Backgound to the Working Conference Series

At the 2006 Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education Hans Smits (University of Calgary) and I met to discuss the possibility of organizing a conference that would focus on research in teacher education within the Canadian context. Earlier that year both of us had attended a special session at the Teacher Development conference at Simon Fraser University in which Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Kenneth Zeichner presented on the 2005 Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education, which both edited. This compendium of research on teacher education not just considers research undertaken only in the USA context, but in their presentation Cochran-Smith and Zeichner pointed to the necessity for research that would reflect the Canadian experience, in all its diversity.  It was our view, that given the considerable length of time that such an effort was attempted, it was an opportune moment to initiate and implement a program of systematic and broad-based pan-Canadian research into teacher education.  The release of the Accord on Initial Teacher Education by the Association of Canadian Deans provided an impetus and possible parameters for such research, and was exemplary of a shared vision about teacher education, and how it might live well in the contexts of our different jurisdictions.  For us, it was also significant that there had been a number of teacher education conferences recently hosted by different universities, and several teacher education programs in Canada had been or were in states of review.  Also, the Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE) had become much more active in recent years on focusing on teacher education and on advocating for a greater research presence in the area of teacher education.

In light of these considerations, Hans and I started developing plans for a working conference which could provide the starting point for a pan-Canadian and more systematic approach to researching teacher education in Canada. These plans resulted in the first Working Conference on Research in Teacher Education in Canada, held 1-3 November 2007 at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. The respective links at the top of this page, as well as in the right column, link to information on the conference as well as to the conference proceedings.

The positive response to the Winnipeg conference resulted in the idea of making the conference the beginning of a series of regular conferences that all would have the character of working conferences, where the focus is less on presentations of research and more on engaging in in-depth dialogue about teacher education (research) in Canada.

While the first two conferences in 2007 and 2008 were designed to provide a supportive and engaging context for developing and planning of collaborative, pan-Canadian research projects on teacher education in Canada, from the 2009 Working Conference on, each of the conferences is integrated into a three-phase book project on a specific topic relevant to teacher edcuation in Canada. All the books are published on this website on the page of the respective Working Conference.

 

Thomas Falkenberg (University of Manitoba)