Edited by Martin Harant, Philipp Thomas und Uwe Küchler (2020)

The open-access articles of the anthology “Theories! Horizons for Teacher Education” can be freely downloaded as pdf files.

Why do I have to deal with theories, I just want to become a teacher?
The contributions of the volume “Theories! Horizons for Teacher Education” offer an answer to this question. On the one hand, our society needs the discussion about the overall orientation of its educational goals and the reference disciplines of the school subjects. In a time of political, societal and cultural upheaval in the field of education, the need for an orienting reflection is becoming increasingly important. Theoretical discourses are where this self-orientation takes place. Subsequently, teaching students must be enabled to think from multiple perspectives, which they can learn best by engaging with theories.

The individual contributions of the volume show what theories make newly visible and on the other hand, what they close off when received in a one-sided or totalizing way. After all, theories have a genuinely heuristic power, theories make visible, they open doors, they let us understand something anew. Accordingly, the contributions of the volume ask: where can we find, whether in educational science or in subject didactics, examples of aha-experiences or an awareness of greater contexts that only become possible through theoretical penetration? What do we see anew in the world, in our life and as a phenomenon, when we have understood a theory?

The over 500-page anthology „Theories! Horizons for Teacher Education” brings together central and meaningful theoretical approaches for teacher education from the various disciplines of educational science and 18 different subject didactics. The critical and reflective engagement with theories is an important competence for prospective teachers. That this is not only true of subject traditions, but also of the whole variety of educational sciences and additionally of all subject didactics, becomes clear in the joint publication.

Edited by Nina Beck, Thorsten Bohl and Sibylle Meissner (2021). The open-access contributions of the volume “Diversely Challenged. Research and Development Fields of Teacher Education under Scrutiny. Discourses and Results of the First Funding Phase of the Quality Campaign Teacher Education at the Tübingen School of Education” will soon be freely available for download as pdf files.

In the volume “Diversely Challenged”, central results from teaching, research and development in the first phase of the funding program Quality Campaign Teacher Education are presented and discussed at the Tübingen School of Education. Those addressed are teacher educators and researchers with an interest in the following specific subtopics of teacher education research:

• Modelling, diagnosis, funding and development of teaching students’ competences
• Digital media in teacher education, school and classroom
• Inclusion and exclusion in society and the educational system
• Linguistic heterogeneity and language sensitivity in teacher education and teaching, as well as
• Professionalization processes in the first and third phase of teacher education

The contributions bring to light a variety of research findings that are particularly valuable now because of their heterogeneity with regard to the chosen topics as well as because of their respective approaches and methods. They represent the diversity of activities, discourses and paradigms in research on and development of teacher education, and contribute to preparing future teachers for the professional challenges of the future. In the volume “Diversely Challenged” it becomes clear that the teacher education institutions that have been created or further developed (not least in the course of the federal and state funding programs), such as the Tübingen School of Education, are now also places of differentiated teacher education research.