Research-based teacher education can be understood in different ways: as a call to understand teacher education institutions as research institutions, as the ambition to educate student teachers to have an inquiring attitude, as the basing of teacher education curricula on the latest research, or as a combination of all three.In this chapter we reflect on a method of connecting research, curriculum development and practice in teacher education, presenting a case study of a conversational community of teacher educators and researchers. The aim of the conversational community was to understand the process of curriculum design in teacher education as an inspiring and practical combination of design research, self-study, collaborative action research and curriculum study by teacher educators. This process was supported by a conversational framework in which curriculum development was understood as an ongoing dialogue between vision, intentions, design and practice in the teacher education curriculum. Using the conversational framework in this single case study of a conversational community, we have tried to connect teacher education research, curriculum development and practice in a meaningful way.
Economic, social and environmental changes place high demands on teachers and teacher education. Consequently, teacher education is challenged to design curricula that respond to and anticipate changes. Curricula are value-driven and even though part of these values might be constant, the relative importance of values and the values themselves may also be subject to change since society is changing rapidly. In vocational education, responsive curriculum development refers to balancing the needs of students, workplaces and society. Vocational education qualifies students for coping with unpredictable situations and complex problems in occupational practice. As in vocational education, teacher education also prepares students for unpredictability and complexity and thus, we adopt the concept of responsiveness from vocational education to explore teacher education. This study explores the concept of a responsive curriculum for teacher education using a qualitative approach. Interviews were conducted with the key actors, namely students and teacher educators, in the context of Dutch teacher education. An initial framework, consisting of three responsive dimensions and five designable elements, was used to guide the interviews and analyse the data. The data revealed 14 relevant themes to identify how a teacher education curriculum can be responsive to changes in society, to a variety of schools and to student diversity. The developed framework can serve as a conceptual frame to study the enactment of responsive curriculum designs. Also, it can support practitioners when designing responsive curricula.
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Engineering students have to learn to create robust solutions in professional contexts where new technologies emerge constantly and sometimes disrupt entire industries. The question rises if universities design curricula that enable engineering students to acquire these cognitive skills. The Cynefin Framework (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003; Snowden & Boone, 2007) can be used to typify four complexity contexts a system or organisation can be found in: chaos, complex, complicated and obvious.The Cynefin framework made it possible to create the research question for a case-study: To what extend does the Business Engineering curriculum enable bachelors to find business solutions in the complexity contexts of the Cynefin framework? The results show that 80% of the methods are suitable for complicated contexts and no distinction is made between contexts. This means students are taught to approach most contexts in the same way and are not made aware of differences between the contexts. Making sense of the methods in the curriculum with the Cynefin framework was insightful and suggestions for improvement and further research could be substantiated
