Stakeholders’ roles in field experience: some empirical evidence

Abstract

Purpose Field experience (FE) has long been a crucial component of the process of teacher education. Clearly, a range of stakeholders can affect student-teachers’ achievements in FE. Given the importance of these stakeholders in FE, it may be possible to improve FE practices by clarifying the involvement of different parties in the FE process. Since student-teachers are the major beneficiaries in FE, their voices should not be ignored. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore student-teachers’ perceptions of the roles played by different stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach In a qualitative research design, 18 student-teachers took part in this study. Content analysis was used to classify and compress the large amount of text provided by the informants into a manageable number of categories to track trends, patterns, frameworks and typologies. Findings In addition to those of the five major stakeholders of FE (i.e. student-teachers, cooperating teachers, institute supervisors, schools and institutes), this study identified the roles of three other stakeholders (i.e. students, other student-teachers and parents) that had not been widely focused in previous studies. Originality/value The present research took the first step to investigate the roles played by different parties in FE from the perspective of student-teachers and offered insights for enhancing student-teachers’ performance in FE.

The Influence of Knowledge Management on Internal Quality Assurance in Higher Education Institutions

“…However, it has been argued in previous studies that HEIs tend to be conservative especially in terms of teaching methods, assessment and research [52]. There is a tendency for some academics to rely on old teaching and research methods using materials that are never updated [54,56] as well as failure to manage online teaching [47,8]. Thus, academic freedom inspired by institutional vision and mission may not suffice in using the available knowledge to design quality assurance mechanisms.…”

“…Several studies have confirmed that knowledge management is crucial in enabling institutions gain and maintain a competitive advantage [43]. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) especially universities are popularly known for knowledge generation through teaching and research [7,40,48,54]. Yet, HEIs continue to grapple with internal quality assurance challenges amidst knowledge accumulation through research and practice [1,15,16,58].…”