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The authors conducted a study at a history museum with the objective of examining changes in the knowledge of students aged 12 to 14 concerning the use of primary sources.

Students utilized self-led guides while exploring two museum spaces presenting different historical events. These guides encouraged students to scrutinize the exhibits, become acquainted with the methods employed in their research, and develop an awareness of the information derived from them. Students' responses to pre- and postquestionnaires were compared and analyzed using mixed methods.

The results revealed that students became familiar with various types of primary sources, recognized that only specific sources endure through time and gained an understanding of the research methods employed to study them. Additionally, most students comprehended that the same sources could lead to diverse historical accounts and the potential reasons for such variations.

Recommendations for practice are discussed.

This study contributed to the limited knowledge regarding learning during a single, self-led tour in a history museum. The findings illuminate the potential for learning and advancing historical thinking concepts even within such museum-visit contexts.

The chapter discusses my response to the urgent need for a pedagogy that would effectively promote Israeli teachers’ meta-representational and particularly Visual Representational competencies in order to prepare new generations of school students to fully and successfully navigate the diverse, rich multimodal information that they encounter in the postmodern visual world. Currently, although VRs widely permeate school curricula, learners’ mass media sources for information gathering, and even matriculation testing, students’ meta-representational competence (MRC) are not intentionally developed to enable their dealing with visually transmitted information and their mindful manipulation of it for achieving their goals. VRs usages have been shown to be superficial, implicit, inadequate to utilize VRs’ potential for promoting knowledge acquisition and understanding, and even frequently erroneous. Following a short discussion of the constructs of Meta-Visual Representational Competencies and pedagogy, and potential institutional obstacles for introducing VRs, I propose core pedagogical guidelines for promoting such competencies in teachers, based on evidence collected continually over a decade of work with teachers at Haifa, Israel, while designing, developing, and refining this pedagogy in preservice teacher training and other programs at the University of Haifa and inservice frameworks. Each guideline is operationalized into tasks and activities designed for achieving its specific purpose, focusing on the application of these suggested guidelines in preservice teacher development program. The MRC-promoting pedagogy was designed and developed while keeping in mind the notion that a pedagogy should be flexible, adaptable to different instructional styles, goals, and contexts, and based on guidelines that are operationalized into detailed instructional plans for achieving specific goals, in accordance with teachers’ preferences.

This scholarly work analyzes the previous 17 chapters in the International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C) volume. The purpose of the analysis is to distill the essence of what constitutes promising international teacher education pedagogies and how those pedagogies can best be shared. The chapters are reviewed according to the sections in which they appeared: pedagogies of working with multimodalities; pedagogies of partnerships and communities; pedagogies of teacher assessment; and vehicles for teacher education research, and dissemination. Key knowledge contributions from each chapter are emphasized. Similarities between the featured pedagogies are also highlighted. Finally, overarching themes are pinpointed.

Teacher education pedagogies face the complex challenge of attending to standards of professionalism while being sensitive to the local changing needs of professional learning. Encounters between these two aspects of professional work are manifested, for example, through the relations between innovative, “against the grain” pedagogies and standardized criteria and accountability to policy issues and measurement. This chapter characterizes various “contact zones” across participants, contexts and contents, called for by the four categories of pedagogies (working with multimodalities, partnerships and community learning, teacher assessment, and vehicles for dissemination) that comprise this volume of International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C). The four categories of pedagogies join five earlier categories of pedagogies (teacher leadership, diversity, family, social justice, and technology), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part B). These go in with yet another five categories of pedagogies (teacher selection, reflection, narrative knowing, teacher identity and mediation and mentoring), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A).