Fall working conference
Research in Teacher Leadership in Canada: Transformative and Contextualized Agency
12th Working Conference on Canadian Research in Teacher Education Brandon, Manitoba, October 12-14, 2023
The Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE) is pleased to invite you to prepare your proposal to participate in the 12th Working Conference on Research in Teacher Education October 12-14, 2023.
This year’s CATE Working Conference will be in Brandon, Manitoba. The theme for the 2023 working conference is: Research in Teacher Leadership in Canada: Transformative and Contextualized Agency. Papers must be research-informed and research-active, demonstrating formal information/data gathering, data analysis/integration, and reporting of results.
Proposals are due July 15, 2023. Researchers are encouraged to prepare proposals on individual or collaborative scholarship related to teacher leadership in classrooms, schools, communities, and post- secondary settings. Accepted authors will come together at the Working Conference to share and discuss their research, contribute their experience, expertise, and insights to dynamic discussions about teacher leadership, and build connections and collaborations to expand collective Canadian scholarship in teacher education. The following four broad areas of focus are offered as provocations:
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- Classroom-Based Teacher Leadership – design models; innovative practices; experiences of classroom-based generative leadership by pre-service and/or in-service teachers; could include innovative courses, new pedagogies, promising practices, anti-racist, anti-colonial, Indigenous research methodologies or content;
- School-Based Teacher Leadership – teachers as change agents; teacher coaches, team leaders or consultants; teachers involved in technology, environmental, equity, social justice movements; systemic change inspired and facilitated by teacher leaders working within various systems,
- Community-Based Teacher Leadership – union-based teacher leadership; creating change as members of teacher associations; research supported, funded, or facilitated by provincial or territorial teacher professional associations; teacher leadership of student groups that are active within the community; innovative partnerships or collaborations between teachers and community-based groups including non-governmental organizations, Indigenous communities, and parent and teacher groups,
- Post-Secondary Teacher Leadership – exploring empowerment approaches with students; faculty self-study in developing agency of pre-service and in-service teachers; faculty or graduate student research on teacher leadership; studying the application of teacher leadership research in the K-12 or post-secondary field, structural revision of programs to increase student agency, community leadership development programs, student engagement in action research,
A variety of research methodologies and methods may be appropriate.
As with previous CATE Working Conferences, authors will be invited to transform their working conference papers and submit them for peer review as a complete chapter by Feb 1, 2024 for
the next CATE eBook, Research in Teacher Leadership in Canada: Transformative and Contextualized Agency edited by Dr. Cathryn Smith, Smithc@BrandonU.ca, Brandon University, and Dr. Leyton Schnellert, leyton.schnellert@ubc.ca, University of British Columbia, to be published in the fall of 2024.
#CATE_WC23 Timeline:
- July 15, 2023: Proposals due (1000 words)
- August 2023: Decisions to Authors
- October 12-14, 2023: CATE Working Conference in Brandon
- February 1, 2024: Completed chapters due (5000 – 6500 words, excluding refs)
- Feb – March 15, 2024: Peer Review
- July 1, 2024: Final chapters due
- Fall 2024: CATE WC eBook publication
Proposals
Interested scholars are invited to prepare a 1000-word summary of a paper (not including references) they intend to write that addresses one of the four (4) focus areas. Please identify which focus area you have chosen to address. Following review by the editors, those authors invited to participate in the Working Conference will be notified in August. Proposal summaries will be circulated among participants prior to the conference to provide the basis for discussion within small working groups.
Depending on the outcome of the peer review process, participants will be invited to publish their paper as a chapter in the book to be published on the topic through the CATE Working Conference Book Series.
Participants must commit to take part in all three phases of the working and publication processes:
- Attendance at, and participation in, the working
- Submission of complete chapter according to
- Participation in peer review process and chapter editing according to
If you are interested in participating in the three-phase working and publication process, please follow these steps:
- To maintain a close working environment and to limit the size of the publication that results from the working conference, the editors reserve the right to cap the number of proposals at
- Proposals can be created by author teams, with all authors being invited to attend the working conference. Attendance by at least one author is compulsory.
