpret, and improve the teaching and learning experiences within these critical stages of educating new teachers.

The second perspective in our theoretical framework aims to support what is referred to in the literature on practicum studies as "the third space." In this "third space," students undergoing training, the teachers in the kindergarten/school serving as the students' practice mentors, and subject teachers from the university/college responsible for practice supervision come together (Korthagen, Loughran, & Russell, 2006). The work of teacher educators (both practice mentors and subject teachers) in "the third space" revolves around facilitating participatory and exploratory learning processes for students, practice mentors, and subject teachers. This requires all participants to move across professional, academic, and personal boundaries, engaging in negotiation and renegotiation of understandings associated with the role and tasks of the teaching profession (Williams, 2014).

The distribution of responsibilities and collaboration in practical training within teacher education is intended to create conditions for the emergence of effective teacher education and professional development in such an exploratory communal learning process.

Field-placement programs are expected to offer multiple opportunities to student teachers (STs) to enable lessons learnt in university-based coursework to teaching practices in the field (Moyer and Husman 2006; Tigchelaar and Korthagen, 2004). Early field placement experiences provide STs with a first (teaching) experience on developing generic aspects of teaching, including classroom management (CM) practices (Anderson, Barksdale, and Hite, 2005). One of STs’ main concerns during practice is CM (Ma and Cavanagh, 2018; O’Neill and Stephenson, 2012). STs during their first teaching efforts, ebb and flow between theory and practice, often guided by their attitudes and beliefs on what they consider as an effective practice to gain classroom’s control (Caner and Tertemiz, 2015).

Several CM models are discussed in the literature (e. g. the Assertive Discipline Model, the Withitness and Group Management Model, the Choice Theory Model, see Balli, 2011), from which several aspects are introduced during early field coursework. CM is often related with developing procedures and routines to maximize the use of teaching time and dealing with pupils’ misbehavior (Meister and Melnick, 2003). In handling commonly occurring CM situations, the development of procedures/routines might offer STs a place to begin in developing heuristics and associated procedures for responding to (less) predictable situations during teaching (see Brophy, 1988). At the same time, various studies show that time management in the context of CM is one of the greatest concerns for beginning teachers since they lack experience in calculating/addressing the amount of time needed for each activity during enactment (see Kyriakides, Christoforidou, Panayiotou and Creemers 2017; Moore 2003). However, only a few studies investigated STs’ use of teaching time (Cakmak 2008).

During early field placement, traditional modes of CM need to give their place to more enhanced-supportive engagement of STs and pupils in their first (and subsequent) interaction. Hence, the use of strict rules or formalized CM “contracts” as STs’ first or last resort during practice, might contradict the idea of a blended mode of CM models according to STs’ and pupils’ needs. The development of a procedure as a routine as it is discussed in coursework and implemented during practice (i.e. discussion/agreement with pupils, rehearsal and encouragement, see Wong and Wong, 2018) could be used as a paradigm of blending CM models offering STs with a place to begin their CM efforts. To this end, we acknowledge that STs’ engagement and limited presence in schools, makes the establishment of procedures/routines a very difficult endeavor (Brophy, 1988).

Blending particular CM models is defined as selecting different aspects of teaching from each model related with practices that enhance CM not neglecting pupils’ needs. In this context, every step of the teaching procedure (i.e. assertive discipline model) is developed carefully within the classroom with pupils’ interaction (i.e. withitness group management model), considering the different needs of pupils’ which are interlinked with the general needs of the classroom (choice theory model) (see Balli 2011). In this study, we explore STs’ experimentation on CM using a video-setting (see Zhang et al. 2011) during early field placement after a coursework section based on blending particular aspects of CM models. Hence, we particularly focus on the aspects of developing procedures/routines and the management of time, implementing a video-setting to support STs’ reflection during/after practice. In this context, we ask:

i) How do STs experiment and reflect on developing classroom and time management procedures/routines in a video setting during early field placement?

ii) What challenges do STs face when enacting classroom and time management procedures/routines during early field placement?

Theoretical Framework and Research Question

Globalization and increased transnational mobility and at the same time worldwide challenges such as economic crises, climate change, global pandemics and war have increased during the last decades and have led to heterogeneity in school population (Wernicke et al., 2021). Given the continuous increase in heterogeneity, a consideration of individual student needs has reemerged as a major issue in theoretical, empirical, and practice-oriented work (Hardy et al., 2019). As Corno (2008) states: “Our modern society expects instruction to reach all students across a broad range of special needs, talents, linguistic backgrounds, and sociocultural conditions”. Teachers are challenged to meet the individual needs of all students and adjustments to students’ individual development are considered a core element of effective teaching (Hardy et al., 2019). Adaptive teaching (Corno, 2008) as a solution has been discussed for the last decades and is today more relevant than ever. Adaptive teaching is essential in instructional interaction: the teacher guides the learning process in dialogue with students, supporting independent learning, problem-solving, and cognitive self-experience (Brägger, Haug et al., 2021). Corno (2008) states that teaching adaptively means responding to learners as they work, diagnose their needs “on the fly” (Corno, 2008, p.1). The teachers’ intervention occurs slightly above the students' level and is gradually withdrawn, transferring responsibility for the learning and problem-solving process back to the students (Vygotsky, 1980; Van de Pol et al., 2010). Despite being considered a well-founded and pedagogically promising concept (Hardy et al., 2019), adaptive teaching remains limited in practice in the German school system (Schwippert et al., 2020).

A reason for this might be that it poses a significant challenge for teachers to simultaneously address a variety of students individually – both in lesson preparation and in situational teaching-learning interactions. To meet these needs, promoting adaptive teaching competence amongst pre-service teachers appears particularly significant. We follow the idea that teachers’ competence is based on learnable dispositions linked to teaching situations (König, 2020). The lack of opportunities to learn such competencies in university teacher training may be a cause of teachers’ difficulties in teaching adaptively (Praetorius et al., 2012). For the subject of mathematics, which primarily involves task-based teaching, there is a specific need to focus on problem-solving processes that teachers must adaptively support (Leiß, 2007).

We developed a model for adaptive teaching (Lemmrich et al., in press), addressing both the level of adaptive lesson planning and adaptive decision-making during ongoing lessons. The model provides a framework for differentiating generic facets of adaptive teaching in a subject-specific manner. We also developed an innovative seminar concept to impart competence in teaching adaptively in mathematical problem-solving processes, aiming to overcome traditional theory-practice barriers (Schilling & Leiss, 2022). Therefore, it incorporates multiperspective videos and trainings and a community of practice. The seminar has been continuously evaluated and modified (Leiss et al., submitted). The following presents initial results. The guiding research question was: To what extent can the ability of pre-service teachers to give adaptive instructions be promoted through university teaching?

The significance of teacher professional learning has been widely acknowledged in the field of teacher education, as it is often considered pivotal in bringing about changes in educational practices (Lieberman & Mace, 2008). Confronted with the need to address practical problems and encourage scientific inquiry, teacher-led research is employed in many teacher professional learning programmes (Choy & Dindyal, 2021). As an evolving research approach in education, lesson study (LS) has been increasingly popular within academia (Ding et al., 2024).

Previous research has explicated the ontology, epistemology and methodology of LS. Several studies have demonstrated its effectiveness in developing teachers’ knowledge, instructional skills and beliefs (Lewis et al., 2006; Coenders & Verhoef, 2019; Fox & Poultney, 2020). Existed empirical studies have mostly focused on cases carried out by teachers themselves. With the increasing emphasis on the cooperation between universities and primary and secondary schools, LS programmes usually involve the participation of teacher educators from universities. However, little research has investigated LS as a pathway to facilitate teacher professional learning through teacher-researcher partnership.

The objective of this empirical research is to characterise the impact of teachers’ participation in LS on the development of their professional knowledge and inquiry mindsets relevant to teaching and student learning. Specifically, this research aims to answer the following questions: (1) How do teachers’ participation in LS contribute to their professional knowledge of teaching and student learning? (2) How do teachers’ participation in LS contribute to their inquiry mindsets towards teaching and student learning? (3) What are the impacts of teacher-researcher partnership on teachers’ development in professional knowledge and inquiry mindsets?

In order to achieve the research objective, a conceptual framework is developed based on expansive learning theory, aiming to characterise participating teachers’ experiences. Expansive learning is a term raised on the basis of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical/ sociocultural theory and Engeström’s version of cultural-history activity theory, alongside many other theoretical and philosophical opinions. According to expansive learning theory, learning is interpreted as a complex activity system in which “learners are involved in constructing and implementing a radically new, wider and more complex object and concept” (Engeström & Sannino, 1999, 2017). Learners surpass the objective of directly acquiring new knowledge and skills, striving to implement what they have acquired in practice and produce something new. Such epistemology aligns with the connotation of teacher professional learning and the process of LS.

This framework interprets LS as a pathway to facilitate teacher professional learning. Teachers’ participation in LS is framed as an activity system comprising two interrelated sub-systems. The first sub-system involves a research activity system in which teachers collaborate with teacher educators to co-design classroom activities and reflect on their teaching practices. The second sub-system is a teaching activity system, which entails the application of the designed activities in actual classroom settings. Through the two sub-systems, teachers are able to generate new understandings of concepts and theories in teaching and learning, and simultaneously develop their inquiry mindsets as researchers. This framework serves as a guiding tool for data collection and facilitates the interpretation of research findings.

