The History of Initial Teacher Preparation in International Contexts
This chapter examines the history of teacher education in five nations – South Africa, Singapore, Chile, Finland, and United States – representing different continents, histories, political structures, cultures, levels of wealth, and economies. The nation
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The History of Initial Teacher Preparation in International Contexts Peggy L. Placier, Moeketsi Letseka, Johannes Seroto, Jason Loh, Carmen Montecinos, Nelson Vásquez, and Kirsi Tirri
This chapter examines the history of teacher education in five nations – South Africa, Singapore, Chile, Finland, and United States – representing different continents, histories, political structures, cultures, levels of wealth, and economies. The nations were selected, in fact, because of this variability; Table 2.1 shows how widely they differ on a number of indicators. We hope the chapter will generate discussions about the role teacher education has played in national development and what teacher educators in different nations might learn from each other. For purposes of the chapter we should define what we mean by ‘teacher’ and ‘education’. Teaching is as old as human history. “Before there was teacher education – or from one perspective, even teachers – there was teaching” (Warren, 1985, p. 5). Nevertheless, we will limit ‘teacher’ to mean a classroom instructor. Education writ large includes all the ways people learn, inside and outside of schools. LaBelle’s (1982) widely-used heuristic divides education into informal, nonformal, and formal dimensions. Informal education is the lifelong experience of learning in every-
P.L. Placier (*) University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Letseka • J. Seroto University of South Africa (UNISA), Pretoria, South Africa J. Loh National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore C. Montecinos School of Psychology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile N. Vásquez History Institute, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile K. Tirri Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 J. Loughran, M.L. Hamilton (eds.), International Handbook of Teacher Education, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0366-0_2
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Table 2.1 National demographic and education data
Country South Africa Singapore Chile United States Finland
Population in millions (2013)a 53.98 5.4 17.6 316.1 5.4
GDP ranking (2013)a 33 36 38 1 42
Poverty as % of population (2011)a 45.5 % NA 14.4 14.5b 6c (2010a, 2010b)
Per capita GNI (US $) (2013)a $7190 54,040 15,230 53,470 48,820
Mean score on PISA (2012)c NA 573 423 481 519
Ranking on health and primary education pillar (2013)d 135 2 74 34 1
a
World Bank U.S. Census Bureau c Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) d The Global Competitiveness Report 2013–2014 b
day situations; nonformal education is intentional and/or programmatic learning outside of schools; and formal education consists of institutionalized, systematic, and hierarchically structured learning experiences in schools. In a holistic sense teacher education includes all of these. However, as Bekerman, Burbules, and Silberman-Keller (2006) argued, “formal education has long be
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