- Participants must prepare and send a 1000-word summary of their paper to Cathryn Smith (Smithc@BrandonU.ca) by July 15,
- The 12th CATE Working Conference will be held in person in Brandon, Manitoba beginning at 4:00 pm CST on Thursday, October 12, 2023, and concluding by noon on Saturday October 14, 2023.
Costs involved: There will be a registration fee of $100 ($30 for graduate students) required to address conference costs.
Academic writing and peer review following the Working Conference
- Authors/author teams must commit to submitting completed papers by the deadline of
February 1, 2024 for the blind review process.
- Authors/author teams must commit to reviewing papers submitted by other participants of the Working
- Deadline for the submission of the reviews is March 15, 2024.
- Reviews and feedback from editors will be sent to authors in early April 2024.
- The deadline for the revised final chapter and a document summarizing the response to the reviews is July 1, 2024.
- Publication of edited book: Fall 2024.
Depending on the outcome of the review process and meeting of required deadlines, participants will be invited by the editors to publish their paper as a chapter in an online volume of the CATE Working Conference Book Series.
Guidelines for the chapter submissions to the Working Conference publication
- Chapters must be between 5000 and 6500 words, not including
- Use APA style referencing (7th Edition).
- Chapters must clearly respond to the overall theme of the Working Conference, and one of the four sub-themes.
- Chapters must be research-informed, demonstrating formal information/data gathering, analysis of data, and reporting of findings/results.
- Acronyms and particular regional practices must be explained the first time they appear in the text to orient the
- To support the blind review process, please eliminate all references to authors throughout the text and in the properties of the
- Documents must be submitted in Word or Rich Text format. Do not submit PDF
Any questions about any aspects of the working conference process can be sent to Cathryn Smith smithc@brandonu.ca
We look forward to your participation. Sincerely,
Cathryn Smith (Co-Editor/Co-Conference Organizer/CATE Past-President) Leyton Schnellert (Co-Editor/ Co-Conference Organizer/CATE President)
Acknowledgement
The Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE) gratefully acknowledges the support of the Brandon University Student Union (BUSU) Work Study Program and the Canadian Society for Studies in Education (CSSE) for support of the CATE Working Conference and scholarly publication.
PREVIOUS WORKING CONFERENCES
Preparing Teachers as Curriculum Designers
Tenth Working Conference on Canadian Research in Teacher Education
October 24-26, 2019
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, ON
CATE’s latest eBook, Preparing Teachers as Curriculum Designers, is the product of the collaboration of participants at the Tenth Working Conference of the Canadian Association for Teacher Education that was held at Wilfrid Laurier University from October 24–26, 2019. Authors submitted a three-page research summary related to one of the conference themes in advance of the conference:
- Student Engagement: In what ways does your teacher education program prepare graduates to design engaging learning experiences? What innovative pedagogies and assessment strategies have been found to be especially effective in promoting deep learning and design approaches that translate into practicum?
- Instructional Design: Consider Backward Design, Inquiry Based Learning, Universal Design for Learning, Concept-based Curriculum, etc. In what ways do these, or other particular instructional design approaches, guide teacher candidates’ design of learning experiences in your teacher education program? How and to what extent do principles of design thinking inform the design and evaluation of curriculum in your teacher education program?
- Disciplinary Thinking: What “pedagogies appropriate to the discipline” frame the curricula in your teacher education program (e.g., historical thinking in Social Studies, scientific thinking in STEM, and so on)?
- Practicum/School Divisions: How do planning frameworks in local school divisions influence planning in your teacher education program? In what ways are collaborations between your teacher education program and area school divisions supporting research and practice in schools?
