Dr. LIAO Wei is Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at Beijing Normal University (www.liaowei.weebly.com). He is an Associate Editor of Beijing International Review of Education (BIRE) and is editing a special issue, the third issue for 2021, for BIRE.
Equity-Oriented Teacher Education: Conceptual Perspectives and Practical Approaches
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.
Proposals with a tentative title and 500-word abstract should be sent with “BIRE Proposal Submission – 2021 Issue 3” as its subject to Editor-in-Chief Prof. Michael A. Peters (mpeters@bnu.edu.cn) and Dr. LIAO Wei (liaowei@bnu.edu.cn) by September 1, 2020. Full papers are to be submitted by January 1, 2021.