This ongoing study focuses on a teacher education programme involving six mathematics teachers from a secondary school in China. The programme centres around using LS to develop programming-enhanced mathematics classroom activities. Teacher professional learning is characterised through detailed analysis of multiple data sources, including conversations within the research community, observations of classrooms activities, one-on-one video-stimulated recall interviews and relevant documents. The expected findings include descriptions of the participating teachers’ development of professional knowledge and inquiry mindsets in LS, which will provide implications regarding how to effectively facilitate teacher professional learning through LS.

This article focuses on researching the transfer of learned content from in-service teacher training to school practice. It includes the SDG goal 4c to expand the supply of qualified teachers which should be increasingly possible through modular training series.

The data in this regard is poor since evidence-based findings are largely lacking. There are some studies on the effectiveness of in-service teacher training but there are no findings in the German speaking world related to transfer (cf. Müller, Kemethofer, Andreitz, Nachbaur & Soukup-Altrichter 2019; Lipowsky & Rzejak 2021; Rzejak, Gröschner, Lipowsky, Richter & Calcagni 2023).

On the one hand in-service teacher training with a long-lasting impact demands a look at the conditions of the individual school (teaching, organizational and personnel development, see also Altrichter & Rolff 2000), whereby this project is particularly linked to the level of teaching development. On the other hand, however, it researches the conditions of the school system such as concept transfer. Furthermore the transfer of experience also plays an important role in sustainability, with teachers passing on their experiences to their colleagues. Ultimately the long-term goal should be the establishment of standards in schools for effective and sustainable in-service teacher training (cf. BMBWF 2021).

In-service teacher training primarily serves to professionalize teachers (cf. BMBWF 2019). One's own further training can be seen as a central request of every teacher. Numerous international studies show the positive effects of in-service teacher training on the teachers concerned (cf. Lipowsky 2014; Hattie 2015).

According to Zehetmeier (2017) a distinction between two types of effects can be mad: The effect immediately afterwards and the long-term effect. Fischer (2017) refers to this long-term effect as follow-up effectiveness, meaning a permanent, lasting success of measures. This concept of sustainable training is therefore included in the present study, with the sustainability of the modular training series being researched four to six months after the last input phase. The concept of sustainable in-service teacher training is understood as part of the concept of sustainable development (UNESCO 2014).

In-service teacher training measures can work on several levels. Lipowsky (2010) describes the following four levels of impact: (1) assessments and opinions of the participants, (2) knowledge of the participants, (3) concrete actions of the participants in the classroom and (4) performance of the students of the participating teachers. In the present study, the first two impact levels are recorded. In addition an attempt is made to record level three with the third measurement point.

Timperley et al. (2007) explored the impact of teacher training. Accordingly, training courses extending over a longer period of time and involving experts are particularly effective. In addition, the participants should be active during the learning process and given the opportunity to question their ideas about their own teaching.

It can be said that the following characteristics are consistently cited by several authors as conditions for the success of effective in-serve teacher training with a long lasting impact:

(1) the advanced training extends over a longer period of time, (2) experts are involved and feedback is provided, (3) a practical transfer is made possible, (4) the attitudes of the participating teachers are questioned or changed.

Based on these findings the research team developed a design that focuses precisely on these beneficial characteristics of sustainable in-service teacher training.

The aim of this project (2019-2024) is to research the effectiveness and sustainability and to develop modular in-service teacher training courses further. The following central research question is derived from this: How sustainable are the selected modular in-service teacher trainings at the University College of Teacher Education Vienna/Krems?

To thrive in a dynamically changing world, it is necessary to develop research skills. Because research skills help people to think critically and evaluate the information they receive. The ability to conduct research and analyze data helps us distinguish true and reliable information from fake news and manipulation, independently search for new information, analyze it and apply it to our work or personal life.

Research skills promote innovation and the development of new ideas. Research allows us to discover new knowledge and discover new aspects in all areas. As a result, thanks to this, society can develop and improve its standard of living, can solve complex problems, and find innovative solutions to existing problems.

A quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is vital to students' future success. Integrated STEM education is one way to make learning more connected and relevant for students. There is a need for further research and discussion on the knowledge, experience, and training that teachers need to effectively teach integrated STEM education [1].

STEM education integrates various subjects - science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This helps students understand how these subjects are interrelated and applied in practice.

STEM education is also designed to prepare students for current and future professions related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. This allows students to be competitive in the labor market and successfully adapt to rapidly changing technologies.

The goal of STEM education is to create scientifically literate people who can survive in the global economy [2].

Action research was conducted in middle and high schools over a 3-year period to improve teaching practice and develop students' research skills through the integration of science subjects [3]. The study was conducted at the Nazarbayev Intellectual School of Chemical and Biological Directions in Almaty by teachers of natural science subjects: chemistry, biology, physics, computer science, geography, and mathematics. Middle and high school students (150 students from grades 7 to 11) took part in the study.

The purpose of the study was to develop students' research skills in two ways:

1. Conducting integrated lessons (20) of chemistry, biology, physics, computer science, geography, and mathematics through “Problem based Learning” and “Project based Learning”.

2. Development of scientific STEM projects (18) through “Project based Learning”.

Students in most secondary schools struggle with learning math and science. [4]

A total of 150 middle and high school students and 6 subject teachers took part in the study. A survey of students was conducted to identify difficulties in extracurricular scientific design.

Based on the results of the survey, it was revealed that 92% of students experience difficulties in carrying out scientific project work. 85% of students indicated that they needed help from the teacher when planning and executing scientific design. Also, 73% of students noted that overload with academic subjects and lack of time make it difficult to successfully complete scientific design.

To the open question “What skills and knowledge are needed to successfully complete projects?” Students rated the following three research skills as the most important:

1. Determination of the topic (area) of research.

2. Planning and conducting scientific research.

3. Determining the novelty of the research.

In this connection, the authors decided to develop an algorithm for conducting scientific design by schoolchildren and developing students’ research skills in lessons and extracurricular activities.

In recent years, global society has faced important challenges that have severely undermined its fundamental values and principles: increased global competition, migration, climate change, environmental threats, economic crises, Covid-19 pandemic, and wars. In this scenario, the social value of science has been strengthened as an expression of an interconnected knowledge on which it is necessary to invest in the perspective of active citizenship and sustainable development.

People all over the world need to understand the changes caused by human activity on Earth, and to find a solution to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of human being and living things. Mathematical, technical, and scientific competences are fundamental to solve a range of problems in everyday situations and to explain the natural world by observation and experimentation.

Ever since Yakman first used the acronym of STEAM at the beginning of the 21st century, STEAM has become a buzzword in the field of education, despite it being a complex and controversial notion (Martín-Gordillo, 2019; Perignat & Katz-Buonincontro, 2019). The interest in this field can be traced back to the 1990s when the US National Science Foundation (NSF) formally included engineering and technology with science and mathematics in undergraduate and K-12 school education (National Science Foundation, 1998). It coined the acronym SMET (science, mathematics, engineering, and technology) that was subsequently replaced by STEM (Christenson, 2011). However, a consensus has not been reached on the disciplines included within STEM (Li et al., 2020).

Further ambiguities have emerged in the transition from STEM to STEAM. The difference between STEAM and STEM (Martín-Páez et al., 2019) lies in the inclusion of the A for arts, which encompasses various disciplines belonging to the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts (Bautista, 2021).

Despite STEAM education is considered a priority in the international educational policies, and upon of increased labour market demand for qualified scientific skills, there are still difficulties in teaching STEAM: low attractiveness from students, strong gender bias in the approach to these subjects and in the careers development, lack of inclusion of disadvantaged people.

So, the main purposes of STEAM education is:

1. attracting more students and teachers to STEAM education through a global approach from primary to adult education;
2. breaking down the barriers between subjects to integrate school curriculum and vocational guidance;
3. developing teacher training activities to improve the quality of STEAM education;
4. reducing the inequalities in the access of scientific studies and carriers for women, ethnic minorities, and people with disabilities.

STEAM Education is characterized by seeking meaningful learning, eliciting students’ convergent and divergent thinking (Yakman & Lee, 2012). STEAM is also characterized by granting students an active, constructive, and critical role in their learning and fostering collaborative work, while the teacher adopts the roles of advisor, counselor and/or guide (Thuneberg et al., 2018).

The paper describes a research project aimed to enhance the teaching of STEAM in the secondary education, focusing on the development of innovative pedagogical strategies using musical and artistic approaches, such as sonification.

Sonification is defined as the encoding of data into nonspeech sounds organized by an algorithm which ensures an objective, systematic, reproducible, and repeatable output (Hermann, 2008). In the last three decades, literature has presented a lot of examples of the relevance of the associations between sounds and science (Godwin, 1992). Several sonification strategies are documented in STEM education. Basically, all these strategies imply the use of digital sound and computer aided output (Supper, 2015), although the use of body percussion and instrumental performance of sonification is also attested (Eramo et al., 2022).

