Information Science Reference Interdisciplinary Approaches Toward Enhancing Teacher Education

Regardless of the discipline or country, creating quality education is multifaceted. At the center of any schooling practice are the educators, their schools, and the teacher education programs that license them. As the schools and faculties of education strive to provide the best practices to pre-service or in-service teachers, it becomes more critical to increase the quality of teacher education via various means to keep up with the demands of schooling in the 21st century. Interdisciplinary Approaches Toward Enhancing Teacher Education provides an overview of how innovation and research experience can enhance teacher education programs with a focus on competencies, skills, and strategies future teachers will need to cope with while teaching students' learning with diversity and facing linguistic, social, and environmental challenges. The book particularly investigates the potentiality of educational technology, innovative techniques, and digital storytelling to enhance education and bilingualism in intercultural contexts and multilingual settings. Covering topics that include performance assessment, teacher training, and professional development, and including many practical and diverse examples, this book is intended for TESOL, second or foreign language learning, and CUL programs and teacher-training institutions, as well as teachers, researchers, academicians, and students in interdisciplinary areas that include science, history, geography, language learning, bilingualism, intercultural competencies, classroom interaction, gamification, and educational technology. About the Author M. Dolores Ramírez-Verdugo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Methodology, Area of English Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). Her research involves two main areas of interests. The first one deals with technology-enhanced language learning in bilingual education and multilingual settings; second and foreign language acquisition, teaching and learning from cognitive and psycholinguistics perspectives; and CLIL as an action research approach to current national and international bilingual programs across Europe and USA. Her second field of research includes English and Spanish prosody, phonetics and phonology within systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) and auto-segmental metrical phonology (AM); spoken discourse analysis and pragmatics; cross-linguistic learner vs. native language corpora and corpus linguistics. One of the research outcome derived from this field of knowledge was precisely her study on Spanish vs English prosodic patterns and their pragmatic effects at a communicative level based on cross-linguistic corpora. This study was awarded with the first national prize in educational research (2003).Dr. Otcu-Grillman is an Associate Professor at TESOL/Bilingual Education Department of Mercy College, NY. She is also the Project Director of CR-ITI ESOL (Clinically Rich Intensive Teacher Institute in ESOL) program. She teaches bilingual education, ESL teaching methods, clinical practices, and linguistics. She received her doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University in International Educational Development, with a focus on Language, Literacy, and Technology. Dr. Otcu-Grillman’s dissertation was published as Language Maintenance and Cultural Identity Construction (Verlag Dr. Müller, 2010), the first case study of Turkish language maintenance and development in a Turkish community school in the US. She authored several book chapters, journal and newsletter articles, and co-edited Bilingual Community Education and Multilingualism: Beyond Heritage Languages in a Global City (Multilingual Matters, 2012).