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: 31 August 2024 | Viewed by 1568
Special Issue Editors
Interests: teacher beliefs; teacher identity; educational policy and planning; higher education
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
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- teacher beliefs and practices
- teacher emotions
- complexity
- pragmatism
- higher education
- value-based education
- sustainable directions