Abstract. Through the integrated, interdisciplinary learning approach known as STEM, academic scientific and technical concepts are explored in the context of real-world situations. The student gains the ability to solve several problems and design prototypes for new mechanisms, procedures, and programs within the scope of the installations of this method. The article describes a study designed to determine the efficacy of integrating the STEM approach into 10th-grade chemistry lessons as part of the updated curriculum based on student's progress in developing 21st-century skills as measured by the Cambridge Assessment. The findings demonstrated that the integration of STEM technology into chemistry classes had a positive impact on participants' 21st-century skills, such as research, critical thinking, and teamwork as well as academic performance. Simultaneously, it has been proven that the application of STEM teaching increases students' motivation to study science and conduct research in extracurricular activities. The implementation of the method will facilitate the establishment of strong connections between schools, society, and the global community, which will enhance STEM literacy and competitiveness in the world economy.

Because of their vital function in developing and sustaining the current labour market, the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) enjoy a leading position in modern society. Indeed, according to research by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, growth in STEM occupations is expected to reach 8% by 2029, while global job growth is expected to reach 3.9% ^[1]. The increased reliance on technology and the requirement for individuals with 21st-century skills and knowledge in these areas to succeed in the contemporary labour market are the main drivers of the growth in demand for STEM occupations ^[2]. Consequently, STEM education is essential in preparing students for enduring changes in the world by equipping them with the necessary skills to comprehend technological advancements in the 21st century.

STEM education, according to Mobley (2015), is “an educational approach in which interdisciplinary applications are made to solve problems in real life and links to different disciplines are created” ^[3]. STEM education is emerging as an interdisciplinary concept that combines science, technology, engineering, and math into one course. Importantly, it is acknowledged that the best methods for integrating authentic STEM into the classroom are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to STEM integration, which apply knowledge and skills from two or more STEM disciplines to real-world problems and deepen understanding ^[4]. Many industries now demand that candidates possess modern skills, such as problem-solving abilities in a short time, critical thinking skills, responsibility, teamwork, communication and collaboration, etc. ^[5]. Despite the existence of a variety of skills, there is no single widely accepted definition and type of ‘21st Century skills’. The works of methodological scientists are devoted to the study of 21st-century skills: Silva, E. ^[6], Binkley, M., Erstad, O., Herman, J. ^[7], Kaufman, J. C. ^[8], Dede, C. ^[9], etc. We identified the following skills as modern life skills in our study by reviewing many recent literature articles:

• Problem-solving;

• Critical thinking;
• Creativity and collaboration;
• Teamwork;
• Research skills.

In this paper, the findings of a study on how STEM education affects individuals' so-called 21st-century skills are compiled and analyzed. The question of how the development of such skills in young people can best be supported is considered in depth. Techniques include STEM-integrated teaching; developing each subject plans that specifically address 21st-century skills in chemistry for the tenth grade; subject-based assessments; nurturing skills in extracurricular activities, and independent research projects in the workplace and research communities. The results of the summative assessment of 21st-century skills are also considered.

Global challenges and changes have an impact on education and increase the expectations of teachers. Supporting students with very different backgrounds, and navigating versatile learning environments require the teacher to be able to make evidence-based decisions in order to best support the learning of all students. In order to best prepare teachers to meet the demands of an ever more complex profession and ensure high quality teaching, teachers need strong theoretical knowledge and a good skill of transferring it into classroom practice. Student teachers often do not see the connection between evidence-based knowledge and its value for classroom practices (Knight, 2015), which might be the case due to their lack of transferring skills.

The contextual model of teacher competences (Blömeke et al., 2015) describes teacher competence as a multidimensional construct, which consists of three facets: teachers' disposition (professional knowledge and affective-motivational aspects), situation-specific skills (perception, interpretation, decision-making, i.e PID-skills) and performance in the classroom. These three facets are in interaction with each other, where dispositions affect PID-skills and the visible behaviour in the classroom is dependent on both two. In other words, teacher PID-skills are of great importance for high quality teaching (Stahnke & Blömeke, 2021) as they function like a bridge between the teacher's knowledge and the transfer of that knowledge to classroom practices.

Finding ways to support the development of teacher PID- skills is receiving more and more attention in the field of teacher education (e.g. Kleinknecht & Gröschner, 2016; Santagata et al., 2021). PID-skills are extensively researched in the field of mathematics and natural sciences (e.g. Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022; Santagata & Yeh, 2016). However, studies that focus on supporting the development of PID-skills in the context of need-supportive teaching are lacking, even though supporting student motivation and engagement are important questions for every teacher (e.g. Reeve & Cheon, 2021). Thus this research provides a novel perspective on developing PID-skills in teacher education. Previous research has shown a lower quality of teacher education students interpretation and decision-making skills (e.g. Alwast & Vorhölter, 2022; Georg & Poom-Valickis, 2023) referring to the inability to use theoretical knowledge in reasoning and decision-making. Student teachers primarily noticed aspects connected to teacher behavior, generalized and paid attention to less-important factors connected to need-supportive teaching, and had difficulties in basing their interpretations and decisions on theoretical foundations (Georg & Poom-Valickis, 2023). Therefore the goal of our current study was to discover ways to support the development of student teachers´ interpretation and decision-making skills in the context of need-supportive teaching using video-based discussions. Previous research has confirmed that classroom videos are a suitable means for this purpose (e.g. Prilop et al., 2021). However, merely video-based observations are not sufficient for supporting skill development effectively (Estapa & Amador, 2023). It is important to guarantee targeted opportunities to practice theoretical reasoning and make decisions thereof through video-observations or case-studies (Santagata & Yeh, 2016; Stürmer, Königs & Seidel, 2013) and pay explicit attention to learning how to direct one´s reasoning based on noticed events (Barnhart & van Es, 2015).

The study sought answers to the following research questions:

1. What are the levels of interpretation and decision-making skills before and after video-reflection activities in the lecture?

2. What are the connections between student interpretation and decision-making skills and their knowledge of need-supportive teaching strategies at the end of the course?

In uncertain times, teacher training is an important strategic initiative for overcoming challenges and actively shaping the future. In 2024, a reform of teacher training in Austria was announced, which, among other things, provides for better integration of practical elements into theoretical training. In addition to redesigning the curricula, it is therefore an important task to design courses that contextualise school practice more strongly in educational theory. This is where the study "OPENness for EDUcational Theories and socio-emotional COOPeration (OPEN EDU COOP)" comes in, by theoretically and empirically analysing central construct areas of the development and strengthening of professional action competence facets of teachers.

The construct areas of teacher professionalism selected for the study are openness towards educational theories, the associated positive emotions and the development of social skills. For this purpose, co-operative learning environments are developed and their effectiveness with regard to the construct areas addressed, is empirically investigated. The importance of openness towards educational science theories is emphasised for the theory-based reflection of practical school experiences (Hascher & Hagenauer, 2016; Gastager et al., 2022). Students with this openness have more sustainable learning experiences in the school placement (Donche & van Petegem, 2009). However, students tend to have negative attitudes towards educational theories and prefer to receive practical tips from mentors (Allen & Wright, 2014).

Positive emotions play a key role here, as they expand the thought-action repertoire, promote holistic thinking (Fredrickson, 2001) and can set in motion a positive spiral that leads to the development of personal resources (Kalchgruber et al., 2021). Several studies (Bach & Hagenauer, 2022; van Rooij et al., 2019; Hascher & Waber, 2020) confirm the positive effects of positive emotions on learning experiences in school internships.

Social competences are multi-perspective constructs which Kanning (2015) categorises as perceptive-cognitive, motivational-emotional or behavioural. Kiel et al. (2012) found in an empirical study that prospective teachers experience an increase in competence in the areas of leadership skills, independence, cooperation skills, situational behaviour and sense of responsibility during the course of their studies. Nevertheless, the majority of prospective teachers show moderate leadership, organisational orientation and little interest in cooperation with colleagues and parents of pupils (Mayr, 2012). Rothland (2010) analysed the development of social skills in the first phase of teacher training and found a need for development in the area of conflict skills and social skills among prospective male teachers, and for dealing with sensitivity to social frustration, particularly among female students. The students were less satisfied with their self-assertion and showed an increased tendency towards confrontation in social conflict situations. A sample of the Potsdam Teacher Study (Schaarschmidt & Kieschke, 2007) lead to the conclusion that a quarter of those surveyed showed deficits in the area of social-communicative skills and in their experience of social support. The researched findings illustrate the great potential of teacher training to promote and support students in expanding their social competences.

The didactic intervention of OPEN EDU COOP is based on the systematic use of cooperative elements in order to promote both social competences and the reflective examination of educational science theories in an emotionally positive way. The study thus aims to close previous research gaps regarding students' emotions when dealing with educational science theories. The central research question is derived from these theoretical considerations: What effects are achieved by a cooperative didactic course concept in the training of teacher students with regard to openness towards educational science theories, the associated positive emotions and the development of social competences?

The Capability Approach, developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and based on Aristotelian ethics, provides a theoretical framework for the discussion of fundamental social (in)equality and (in)justice. At its core is the question of the interaction between people's abilities and the resources available to them. To emphasise this analytically, a distinction is made between functionings and capabilities: „Functionings are people’s beings and doings whereas capabilities are the real or effective opportunities to achieve functionings“ (Potsi 2018: 243). This focus makes the Capability Approach particularly interesting for educational issues and is suitable with regard to transfer to school, teaching research and teacher training. With the central distinction between "functionings" (abilities) and "capabilities" (opportunities for realisation) this approach goes beyond the functional perspective of the widespread approaches widely used in the field of education, because it not only considers the internal-personal conditions of individuals (competences), but also the external-social conditions through which the potentials of learners can be turned into real possibilities (= capabilities).

