TY - JOUR
T1 - Re-conceptualizing professional development of teacher educators in post-Soviet Latvia
AU - Silova, Iveta
AU - Moyer, Amy
AU - Webster, Colin
AU - McAllister, Suzanne
N1 - Funding Information:
This article examines how one of these international initiatives—the two-year project Developing Skills for Experiential and Cooperative Learning (hereafter Project) funded by the Soros Foundation–Latvia and the Open Society Institute in New York and implemented in the late 1990s—transformed into an ongoing partnership between six pre-service teacher education institutions in Latvia. As the Project ended in 1999, the participants established a professional association, the Latvian Association for Cooperation in Education (LAPSA, Latvian acronym), aiming to engage both in-service and pre-service teacher educators in Latvia in an ongoing collaborative professional development. As Catlaks (1998, p. 6) explained, ‘this project developed into something more than a short-term project with a beginning and an end … it developed into the sharing of experience and cooperation among faculty members, teachers, and students’, thus creating a new model of professional development for teacher educators, including pre-service and in-service teacher educators, as well as student-teachers.
PY - 2010/3
Y1 - 2010/3
N2 - During the first decade of post-socialist transformation in Eastern Europe, the majority of education reform projects focused on in-service teacher education. Governments, international agencies and non-governmental organizations prioritized various in-service teacher education programs to help teachers deal with rapid changes in schools. This has consequently created a gap between school teachers, who had multiple in-service development opportunities, and pre-service teacher educators, who were largely left out of the reform processes. Using Latvia as a case study, this article examines one of the first efforts to create professional development opportunities for a group of pre-service teacher educators and explains how this short-term project had contributed to re-conceptualizing professional development for the participants involved in the initiative. Based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with 18 teacher educators, this article: examines the motives behind ongoing, voluntary professional development experiences among pre-service teacher educators; discusses the nature and characteristics of this unique initiative; and contextualizes the theory and practice of professional development of pre-service teacher educators in a post-socialist context.
AB - During the first decade of post-socialist transformation in Eastern Europe, the majority of education reform projects focused on in-service teacher education. Governments, international agencies and non-governmental organizations prioritized various in-service teacher education programs to help teachers deal with rapid changes in schools. This has consequently created a gap between school teachers, who had multiple in-service development opportunities, and pre-service teacher educators, who were largely left out of the reform processes. Using Latvia as a case study, this article examines one of the first efforts to create professional development opportunities for a group of pre-service teacher educators and explains how this short-term project had contributed to re-conceptualizing professional development for the participants involved in the initiative. Based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with 18 teacher educators, this article: examines the motives behind ongoing, voluntary professional development experiences among pre-service teacher educators; discusses the nature and characteristics of this unique initiative; and contextualizes the theory and practice of professional development of pre-service teacher educators in a post-socialist context.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84859300381&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84859300381&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/19415250903457596
DO - 10.1080/19415250903457596
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84859300381
SN - 1941-5257
VL - 36
SP - 357
EP - 371
JO - Professional Development in Education
JF - Professional Development in Education
IS - 1-2
ER -