Even though initial teacher education is a rather short period in comparison to the other phases of a teacher’s career, it has a crucial role in shaping student teachers’ career-long activities. Many argue that everyday teaching in a classroom setting is comparable to conducting research, as teachers pursue experimenting with different strategies to teaching and learning, as they reflect on their own as well as their colleagues’ work, and as they make decisions about their future steps based on these experiences. This paper aims to reveal how the concept of teachers as researchers is addressed in initial teacher education programmes by answering two questions: How is the concept of teachers as researchers represented in these programmes? What kind of experiences do student teachers have regarding practice-oriented research? The research has a case study design with a comparative aspect, in which one Hungarian and one Austrian institution offering initial teacher education serve as the two cases. Results show that both universities have integrated research into their initial teacher education programmes, but in different ways and to different extents. An important notion is that although various courses that deal with research and/or research methodology and could contribute to the development of student teachers’ research competences could be identified, the activities of these courses are somewhat restricted to taking place within the university walls (e.g., discussion of research results), detached from practice. The study is expected to contribute to the understanding of structural similarities and differences in initial teacher education systems in the two countries that may foster or hinder the development of student teachers’ development during their school-based teaching practice, with a particular focus on those that are required to conduct practice-oriented research.
Research conducted on nurturing talent and thus the literature on the subject are predominantly about the gifted people themselves, and those educational programmes that support them in optimising their abilities during the stages of their development. Thanks to relatively popular research projects a number of lists of varying accuracy are available of the cognitive, professional and personality traits as well as other important characteristics of qualified teachers working with gifted children in gifted development programmes, while significantly less is known about those people who, despite not having formal pedagogical qualifications and not receiving regular training in this area, are able to nurture the development of gifted individuals (often generations of them) with outstanding success. Examples include sports coaches, arts teachers who run extracurricular activities for their students in the areas of music, dance, painting or other branches of art, professionals working in a range of non-profit and for-profit organisations, and many others. These people are the same in certain respects: they all work with a high degree of efficiency (many of them produce great results for decades or throughout their whole careers); entire schools of methodology are built around many of them; and they are surrounded by educators dealing with gifted children who want to learn from them, continue and further develop their methods. However, they each differ in regard to whether they themselves were ever active in the given area -i.e. whether they were outstanding sportsmen, artists or scientists at any period of their lives -or they have the ability to achieve something extraordinary and lasting in the development of those gifted in a given area without being outstandingly talented themselves in the same area.
I have long reflected on why research on shadow education-as a part of the education ecosystem-has been ignored for so long. Of course, a variety of arguments could be put forth as to what might have caused late attention to this area-and I will present some of them below; but this delay, in retrospect, is nevertheless puzzling. Indeed, research in this area has only recently started to gain traction. By the time the first really informative reports on shadow education as an important educational factor were written, it was too late: we had long since missed the opportunity for a status nascendi type of research of the initial development of the field. Early work on shadow education did not get much attention (e.g.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.