Accordingly, pedagogical action according to the Capability Approach means "paying careful attention to pedagogical and content-related issues and considering how lesson content and the nature of interactions in the classroom (for example, the role assigned to critical thinking and the ability to imagine things of different kinds in everyday teaching) realise the goals inherent in the approach" (Nussbaum 2015: 155). It should also be questioned which dimensions of school life (from the organisational structure to the concrete teaching activities, the spatial design and the work with parents) can be critically examined and further developed in this respect. Such considerations should already be an integral part of the knowledge and reflection canon in the training of prospective teachers in order to be able to guarantee a school education aimed at the realisation opportunities of the pupils and the necessary willingness of the teachers to do so.

In order to explore the potential of the Capability Approach in the context of teacher training, a working group at the University College for Teacher Training Vienna/Krems is working on the question of how prospective teachers can be explicitly and systematically familiarised with this topic and thus be prepared for equity-sensitive pedagogical practice.

In the presentation, the main theoretical features of the Capability Approach will be addressed and related to questions of educational equity in schools. Based on that, the work of the working group and first insights will be introduced. In concrete terms, this means the potential benefits for teacher education, implication for a curriculum as well as teaching material that is currently in progress.

The current presentation is following an initial research phase in which the perceptions of two groups of History teachers (experienced versus teachers in induction phase) concerning sense making (SM) in their activity was analysed. The topic of SM is relevant for many countries (Fitzgerald, M. S., Palincsar, A. S., 2019; Sakki, I., Pirttilä-Backman A.-M., 2019), considering the debate over the relation between contents and skills. Both commonalities and differences between the two groups of teachers were identified. One of the common points was that SM is important when designing teaching activities focused on the student learning. The topic is of interest in the Romanian setting also because the National Curriculum is supporting classroom applications of its provisions by promoting a new format for designing learning activities for students. The format is focused on identifying the steps taken by students when training for the development of the competences formulated in the National Curriculum. Following the previous research, teachers were asked to design learning activities that are relevant for the development of SM (e.g., explaining technical terms, learning a procedure or technique).

Research question

The focus of our research is the degree to which sensemaking is part of Romanian teachers’ rationale when reflecting on their own teaching practice. That is, if and how sensemaking – as a concept – becomes a tool for organising students’ learning experiences (in terms of selecting relevant historical content, teaching approaches, and assessment instruments). The second research question was to try to identify whether sensemaking in the teachers’ practice is dealt with in isolation or is linked with other concepts that act as a criterion for the selection of contents and teaching approaches. This approach follows the analysis proposed by Ketelaar and colleagues when analysing teacher professional experiences in relation to ownership, sensemaking, and agency (Ketelaar et alii, 2014).

Theoretical background

The first theoretical pillar is Shulman’s analysis of the various types of knowledge that are part of the teachers’ qualification (1986, 1987). The model was upgraded over time to include elements related to SM (e.g., as in Van Boxtel & Van Drie, 2008). The increase in the amount and diversity of knowledge that students, and teachers, have to cope with is among the significant factors that influence teaching. Moreover, teaching is always situated. Material conditions, cultural patterns, educational ethos, the way in which a subject is expected to be taught, all these have an influence on the way in which the teacher reflects on his/her classroom practice.

The second theoretical pillar is Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld (2005: 409) and the process of making a discipline meaningful ‘sense-making’. Sensemaking involves the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing. Viewed as a significant process of organizing knowledge, SM becomes crucial in History teaching.

More than creating representations and ordering them in an explanatory sequence, sensemaking implies also that it enables the creation of links between pieces of information, and that these connections inform future action (to anticipate and act effectively).

The problem seems to be both practical and theoretical – to what degree competences (which are aimed much more at educational results that transcend individual school subjects) influence subject-related elements, such as understanding the processes of enquiry and historical concepts and whether this is more meaningful as parts (nodes) in a network of concepts or learned in isolation.

This theoretical paper explores the potential of actor-network theory and its later form as [NET] (in Latour's AIME project) in teacher education research. The political, environmental and economic uncertainty of our current time has implications for teacher education that are yet to be fully grasped. Perhaps as an effort to harness teacher education in the service of social stability, many national governments increasingly seek to define and standardise the work of teacher educators — their professionalism, knowledge, practices, behaviours and beliefs— through policy. These attempts are often challenged by research which offers a more holistic, dynamic and contextually divergent view of (teacher) education, inviting us to view the work of teachers and teacher educators as necessarily uncertain (Stronach et al., 2002), rooted in dynamism and difference through its relational formation within the cultures, societies and physical worlds of different collectives (Braun et al., 2011; Nespor 1994). Moreover, against a backdrop of normative universality effected by political globalisation rooted in capitalist ideals, an argument has been made for research contributing to negative universality based in social antagonism (Kapoor and Zalloua, 2022): for researching teacher education from the perspective of the (uncertain, fluid) spaces outside of strong normative (policy and social) discourses (Rüsselbæk Hansen et al., forthcoming).

Building on the latter discourse, this paper sets out from the perspective of teacher education as a social construct and education as a discernible, yet fluid, mode of existence (Tummons, 2021). From this perspective is argued the value of ANT in its AIME form [NET] in teacher education research, as a way of coming to know education through description of all actors- normative and divergent- in its ongoing establishment, and the networked activity that holds them temporarily together. [NET] and AIME are explored in terms of the ontological and epistemological tenets by which they are characterised and the potential (and challenges) of these to the researcher of teacher education. The concept of reality as existing in a state of continuous performance and establishment offers researchers in uncertain times an approach that can encompass teacher education as a temporarily stabilised construct, explorable in terms of dynamism, fluidity and situationally dominant/ silenced/ co-opted differences (Unsworth, 2023).

Sustainable education requires cognitive processes in which learners, as constructors of their learning reality, relate implicit ideas of facts to the knowledge of others. Kattmann (2005, p. 60) describes this process as "conceptual reconstruction", which causes changes to previous cognitive concepts through a "reflexive abstraction" (Weinberger, 2017, p.10). In this context, Schneidewind (2018) speaks of the development of a "transformative literacy", to be understood as the development of skills in order to capture the dimensions and context of change dynamics and to implement them in contributions to sustainable development.
The didactic concept of green pedagogy makes it possible to promote the transformation of individual ideas and the further development of the scope of action of learners to be able to deal with uncertainties or unfamiliar, ambivalent situations. It focuses on the connection between essential parameters when designing learning environments in the context of sustainable education (Forstner-Ebhart & Linder, 2020).
Different socialization backgrounds and living environments of the learners lead to a high degree of diversity among the individuals in a school class or learning group. Different interests, skills and perspectives of the learners form the framework for cooperation and collaboration in flexible teaching. Paseka et al. (2018) formulate contingency as a special pedagogical challenge for teachers. If diversity of perspectives, dissent and deviations are used in a way that is effective for learning, the teacher rewards diversity management. Learners are then enabled to learn. Teachers thus show prudence and empathy when adapting a learning environment to the respective situation and group dynamics.

With this theoretical background, teachers are faced with the challenge of dealing with transformations, uncertainties and unmanageable ambiguities in the teaching and learning processes. It requires the development of resilient controllability for challenging and unforeseeable circumstances and the ability to adapt flexibly in order not to counteract unexpected situations with devaluation or rejection. Dealing with ambiguity therefore requires self-reflection as a core skill, which makes it possible to become aware of unpredictable and ambiguous experiences and develop them further.
The construct of ambiguity tolerance was introduced by Frenkel-Brunswik (1949) and derived from Rosenzweig's (1938) construct of frustration tolerance. People with high levels of such tolerance are averse to ambiguous or unexpected stimuli, feel threatened by them and uncomfortable with them. Today, the construct of ambiguity is based on multidimensionality (Radant & Dalbert, 2006). It is interesting to note that when the concept was further developed, people with ambiguity tolerance were defined as those who showed an explicit need for and aspiration towards ambiguity (Reis, 1996, p. 7). Reis developed a scale to measure this construct: The final form then consisted of fiveareas, the evaluation and interpretation of which are described in the manual for the inventory for measuring ambiguity tolerance (IMA): problems that appear unsolvable (PR), social conflict acceptance (SK), parental image (EB), role stereotypes (RS) and openness to new experiences (OE) (Reis, 1996, p. 35f).
Aspects related to ambiguity, such as emotional stability, enjoyment of life, optimism, energy, curiosity, openness to new things and the ability to change perspectives are also included in the resilience concept (Leppert et al., 2008). Resilience is of particular importance as a key competence for the healthy coping with challenging uncertainties, strong changes in short periods of time and unmanageable ambiguities. Therefore, these aspects must be taken up in corresponding concepts of teacher training. The research question therefore is the following: to what extent do student teachers allow ambiguity, accept openness, use divergent thinking, develop creative solutions and are willing to include these aspects in their lesson plans?

This paper sets out to analyse and understand the training processes of education professionals that are taking place at the University of Malaga and what pedagogical models are being implemented and their relationship with the possibilities for change in the education system. In this faculty, teachers of pre-school and primary education, pedagogues and social educators are trained. The training of educators in Spain is heavily regulated by the central government, therefore, this study is presented as a case study of a more global reality.