Participants whose chapter proposals were accepted worked collaboratively in three groups of authors organized by theme to review others’ proposals prior to conference. At the conference, group members met to discuss one another’s work, pose questions, and offer suggestions and recommendations on expanding or strengthening the work. Complete chapters were submitted in February 2020 and the editors distributed these for double blind review. The latest CATE eBook, Preparing Teachers as Curriculum Designers, includes the final versions of these chapters.
2017
The Canadian Association for Teacher Education (CATE)’s 9th Teacher Education Working Conference took place from November 2 – 4, 2017 at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The theme for this year’s working conference was, Globalization and Diversity in Education: What Does It Mean for Canadian Teacher Education? A total of 36 faculty and 11 graduate students from 9 Canadian provinces met to discuss and debate the following focus questions:
- DIVERSITY OF TEACHERS. Who are our current Canadian teachers and what challenges do we face in attracting and preparing educators who reflect the diversity of our students? For example, what barriers exist to internationally trained teachers who wish to become credentialed in order to teach in Canada? What are the challenges in attracting and preparing educators from/for indigenous communities?
- INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE. International opportunities for both Teacher Education Candidates and Faculty of Education instructors/researchers continue to expand. What are the barriers, outcomes, and benefits of teaching and learning in a global context? What foundational courses and/or experiences are effective in ensuring that Canadian Teacher Education is built on a philosophy that represents a global learning population? What impact does international experience have for faculty and students?
- DIVERSITY OF STUDENTS. In what ways does our current Bachelor of Education curricula prepare teachers for an increasingly diverse population of students and what might need to change? What world view is reflected in current programmatic orientation in teacher education and how does it need to change, evolve, or transform?
- INTERNATIONAL TEACHER EDUCATION. How do international approaches to teacher education differ across institutions, countries, or continents? What does comparative research tell us about effective teacher education in varying contexts based on increasing diversity of students, content, and systems of formal and informal education? For example, what do open universities and online learning mean for teacher education?
Look for a sneak peek of the finished compilation of this important Teacher Education research at CSSE 2018 in Regina in May!
I would like to thank all attending authors and those who are collaborating on the chapters for their professional contributions. A big thank you also to our hosts, Mary Jane Harkins and Zhanna Bachuk from Mount Saint Vincent University for their leadership and warm hospitality. We were pleased to have Dr. Steven van Zoost join us to introduce the topic.
CATE coordinates a Working Conference in teacher education every two years in the fall at a Canadian university. Teacher education scholars from across Canada propose papers and gather together in order to develop an electronic book on a current issue in Canadian teacher education.
The 8th 2015 Working Conference was held from November 5-7 at OISE/University of Toronto on the theme “What Should Canada’s Teachers Know? Teacher Capacities: Knowledge, Beliefs and Skills.”
Preparing Teachers as Curriculum Designers
Jodi Nickel & Michele Jacobsen
(Eds.)
ISBN 978-1-990202-00-1
What Should Canada’s Teachers Know? Teacher Capacities: Knowledge, Beliefs and Skills
edited by
Mark Hirschkorn and Julie Mueller (2016)
ISBN 978-0-9947451-6-3
The 7th Fall Working Conference was held in Saskatoon October 31 – November 2, 2013 and resulted in a publication:
edited by
Lynn Thomas and Mark Hirschkorn (2015)
ISBN 978-0-9947451-0-1
Becoming teacher sites for teacher development in Canadian Teacher Education
ISBN 978-0-9919197-9-6
This e-book follows from the Working Conference held at McGill University in Montreal in Fall 2012. Thanks to editor, Lynn Thomas, and congratulations to all the authors!
Publications from prior working conferences
2010: The Question of Evidence in Research in Teacher Education in the Context of Teacher Education Program Review in Canada Volume 1, Volume 2
2009: Field Experiences in the Context of Reform of Canadien Teacher Education Programs Volume 1, Volume 2
2007: Proceedings from the 2007 Working Conference – the FIRST Working Conference