Sustaining Teacher Beliefs in Higher Education: Status Quo and Future Directions
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Education and Approaches".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2024) | Viewed by 2623
Special Issue Editors
Interests: teacher psychology; teacher education; teacher beliefs
Interests: language teacher education; teacher and learner emotions; loving pedagogy; beliefs in language learning and teaching
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
As teachers and educators in higher education, we are now facing an unprecedented time. In terms of a paradigm shift, we have moved from a simple, static, and linear positivism to a complex, dynamical, and chaotic pragmatism. Things become even more complex when unexpected disasters or wars chime in and disturb or change our regular teaching and schooling. In terms of theory, we steer towards developing existing frameworks, including but not limited to sociocultural theory and complex dynamic systems theory, while embracing new tenets from positive psychology and the translanguaging.
These shifts, developments, and changes indicate that our perceptions and beliefs as teachers or teacher educators require further analysis and advanced empirical studies. Ever since Lortie (1975) embarked on attending to teacher beliefs, teacher beliefs as a construct has been persistently studied over the decades from different perspectives, including but not limited to: cognitive camp (Borg, 2003), sociocultural theory (Johnson, 1992; 2009), reflective practice (Farrell, 2013), and complex dynamical systems theory (Gao, 2021). With the influx of theorical input and empirical achievement, it is time we (re)visit our analyses on the constructs of teacher beliefs and see how they may be further developed to equip teachers with the theoretical and practical energy required to build a sustainable future of our teaching profession in higher education.
On this note, we thus welcome submissions for this Special Issue of Sustainability that focus on sustaining teacher beliefs in higher education: status quo and future directions. We are especially interested in theoretical and empirical approaches on the following topics:
- Theoretical or conceptual underpinning pieces that address differences and connections between teacher beliefs and other newly studied or emerging psychological or cognitive constructs
- Bibliometric analysis of teacher beliefs across different leading journals that offer insights on how we extend the line of inquiry
- Empirical works that explore how teacher beliefs inform teaching practices in complex contexts
- Empirical works that attempt to study teacher beliefs and their connections to language teacher identity, emotions, agency, or resilience
- Empirical works that focus on exploration of teacher beliefs and practices in specific, newly promoted pedagogies
- Survey works and analyses on teacher beliefs about AI, value-based education, and emergency remote teaching that go far beyond specific pedagogies
- Historical analysis on how inter/national educational policies have informed changes of teacher beliefs over the decades
Other topics that are not listed but are engaged with research related to the teacher beliefs are also be encouraged and appreciated. Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to the guest editors by 1 March 2023.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Yang Gao
Prof. Dr. Ana Maria Ferreira Barcelos
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- teacher beliefs and practices
- teacher emotions
- complexity
- pragmatism
- higher education
- value-based education
- sustainable directions
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