The training of education professionals is always in the spotlight of educational policies as well as biased ideological debates. Most of the time these debates are conducted according to one's own ideologies and the beliefs and assumptions about education that they imply, but they are rarely contrasted with rigorous research or critical diagnosis. We are dragging behind us traditions based on established ways of doing, and professional models that assume pedagogical models based on institutional cultures and not on educational knowledge (Kincheloe, 1998). For their part, documents from international organisations involved in education, such as UNESCO (2015), insist on the role of teachers and educational agents in the processes of change and transformation of education, as one of the necessary factors for the improvement of society and the achievement of the democratic principles and values of justice, freedom, equity, solidarity and diversity. The document states that "we must therefore rethink the content and objectives of pedagogy and teacher training" (p. 58). The challenges facing teachers nowadays make new demands on their training, which are not always present: diversity, the climate crisis, interculturality, as well as situations arising from new learning scenarios and social relations, through the mediations of the digital world (Martínez & Fernández, 2018; Freire, 2012; Cobo & Moravec, 2011). How are current pedagogical models in faculties of education addressing these emerging situations, both from the point of view of content and practices?

This project, promoted by the Research Institute for the training of education professionals, brings together 15 teachers from different areas of knowledge in an interdisciplinary, open and complex proposal. We start from the idea that current training processes assume an established framework, from institutional traditions, and their epistemological, ontological and ethical frameworks in which the institution's training actions are framed, as well as the regulatory framework that establishes the conditions for their development, both at macro, meso and micro levels (Leite, et al. 2017; Márquez et al. 2022). This also involves taking into consideration the university institution and its educational, political, social and cultural characteristics.

To this end, as specific objectives, we set out to analyse the point of view of the various state about the educational processes that are being developed: Training processes, structure of teaching work, personal trajectories, professional representations, etc. (Korthagen, et al., 2006). An epistemological study is also proposed on the design of university studies, in the light of current training proposals from educational theories and research; to assess the professional development of the faculty's graduates and their assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, as a result of their professional practice; to generate a diverse, complex and democratic discussion forum among the groups involved; to create a forum for discussion among the groups involved in the process; and to promote the development of the faculty's teaching staff and their professional development.

In recent years, the urgent discussion about teaching at colleges and universities online has triggered a rapid redesign of courses using modern media.

In the summer semester 2021, and 2023 respectively, the pedagogical-didactic goal was to enable three groups of students of an online-course on social science research methods to acquire practice-oriented knowledge about working methods in social science research with a participatory, research-based teaching approach and to involve them cognitively and affective-emotionally. They should implement these working methods in a research project of their own choice.

In addition, a data-based evaluation was carried out on the quality of the online course with regard to the personal relevance (Balwant, 2017) of the content, the development of the criteria of research-based learning (Reitinger, 2016), as well as their social science competencies.

Studies by Eccles and Wigfield (2020, p. 59) have shown that student performance depends on positive emotions of those students. These emotions, in turn, are largely based on perceived control within courses, as well as the perceived value of the course content. Loderer, Pekrun and Lester (2020) as well as Pekrun and Linnenbrink-Garcia (2012) were also able to show for the tertiary education sector how the perceived control of learning arrangements and the ascribed value correlate with the cognitive and motivational engagement as well as the cognitively and emotionally conditioned behavior of students.

Value and control remain the precursors of learning emotions online (Loderer, Pekrun & Lester, 2020, p. 2), whereby in the online situation, external factors, such as dependence on the internet connection or technical possibilities, or disturbing environmental influences can have a negative effect on the control factor. On the other hand, benefits such as dislocated learning, time saving, etc. can have a positive impact on learners' perceived control.

Due to the possibility of individualisation and self-determination (Reitinger, 2016), inquiry-based learning seemed to be a suitable concept for the design of personally relevant teaching. Having a choice (Reeve, 2004), exploring authentically, hypothetising, and discussing ideas, processes, or results are crucial to inquiry based learning. At the same time, these are elements of self-determined learning that take into account the interests and concerns of the learners. In this way, inquiry based learning can provide valuable learning opportunities that allow the learner a great deal of control over the learning process.

The challenge was to implement this in the online situation.

Accordingly, three research questions emerged:

To what extent do students experience a participatory, research-based learning process in online lessons?

To what extent do students experience the course content in online lessons as personally relevant?

Does this practice-oriented social science project also provide students with theoretical knowledge of social sciences´ research principles?

Sexuality education can have a range of positive impacts when delivered by competent and trained teachers in ways that are responsive to the contextual factors shaping young people’s needs (Pound et. al., 2017). However, a common problem across European contexts and beyond is lack of adequate pre-service preparation and continuing professional development for teaching sexuality education in the classroom (O’Brien 2021). In their study of the WHO European region, Ketting et. al. (2021) found that it is only in Estonia, Finland and Sweden that most or all pre-service teachers receive sexuality teacher education. Studies based in the USA (Costello et. al., 2022), Canada (Almanssori, 2022) and Australia have examined in greater detail the consequences of lack of teacher preparation, including low knowledge and self-efficacy. In several European studies, including Austria (2018), Spain (Martinez, 2012) and Ireland (Lodge et. al, 2022), similar shortcomings in sexuality teacher education were found. However, international evidence also highlights the positive impact that high-quality teacher education and CPD can have on student’s experiences of sexuality education (Ezer et. al., 2022; Brodeur et. al, 2023).

Many patterns observable across the European teacher education landscape are present in the English context, such as the pressure to impose a more uniform, standardised and centralised control in the name of accountability, measurement and standards (Livingston & Flores, 2017). Echoing other European studies, the 2 most relevant English studies of sexuality teacher education (Dewhurst, Pickett & Speller et. al. 2014; Byrne, Shepherd & Dewhirst et. al. 2015) found that teacher educators ascribed high levels of importance to preparation for pre-service teachers, but also significant limitations in the range of topics covered, and that sex and relationships-related areas were deprioritised amidst other health and wellbeing topics.

There are several factors that make England a distinctive case within the European context of sexuality teacher education. In 2019, ‘Relationships, Sex and Health Education’ (RSHE) became statutory in English primary and secondary schools, in theory creating a higher status and priority for sexuality education within teacher education. However, in 2021, a ‘Market Review’ of teacher education called for a transition from ‘initial teacher education’ to ‘initial teacher training’ (ITT) and established a standardised ‘Core Content Framework’ for ITT, leaving little room for subject areas that typically sit on the margins of the curriculum like sexuality education (Hordern & Brooks, 2023).

The ‘’Mapping RSHE ITT” study responds to these changes, capitalising on a period of transition to highlight current barriers and places where ITT-delivering institutions are adapting and innovating. The primary aim of the study is to map how ITT-providing institutions in England are preparing pre-service primary and secondary school teachers to deliver RSHE, using a national survey, follow-up interviews and observations of teaching on RSHE delivered to trainee teachers on the programmes (further methodological details below). The study also aims to utilise England as a national ‘case’ within the wider European context to identify convergences and divergences with wider patterns of change in teacher education/sexuality education policy and practice across Europe. The study explores and makes visible effective practice while illuminating the numerous barriers faced by teacher education leaders. The Research Questions for the project are:

1. What is the extent of pre-service teacher education for RSHE in England?
2. How is RSHE addressed in English pre-service teacher education?
3. What topics are covered in pre-service teacher education for RSHE in England, and to what extent?
4. What are teachers’ experiences of delivering pre-service teacher education in RSHE?

This paper will report on findings of the study, with data currently undergoing analysis at time of writing (for methodological details see below).

The post-pandemic scenario has led the world of education and instruction, including early childhood services, to adopt strong preventive measures to limit the spread of the SARS-cov-2 virus, including, first of all, interpersonal distancing (Porcarelli, Sardella, 2021).

A possible response to the challenges of education in the complexity of the presented scenario has been recognized in the outdoor educational model, capable of combining education and attention to physical, psychological and relational well-being. Although this model has spread to the countries of Northern Europe in the first decades after the Second World War, it has only recently established itself in Italy.

Taking up the scientific literature, it has emerged that outdoor education offers benefits compared to physical, emotional and cognitive development (Pezzano, 2016); improves the quality of life (Zelenski & Nisbet, 2014); stimulates ecological awareness and identity (Bardulla, 2006); reduces stress and promotes concentration (Bowler, Buyung-Ali, Knight & Pullin, 2010); and helps developing a sense of belonging to the world (Kaplan, 1995). The outdoor model, in the view of the beneficial effects presented, has become more and more innovative, making the most of the opportunities offered by being outdoors and identifying the external environment as a place of training (Farnè, 2015). This educational approach also requires the active participation of the subjects through the body and its movement, has brought back to the center of the development and learning processes the dimension of corporeality, adhering to recent ministerial documents (MIUR 2018; MIUR 2021) that have recognized in the body a vehicle of communication and knowledge. According to the same documents, the territory has taken a particular importance in the learning processes, being recognized as a place to exercise skills and expand educational experiences. Therefore, the outdoor educational model seems to respond both to what is required by ministerial documents and to the new needs dictated by the epidemiological emergency.

