Guest Editors: Cora Weber-Pillwax, Jennifer Kelly, Lynette Shultz, and Elizabeth Lange
The Alberta Journal of Educational Research invites submissions from researchers whose interests include exploring the potential for Indigenous and other knowledge systems to revitalize and revolutionize teacher education programs in Canadian and international contexts.
In the past 20-30 years, teacher education has emphasized diversity, sustainability, and globalization as foundational concepts underpinning other standard elements: managing the learning environment, student assessment, and core curricular content. Recently critical scholarship has pointed out that the theories and praxes of these concepts have not been sufficiently developed to respond fully to the concerns of the vulnerable populations most directly implicated in the meanings, discourses, and applications of such terms. For example, the children who are gradually filling most of the seats in standard classrooms increasingly are Indigenous people or immigrants. Experiences in these classrooms reflect models of teacher education that are confined to the parameters and limitations of a Western intellectual tradition. The literature contains many stories of failure in relation to these experiences.
Given the inadequacies of the Western intellectual tradition to create or develop effective educational programming to meet the needs of all students, it seems incumbent on educational researchers to consider seriously how other, particularly Indigenous, knowledge systems can contribute to contemporary teacher preparation programs.
Because North American teacher education systems are marketed and modeled in other countries, it follows that other knowledge systems are affected. Where the Western intellectual tradition underlying teacher education programs has had to face serious challenges to its inherent binary oppositional thought and epistemological dualism, postmodern theorizing has posited explanations and resolutions to this Western breaking apart of its meaning structures. Indigenous scholars, however, speak critically of postmodernism as merely another attempt to maintain Western domination.
Submissions must be received by October 20, 2008.
Authors planning
to submit a manuscript should first send a statement of intention (250 words)
well before October 20 in order to receive feedback on the
appropriateness of the proposed article. Abstracts, intention statements,
suggestions, and inquiries should be sent to: Cora Weber-Pillwax,
Send manuscripts, indicating
consideration for the Theme Issue, to ajer@ualberta.ca
Go to the AJER Information and guidelines for submission of manuscripts page
Copyright © AJER, the Faculty of Education, and the University
of Alberta, 2008.
Last revised: April 29, 2008
Designed by G.H. Buck