Beijing International Review of Education Special Issue (2021, Issue 3)

Call for Papers

Theme

Equity-Oriented Teacher Education: Conceptual Perspectives and Practical Approaches

Purpose and Significance

One persisting challenge facing many education systems worldwide is the unequal access to high-quality teachers among students from different backgrounds, regions, and socio-cultural contexts. Equity issues in education, broadly defined, can compromise the schooling experiences and outcomes of traditionally disadvantaged students and undermine the overall quality, morality, and sustainability of education systems. Given teachers’ pivotal roles in empowering student learning, they have been placed at the center of educational research, policy, and practices in the past few decades. Previous research has explored measures to tackle the equity issues in teacher workforces. Some commonly used measures include establishing certification mechanisms to ensure that every schoolteacher has the essential qualities for teaching, using policy interventions to channel high-quality teachers to under- resourced schools, and empowering disadvantaged communities to “grow their own” teachers. While these approaches have righteously located and addressed important external forces that can influence teacher workforces, it is still not clear enough, both conceptually and empirically, how teacher education programs can play a role in nurturing teachers’ mindedness, competencies, and actions for enhancing educational equity in different settings. Thus, this special issue proposes equity-oriented teacher education (EOTE) as a core concept to explore the crucial and complex relationships between teacher education and educational equity in a variety of local, national, and socio-cultural contexts.

Sub-Themes

We call for papers that address one or both of the following two sub-themes:

• Sub-Theme 1: Perspectives on conceptualizating EOTE. This sub-theme focuses on surveying the existing and alternative conceptualizations of EOTE and articulating the theoretical underpinnings, strengths, and limitations of each conceptualization. The questions authors can consider addressing in their papers include but are not limited to:
  • What are the existing perspectives on conceptualizating EOTE?
  • What alternative perspectives could be used to understand EOTE?
  • What are the ontological, epistemological, and methodological stance of each of the existing and alternative perspectives on conceptualizing EOTE?
  • How is equality, equity, justice, fairness, and other relevant notions reflected in the conceptualizations of EOTE?
  • What are the theoretical issues and debates in conceptualizing EOTE?
  • In what ways do institutional, socio-cultural, and global discourses shape the the conceptualizations of EOTE?
• Sub-Theme 2: Approaches to practicing EOTE. The second sub-theme is aimed to empirically examine the issues related to EOTE practices. Guided by different views on EOTE, teacher education programs, including both pre-service teacher preparation programs and in-service teacher professional development programs, have developed a rich set of approaches to practicing EOTE. Each approach involves a series of practices, such as mission orientation, program design, curricular arrangement, pedagogical adjustment, and teacher educator development. Authors aiming at this

sub-theme should consider addressing one or more of the following questions in their papers.

• What are the exiting approaches to practicing EOTE?
  • What could be the alternative approaches to practicing EOTE?
  • In the program(s) studied, how is EOTE defined and operationalized at the individual, curricular, programmatic, institutional, and socio-cultural levels?
  • How do different stakeholders (e.g., teacher educators, pre-service and in- service teachers, program administrators) shape EOTE practices?
  • What intended and unintended consequences have the studied EOTE program(s) caused to teachers, students, schools, and the education system?
  • What are the major challenges in practicing EOTE?
  • Which directions should EOTE move toward? Why and how?

We welcome papers using a plural set of research paradigms, methodologies, and methods. Given the two sub-themes’ respective focus, we will prioritize systemic or narrative literature review, theoretical work, and historical studies for the first sub-theme. As for the second sub- theme, we ask authors to report empirical studies using a variety of methodologies and methods, such as quantitative analysis, ethnographic study, case study, action research, narrative inquiry, self-study, and others. Furthermore, to make the special issue to be informative to BIRE’s international readership, we ask authors to situate their studies in the international discussions on related topics.

Timeline

Due dates    Tasks

2020/09/01    Paper proposals due

2020/10/01    Review results released–Confirming with authors of accepted proposals

2021/01/01    Full manuscripts due

2021/04/01    Peer review completed

2021/07/01    Revised manuscripts due

2021/10/01    Finalized manuscripts sent to Brill for publishing             

How to Submit a Proposal

If you are interested, please submit a proposal with a tentative title and a 500-word abstract with “BIRE Proposal Submission-2021 Issue 3” as its subject to the editor-in-chief of BIRE Prof. Michael PETERS (mpeters@bnu.edu.cn) and the editor of the special issue Dr. LIAO Wei (liaowei@bnu.edu.cn) by September 1st, 2020. Please feel free to share this call with your colleagues or communities who may be interested. If you have any questions, please contact Dr. LIAO Wei. We look forward to receiving your submissions.

About BIRE

The Beijing International Review of Education (BIRE) is a new start-up journal published by Brill Academic Publishers (https://brill.com/view/journals/bire/bire-overview.xml) starting in 2019. BIRE aims to publish articles that are of interest not only to academics and policy makers but also teachers and members of the public. All articles in this journal will undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and double-blind peer review. The journal publishes four issues per year.