Living in the society of complexity and uncertainty (Bauman, 2008; Morin, 2012) requires the early childhood professionals not to stop at their basic training, but to keep on training in the light of constant changes in order to be able to learn about new educational and training strategies and to implement their social and technical skills. The article examines the results of a research-training conducted in the kindergartens of the territory of Bari on the theme of outdoor education, in order to observe and improve the applicability/feasibility of this model to early post-pandemic education. The project, entitled "The Indispensable Proximity: Reorganize the Kindergartens in Safety" (RIoNI) was carried out with the aim of enhancing the outdoor educational model, especially following the healthcare emergency, that brought the need to enhance infection preventive measures in kindergartens through interpersonal distancing and the use of "bubbles", ie sections of a few children without the possibility of intergroup exchange.

According to the findings, the RIoNI project aims to train educators and inform parents about the outdoor educational model, explaining the benefits of outdoor activities on emotional regulation, cognitive, physical and relational development of children. The project, moreover, in the light of the importance of the physical internal and external environment of the school on the learning processes and on the psychophysical and relational well-being (Plotka, 2016), aimed to rethink the organization of the available spaces (indoor and outdoor), for a better applicability of the proposed educational strategy.

Finance is a vital part of everybody’s life and dealing effectively with a wide range of financial challenges requires a level of financial literacy that many people lack. The OECD defines financial literacy to be a combination of financial ‘knowledge, awareness, skills, attitudes, and behaviour in order to make effective decisions across a range of financial contexts, to improve the financial well-being of individuals and society, and to enable participation in economic life’ (OECD 2014, 33). A high level of financial literacy contributes to a person’s financial stability, independence and well-being. People with a higher level of financial literacy know comparatively more financial products, use more sources of information for their financial decisions and have a nest egg set aside for a rainy day. They are less inclined to take out loans for short-lived purposes such as current bills, spontaneous purchases, gifts or a holiday (Silgoner et al. 2015, Stolper and Walter 2017, Lusardi 2019).

Consequently, improving financial education at schools is at the heart of most national strategies all around the world. However, considering the high diversity of students, there is little empirical evidence on the didactic adequacy and effectiveness of financial education initiatives. In order to provide a tailored financial education program that really meets the needs of the respective audiences, an innovative initiative of training students of business education to become financial education coaches at schools has been developed at Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU). As coaches, they offer to teach financial education workshops at schools, customised to the needs of the students while taking the teaching conditions at the respective school into account. Teachers at secondary schools may request workshops within the framework of the initiative on the website of the Institute for Business Education. In addition to their contact details, school and class, the teachers provide information on the desired topic, the desired length and the desired time period of the workshop. Accordingly, coaches develop an individual workshop for each request from a school or teacher.

The program has proven to be attractive not only for WU students who wish to enhance their financial knowledge and skills as well as their teaching abilities, but also for schools and teachers alike that aim to foster the level of financial education of their students. In creating a tangible impact in schools and society at large, the initiative contributes to a well-blended mix of third mission initiatives of a university. Yet, the program not only provides effective financial education for schools under consideration of the prevailing teaching conditions, but has also been evaluated from the very beginning of its implementation in order to closely examine the acceptance and effectiveness of the initiative. The actual effectiveness of the program has been assessed by means of an evaluation study that analyses the impact of the initiative on financial education coaches, teachers and students at schools while also analysing its recognition by society.

Subsequently, this contribution presents the initiative, its theoretical framework and the evaluation results on the didactic adequacy and the effectiveness of the program, in particular its impact on research and teaching.

One of the key issues of contemporary education is about conditions created for preparing children for the uncertainty and polyphony of positions that prevail in the modern world. Previous studies have shown that it is important to start at the Early Childhood Education level (Sylva et al., 2014). Activities such as pretend play are of particular interest since situations of uncertainty are modeled in the play process (Schulz, 2022) and play has an imperative role in children’s development (Liu et al., 2017; Smith & Roopnarine, 2018).

In play, a child can build an imaginary situation, take the initiative in constructing and transforming a plot, and solve challenges that arise in communication (Brėdikytė et al., 2015). Research shows that in mature pretend play, prerequisites arise for developing various functions – executive functions, imagination, and the ability for decentration. According to Vygotsky, pretend play is a leading activity that “represents the ninth wave of child development” (1967).

Research on play has highlighted the role of the adult as an important variable for the richness of play. This has been conceptualized in combination with Early Childhood Education Pedagogy. Besides the organization of the setting, one crucial condition for play development is joint play with the mediator of play culture (adult and/or older playful children). In the preschool setting, teachers can create special scaffolding situations and provide indirect and direct play support, creating a special subject-spatial environment that fosters play (Vygotsky, 1967; Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Recent studies show that preschool teachers in different countries prefer being outsiders instead of playing as partners with children (Devi, Fleer, & LI, 2018; Bredikyte, 2022) which, along with intensive schoolification, has been leading to the disappearance of play from Early Childhood Education centers.

The symposium includes empirical studies shedding light both on the power of play for developing children’s learning and on teachers’ perspectives on play, its role in pedagogy, and their play support strategies. The objective of the Symposium is to contribute to a research-based agenda for Early Childhood Education teachers’ play education. The Symposium combines perspectives from 3 countries and creates the space for dialogue between researchers to elaborate on the following research questions: how can teachers support the developmental potential of children's play, its impact on children's readiness to face situations of uncertainty in other contexts, for example, when solving non-standard problems; what strengths and deficits of play support strategies may be considered as specific or universal ones; how teachers’ education and professional development can be organized to make the shift (from didactic and outsider positions in joint play to partner) more sustainable.

The most important task of the Symposium is to highlight areas of professional learning that need to be further elaborated so that teachers can become playful, spontaneous, and ready to support children's play.

Pretend play contributes to the development of emotions, self-regulation, and imagination (Singer & DeHaan, 2019), gives children the possibility to follow rules and at the same time – degrees of freedom (Oers, 2014), allows them to merge into the process, challenge themselves, co-construct meanings and meet uncertainty in symbolic space. Replacement of play with structured planned activities, and its exploitation for teaching, leads to the disappearance of play from kindergartens (Loizou & Trawick-Smith, 2022). There is a gap between the declaration of the importance of play and real practice due to the distortion of teachers’ understanding of key features of play and its role in children’s development. The objective is to study how teachers’ perspective on play is related to the strategy of its support. The theoretical framework is a cultural-historical approach to play (Vygotsky, 1967; Pramling et al., 2019; Bredikyte, 2022). This is a mixed-methods study, interpretative paradigm. Participant's consent was obtained. Data were anonymized. The research is conducted according to MCU's ethical code. Semi-structured interviews, including commentary on 2 videos, were conducted with 34 preschool teachers. Thematic analysis of interviews revealed 13 positions of the adult in joint play and 3 subthemes: overvalue the adult's role, undervalue the child; trust children, undervalue the adult; and search of balance. The assessment of the conditions for play development was carried out using the scale "Play Environmental Rating Scale. ECERS-3 Extension" (Shiyan et al., 2024) in 28 preschool classrooms (13 kindergartens). The average total score is 3,35 (sd=1,31; med=3,43), which corresponds to the minimal quality level of conditions for play. Key deficits are the participation of the teacher in joint play with children, and the provision of conditions for multi-age interaction. Significant differences are revealed in the strategy of play support among teachers with a contrasting understanding of the pseudo-play video. Teachers who distinguish between play and pseudo-play and emphasize the developmental value of spontaneous children's play create a multifunctional play environment and more often participate in joint play as partners, supporting more uncertainty in the environment and in the relationship with children. Teachers who do not distinguish between a play and a pseudo-play are more often too didactic or outsiders, they create too realistic play environment and destroy the spontaneity of children’s play by their desire to control and organize the process of play. The results of the study can be used in the elaboration of programs for teacher’s professional development.

Bredikyte, M. (2022) Adult participation in the creation of narrative playworlds: challenges and contradictions. International Journal of Early Years Education, 30, 1-15. Loizou, E., & Trawick-Smith, J. (Eds.). (2022). Teacher Education and Play Pedagogy: International Perspectives (1st ed.). Routledge. Oers, B. (2014). Cultural–historical perspectives on play: Central ideas. In. L. Brooker, M. Blaise, & S. Edwards (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Play and Learning in Early Childhood (pp. 56-66). SAGE. Pramling, N., Wallerstedt, C., Lagerlöf, P., Björklund, C., Kultti, A., Palmér, H., Magnusson, M., Thulin, S., Jonsson, A., & Pramling Samuelsson, I. (2019). Play-Responsive Teaching in Early Childhood Education. Springer. Singer E., & De Haan D. (2019). Igrat', udivlyat'sya, uznavat'. Teoriya razvitiya, vospitaniya i obucheniya detei. Publishing MOZAIKA-SINTEZ. Shiyan, I.B., Iakshina, A.N. et al. (2024). Play Environment Rating Scale (PERS). ECERS-3 extension. Teachers College Press (in press). Vygotsky, L.S. (1967). Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child, Soviet Psychology, 5:3, 6-18.

