The central argument of this proposal is that teacher education needs a creative turn and innovative methods to foster the necessary competencies professional teachers will need to be able to respond to the complex challenges of the contemporary societies.

Since international studies provide evidence that high-quality teaching is directly connected with students’ learning success, special attention is to be given to the topic of teacher education (cf. among others, Darling-Hammond, 2000; Darling-Hammond et al. 2002; Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia et al. 2009, Schratz & Schrittesser 2007).

In today’s highly diverse world learners are characterized by heterogeneity with different backgrounds, and with different levels of skills. Therefore, teachers have to develop a specific sensitivity to the abilities, talents, and needs of the individual learner. Personalized teaching in this sense does not only demand high level cognitive capacities, but also creative and intuitive competences. This observation goes hand in hand with findings in professionalism research (cf. among others Oevermann 1996), which point out that the formation of a professional habitus involves an intuitive and reflexive dimension which is closely linked to narrative and interpretative skills (cf. Charon 2001, Schrittesser 2004, 142).

Therefore, the planned workshop  intends to present concepts which aim at fostering these professional teacher competences and skills.

Eveline Christof, Sabine Gerhartz and Ilse Schrittesser from the University of Innsbruck will focus on case interpretation and narrative methods used in teacher education programmes to make students highly attuned to the learners’ motivations and acutely sensitive to the individual differences among the learners.

The “Staging Knowledge” concept created by Herbert Lachmayer describes an artistic-scientific cultural technique that complies with the demands of teacher education by recurring to the medium of exhibitions (www.daponte.at). Through this, an ambiguous competence is developed both belonging to artistic productivity (inspired by unconscious inspiration) and to the rational intuition of scientific recognition. The context of cultural content is physically represented by so called “Hermeneutic Wallpapers” which include all significant emblems researched/created by the respective curatorial team of teacher education students. The great challenge for the curatorial team, then, is to articulate the intended meanings of the wallpaper through the medium of “performative free speech” during the whole period of the exhibition using  its space as a stage. Again, this concept applied to teacher education provides an innovative way of opening up spaces for creative reflection.

Michaela Gläser-Zikuda, Christine Voigt and Sascha Ziegelbauer will present  specific types of portfolio-approach as a reflexive instrument (Gläser-Zikuda & Hascher 2007; Spandel 1997). The portfolio is seen as a very promising approach to initiate and support reflection for the professional development of teachers (Häcker 2012). A portfolio approach requires an environment characterized by self-regulation, communication, cooperation, and process orientation. It offers opportunities for reflection as a way of encouraging teachers to systematically think about their views on and experiences with practice, thus enabling them to begin and continue the transformation of personal experience into personal and professional knowledge (Gläser-Zikuda et al. 2011). 

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