Teacher Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy
The Teacher Education, Curriculum, and Pedagogy hub focuses on research relevant to the education of teachers working in a wide range of different formal and informal settings, including research on curricula and pedagogies.
The education of teachers forms an important part of the work we do in the Moray House School of Education and Sport. More generally teacher education is a major part of the field of educational research world-wide. Educating teachers and interrogating the process of becoming a teacher raises important intellectual and political questions about orientation, direction, and values. In addition, it raises important empirical questions about the most optimal ways in which teachers can be prepared for their professional careers, and how such careers can be sustained over time. Questions about curriculum development and enactment and questions about pedagogy are key to the craft of teaching, which makes research on curricula and pedagogies an integral part of teacher education research and scholarship internationally. In the TECP hub we bring together research and scholarship on these topics, with the aim to further develop work in these areas, and do so in fruitful dialogue with our teacher education programmes.
Leadership team
The initial phase of this thematic hub will be led by Professor Gert Biesta and Dr Laura Colucci-Gray, in collaboration with Dr Ramsey Affifi and Dr Hui-Chuan Li.
Centres, groups and networks
Our areas of research interest include: widening participation; transition into higher education; internationalisation; employability; master’s level provision; student experience; interdisciplinary, critical policy studies, comparative higher education and capacity building.
Learning for Sustainability (LfS), or Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), is a wider agenda that has emerged in the UK and internationally at all levels of education. LfS is defined in multiple ways, for example as ‘a process of learning how to make decisions that consider the long-term future of the economy, ecology and equity of all communities’ (Martin et al. 2013: 1523). As such, how courses are taught is as important as what is taught.
Our work covers a range of areas within the field of philosophy of education, including theories of teaching and learning, moral education, theories of discipline, curriculum theory, virtue epistemology and education, theories of inclusion and social justice. Our members have backgrounds in diverse traditions of philosophy, including Analytic, Continental and American Pragmatism.
We are a group of researchers from across Moray House School of Education and Sport, and beyond, who engage in physical culture research in the context of education: schools, curricula, teacher learning and ITE. Together our research aims to enrich practice and improve the experiences, learning and lives of young people and their teachers.
The Research-led Teacher Education Network (RTEN) is an interdisciplinary network for dialogue and collaboration in research on teachers, teaching and teacher education, knowledge Exchange between academic and non-academic partners, research-led development of teacher education, drawing upon the wide range of research at the University of Edinburgh and internationally.