Playing and creativity are united by the fact that in both cases a person is faced with an open situation of uncertainty. However, in the first case, we are talking about constructing imaginary situations (Kravtsov &Kravtsovа, 2019), and in the second – about solving non-standard problems (Craft, 2007; Veraksa, 2019). We set out to analyze • what are the conditions for play development and creativity in preschool classrooms; • are the quality of the conditions for play and the quality of the conditions for creativity related to each other? An assessment of educational conditions in 39 preschool classrooms in Russia and Kazakhstan was carried out using ECERS-3 extensions: “Play Environment Rating Scale” and “Creativity Environment Rating Scale”. Both instruments assess quality on a 7-point scale (from unsatisfactory to excellent). The conditions both for play and creativity are at a level below the minimum: The average score for the conditions for supporting play is 2.62 (with sd = 0.84), minimum score = 1.00, maximum = 4.43; for the development of creative abilities 2.33 (with sd = 1.09), minimum score = 1.00, maximum = 5.50. Deficiencies in the conditions for supporting play include the rare participation of the teacher in joint play with children, as well as the unavailability of unstructured materials for play. Deficiencies in the conditions for the development of creative abilities include rare joint discussions of problematic situations related to children's lives, including situations of divergent points of view and contradictive situations, with different development options. There are no correlations between the conditions for play and the conditions for creativity (the relationship is not significant at both the 0.01 and 0.05 levels; the correlation coefficients are weak (correlation coefficient 0.28, P-value = 0.0826)), which indicates that kindergartens tend to focus on either one or another group of conditions, and these efforts are not systematically coordinated. The identified deficits allow us to draw a conclusion about the skills that teachers lack: the ability to work in situations of unpredictability and surprises, which is required by both accompanying the play (spontaneity, playfulness, readiness to react sensitively and non-directively joining in the play) (Hännikainen, 2013) and stimulating the resolution of conflicting situations (ability to notice a problem, organize a discussion, support the diversity of children's answers) (Siraj-Blatchford, 2009).

Belolutskaya, A. K., Vorobyova, I. I., Shiyan, O.A., Zadadayev, S.A., & Shiyan, I.B. (2021). Conditions for the development of a child’s creative abilities: results of testing a tool for assessing the quality of education in kindergarten. Modern preschool education, 2, 12–30. Craft, A., Cremin, T., Burnard, P. & Chappell, K. (2007). Developing creative learning through possibility thinking with children aged 3-7. In. A Craft, T. Cremin, & P. Burnard (Eds.), Creative Learning 3-11 and How We Document It. Trentham. Singer, E. & van Oers, B. (2013). Promoting Play for a Better Future. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 21(2), 165–171. Kravtsov, G.G., & Kravtsova, E.E. (2019). Play as a zone of proximal development of preschool children. Psychological and pedagogical research, 11(4), 5–21. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2009). Conceptualising progression in the pedagogy of play and sustained shared thinking in early childhood education: a Vygotskian perspective. Education and Child Psychology, 26(2), 77-89. Veraksa, N.E. (2019). Dialectical thinking: logic and psychology. Cultural-historical psychology, 15(3), 4–12. Yakshina, A.N., Le-Van, T. N., Zadadayev, S. A., & Shiyan, I. B. (2020). Development and testing of a scale for assessing the conditions for the development of children's play activity in preschool groups. Modern preschool education, 2, 21-31.

The relationship between content knowledge and play in Early Childhood Education (ECE) has been complex (Figueiredo, 2022). Acknowledging the relevance of content in ECE requires attention to the pedagogical appropriation of knowledge but also to the view of knowledge itself. When a sociocultural perspective is assumed, it is about using knowledge as a potential tool for transformation that allows the individual to build himself subjectively and intersubjectively (Pramling et al., 2019). Research has also highlighted how teachers’ lack or inadequacy of knowledge of a certain area of the curriculum can harm children's learning by leading to opportunities that are not explored (Siraj-Blatchford, 2010), while feeling security about their knowledge leads to a greater probability of recognition and learning enhancement in children's play experiences (Hedges & Cooper, 2018). ECE teachers tend to undervalue their content knowledge even though they use it to add depth to children’s learning during play and can use pedagogical content knowledge for organizing play environments (Oppermann et al., 2016; Figueiredo, Gomes, & Rodrigues, 2020). The particular case of introducing algorithmic thinking in ECE contexts in Portugal opened the opportunity to study this connection between play and content knowledge. Computational thinking and algorithmic thinking have been promoted in several educational systems as preparation for the challenges of the future, including uncertainty and openness. Algorithmic thinking, in particular, has long traditions in different scientific areas and can be connected to all curricular areas of ECE in Portugal (Figueiredo et al., 2021). With a focus on problem-solving together with thinking and creativity skills, teachers and curriculum developers are being challenged to foster algorithmic thinking skills starting from the preschool period (Strnad, 2018). Based on a common practitioner research approach, two studies were conducted on Portuguese ECE centers that explored play as a context to develop algorithmic thinking with children from 3 to 6 years old. The practitioners were unfamiliar with the concept and used the research on practice as a learning experience. The reports from those studies were combined with in-depth individual interviews with the teachers to explore how they perceived the relationship between their knowledge and their actions regarding children's play. Results from the content analysis on the combined data set show that a focus on play from a new content area perspective highlighted the role of the adult in supporting play and revealed areas where the adult intervention was relevant.

Figueiredo, M. (2022). Tensions and (re)transformations in the Portuguese ECE curriculum. In S. Almeida, F. Sousa, & M. Figueiredo (Eds.), Curriculum autonomy policies (pp. 45-58). CICS.NOVA. Figueiredo, M., Gomes, H. & Rodrigues, C. (2020). Mathematical pedagogical content knowledge in ECE: Tales from the ‘great unknown’ in teacher education in Portugal. In B. Perry & O. Thiel (Eds.), Innovative approaches in early childhood mathematics (pp. 535–546). Routledge. Figueiredo, M., et al. (2021). Play, Algorithmic Thinking and ECE. In 2021 International Symposium on Computers in Education (pp. 1–4). IEEE. Hedges, H. & Cooper, M. (2018). Relational play-based pedagogy: Theorising a core practice in ECE. Teachers and Teaching, 24(4), 369–383. Oppermann, E., Anders, Y. & Hachfeld, A. (2016). The influence of preschool teachers’ content knowledge and mathematical ability beliefs on their sensitivity to mathematics in children’s play. Teaching and Teacher Education, 58, 174–184. Pramling, N., et al. (2019). Play-Responsive Teaching in ECE. Springer. Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2010). A focus on pedagogy. Case studies of effective practice. In K. Sylva, et al. (Eds.), Early childhood matters. Evidence from the EPPE Project (pp. 149–165). Routledge. Strnad, B. (2018). Introduction to the World of Algorithmic Thinking. Journal of Electrical Engineering, 6, 57–60.

Shaping Minds, Empowering Educators: Unveiling the Power of Teacher Mindsets from University to Service

Drawing on diverse educational landscapes, this symposium aims to contribute to research on teacher mindsets. As we dive into these research narratives, we'll navigate the territories where teacher beliefs, subject specificity, and mindset evolution converge across different countries.

Theoretical Background

Developed by Dweck (1999; 2006), mindset theory centers upon the motivational mechanisms associated with our beliefs about intelligence. When faced with challenges, this theory suggests that our mindset influences our drive to learn and persevere. Rooted in early attribution theory, it revolves around the notion that our implicit theories shape how we interpret events, like attributing the causes of failure (Yeager & Dweck, 2012). Dweck's theory distinguishes between growth and fixed mindsets, where growth mindsets foster incremental beliefs, such as intelligence being a journey, not a destination. Fixed mindsets, in contrast, are static beliefs about abilities. Research findings of mindset research have been transferred into many different areas, however an early focus of mindset research were educators’ mindsets and their possible advantages for students’ motivation and achievement, as well as their own mindset (Mueller & Dweck, 1998; Dweck, 2014; Yeager et al., 2022).

Methodology and Research Aim

While some progress has been made in attempting to understand the development of mindsets (Blackwell et al., 2007), the mindsets of educators at different stages of their careers remain critically underexplored. Additionally, while most mindset research focuses primarily on mindset alteration through interventions, little is also known about how mindsets can change in the absence of these interventions. Understanding how mindsets develop outside of specific interventions as well as exploring their connections with other important educational constructs, such as intercultural competences is also crucial. As classrooms have become more heterogeneous, this creates new challenges for teachers, and currently the links between the development of mindsets and intercultural competences in teacher education remain underexplored.

This symposium will bridge the gaps in current mindset research by bringing together studies on both in-service and pre-service teachers. In the first contribution, development of mindsets in several subjects throughout university teacher education will be the main focus. In the second contribution, early childhood-in-service teachers’ perceptions of mindset theory is examined, laying a special focus in identifying support mechanisms that can help them fostering growth mindsets in their students. Lastly, preservice teachers’ mindsets and their connection with intercultural competences is emphasized; and enriched by qualitative exploration. By combining research on both pre-service and in-service teachers, we aim to close the current research gap in mindset research on development of mindsets during teacher education as well as their association with an important asset to face the challenges in modern classrooms, namely intercultural competence. Additionally, we include relevant research work on early childhood educators’ mindsets to address practical implications regarding the possibility to foster mindsets in the classroom.

Conclusions

This collection of research works provides valuable and unique insights into the dynamic nature of mindset development throughout various stages in teachers’ careers across different countries. The integration of three research works from different contexts, featuring both quantitative and qualitative strategies, enriches the understanding of teacher mindset evolution in Europe and beyond, highlighting its relevance from primary in-service teaching to tertiary teacher education. By doing so, we will be contributing to the dynamic research field of mindset research, placing a special focus on teacher mindsets.

Teachers significantly influence student learning and motivation, with their beliefs playing a key role in shaping instructional behavior (Dweck et al., 2006; Hattie, 2023). Growth mindsets, emphasizing the malleability of abilities through effort, have been linked to better educational outcomes (Burnette et al., 2023). Field-specific ability beliefs (FABs) focus on the context-specificity of mindsets, assessing beliefs about the necessity of innate ability for success in a subject (Leslie et al., 2015). Most longitudinal mindset studies focus on the development of Growth Mindset in the context of an intervention (Yeager et al., 2022); there is a scarcity on research regarding the question how mindsets, especially field-specific mindsets, change in the absence of interventions; even more so related to teacher mindsets. This study investigates the longitudinal development of FABs as well as Growth Mindset in 1,015 preservice teachers across 21 subjects over four years. Structural equation modeling and latent growth models were employed to analyze changes in both field-specific mindsets and general mindsets of intelligence. Pre-service teachers rated both their belief in the necessity of talent in their subject and their belief in the necessity of intelligence for academic success in general. Covariates were gender and prior achievement. Overall, FABs decreased over four years, indicating a shift toward reduced emphasis on innate ability for success. STEM subjects (Science, Technology and Mathematics), in general, started with higher FABs and showed steeper declines compared to non-STEM subjects. Pre-service teachers in mathematics showed the strongest FABs at T1, but also the strongest decline. Physical education was the only subject where FABs increased over time. Gender influenced initial FABs, with men exhibiting stronger beliefs in innate ability at the start of teacher education. Growth mindset, on the other hand, showed a different trajectory throughout teacher training, with a decreasing curve at the first two years of university. After the third year we found a weak increase in growth mindset in most subjects, however, Physical Education showed once again a more complex pattern. The findings highlight the dynamic nature of mindsets during teacher education. Results suggest that teacher university training may contribute to a shift towards a growth-perspective in specific subjects, but not in the mindset of intelligence. Subject-specific variations emphasize the need for tailored interventions and teacher training strategies. Overall, the study contributes valuable insights into the complex interplay between teacher beliefs, subject specificity, and mindset development during the crucial phase of teacher education.

Burnette, J. L., Billingsley, J., Banks, G. C., Knouse, L. E., Hoyt, C. L., Pollack, J. M., & Simon, S. (2023). A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Growth Mindset Interventions: For Whom, How, and Why Might Such Interventions Work? Psychological Bulletin, 149 (3-4), 174-205. Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House. Hattie, John A. C. (2023): Visible Learning: The Sequel. A Synthesis of Over 2,100 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. New York: Routledge Kunter, M., Klusmann, U., Baumert, J., Richter, D., Voss, T., & Hachfeld, A. (2013). Professional competence of teachers: Effects on instructional quality and student development. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(3), 805-820 Leslie, S.-J.; Cimpian, A.; Meyer, M.; Freeland, E. (2015). Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science, 347(6219), 262–265.

A growth mindset positively impacts academic achievement, motivation, and student’s agency for learning (Dweck, 2016). There is increasing evidence that students’ recognition of their capacity to learn using a growth mindset assists them to achieve greater success in learning in the primary and adolescent years (Claro et al., 2016; Good et al., 2003; Paunesku et al., 2015; Yeager et al., 2019). However, very few studies have researched how to support the development of student’s growth mindset in the early years. A limited understanding of the teaching of mindset theory as a metacognitive strategy in early childhood classrooms warrants further exploration. Developing student’s growth mindset in the early years may assist students to build effective learning strategies for future academic success. This study investigated the current perceptions that early childhood teachers have of mindset theory and devised principles to support them to incorporate the teaching of mindset theory and foster a growth mindset in students. The theoretical framework for this study draws upon Deweyan pragmatism whereby knowledge is gained through interventions as connections between actions and consequences are made (Tashakkori, 2010). Design Based Research (DBR) was used in this study as a methodology for exploring an educational problem to understand how, when, and why educational innovations work in practice. Entrenched in practice, DBR considers the influence of place to produce theoretical and practical insights to extend knowledge and sustain innovative learning environments. Using a pragmatist paradigm this mixed methods study followed four stages of DBR (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992) over 10 weeks to develop design principles in early childhood classrooms in one school in Western Australia. Two iterations were designed and examined with teachers of children aged 3.5–6.5 years. The participants recorded weekly video diaries to reflect on the principles. Three focus groups were conducted, at the beginning, middle, and end of the two iterations, allowing the researcher and teachers to collaboratively develop, refine, and reflect on the principles. Throughout the DBR process, design principles were developed by drawing on theory and the real world to address the research problem. This study’s contribution lies in the theoretical and practical grounding of the nine design principles which teachers found highly effective in assisting them to foster students’ growth mindsets for positive learning outcomes in early childhood contexts.

Boylan, F., Barblett, L., & Knaus, M. (2018). Early childhood teachers’ perspectives of growth mindset: Developing agency in children. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 43(3), 16–24. https://doi.org/10.23965/AJEC.43.3.02 Brown, A. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2(2), 141–178. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327809jls0202_2 Collins, A. (1992). Toward a design science of education. In E. Scanlon & T. O’Shea (Eds.), New directions in educational technology (pp. 15–22). Springer-Verlag. Claro, S., Paunesku, D., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(31), 8664–8668. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1608207113 Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success (updated edition). New York, USA: Random House. Good, C., Aronson, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2003). Improving adolescents’ standardized test performance: An intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 24, 645–662. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2003.09.002 Tashakkori, A. (2010). SAGE handbook of mixed methods in social & behavioral research (2nd ed.). SAGE Publications. Yeager, D.S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G.M. et al. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature 573, 364–369. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y

Recent findings reveal a significant achievement gap between native Finnish students and first- and second-generation immigrant students in Finnish education systems (Jahnukainen et al., 2019). This underscores an urgency for targeted research focusing on Finnish teachers’ intercultural competences. Intercultural competences refer to the attitudes, knowledge and skills that enable teachers to effectively interact within intercultural contexts (Perry & Southwell, 2011). Research in psychology on implicit beliefs has shed new light to the study of teachers' intercultural competences. Individuals with orientation towards incremental theory (i.e. growth mindset) believe that qualities and traits can be altered, while individuals oriented towards entity theory (i.e. fixed mindset) believe they remain stagnant (Dweck, 2010). As these orientations have been found to impact stereotyping, prejudice, and intergroup relations (Carr et al., 2012; Rattan & Georgeac, 2017), they are increasingly being found to be useful for examining intercultural competences as well. Research focused on in-service teachers in Finland shows how orientations towards these different theories strongly influence teaching practices and interactions with students as well as are associated with their intercultural competences (Rissanen & Kuusisto, 2023; Rissanen et al., 2023). However, currently the link between mindsets and development of intercultural competences remains unexplored within the territory of teacher education. This study addresses this gap by utilizing mixed-methods research to explore Finnish student teachers’ malleability beliefs and intercultural competences. Survey data from student teachers (n=232) as well as semi-structured interviews (n=13) utilizing vignettes, was gathered to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between implicit beliefs of malleability and intercultural competences. Findings based on statistical analysis of survey data found that student teachers were more oriented towards incremental theory mindsets which also correlated significantly with social justice beliefs. Enthusiasm for teaching culturally diverse groups was moderate, but those with more experience with diversity were more enthusiastic for teaching culturally diverse groups. Preliminary findings from qualitative analysis of interview data seem to indicate that student teachers are in fact more oriented toward growth mindset, and that these orientations may make them more inclined to favor teaching practices that align with culturally responsive pedagogical practices. Implications of findings will be discussed for intercultural competence research as well as teaching and teacher education.

Carr, P. B., Rattan, A., & Dweck, C. S. (2012). Implicit theories shape intergroup relations. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 45, pp. 127–165). Elsevier Science & Technology. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-394286-9.00003-2 Dweck, C. S. (2010). Even geniuses work hard. Educational Leadership, 68(1), 16–20. Jahnukainen, M., Kalalahti, M., & Kivirauma, J. (2019). Oma paikka haussa: Maahanmuuttotaustaiset nuoret ja koulutus [Searching for a place of one’s own: Young people with an immigrant background and education]. Gaudeamus. Perry, L. B., & Southwell, L. (2011). Developing intercultural understanding and skills: Models and approaches. Intercultural Education (London, England), 22(6), 453–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675986.2011.644948 Rattan, A., & Georgeac, O. A. (2017). Understanding intergroup relations through the lens of implicit theories (mindsets) of malleability. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 11(4), e12305-n/a. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12305 Rissanen, I., & Kuusisto, E. (2023). The role of growth mindset in shaping teachers’ intercultural competencies: A study among Finnish teachers. British Educational Research Journal, doi: 10.1002/berj.3875. Rissanen, I., Kuusisto, E., & McMullen, J. (2023). Identifying core beliefs of an intercultural educator: How polyculturalism and group malleability beliefs shape teachers’ pedagogical thinking and practice. Social Psychology of Education, 26(5), 1201–1225. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09785-z