The charge of teacher education at a research-intensive university is to prepare teachers for their responsibilities as educators in both local and global contexts.
The UBC Faculty of Education provides programs in both initial and continuing teacher education that foreground disciplined professional inquiry while complementing the best of current classroom practice with the results of recent research on teaching and learning. Therefore, the Faculty is committed to preparing educators who will be knowledgeable, capable, flexible, and compassionate members of the profession guided by a sense of social and ethical responsibility in relation to their students and the wider society.
To achieve this mission, teacher educators at UBC are aware that enacting global citizenship necessitates a dialogical approach to issues of social justice, equity, sustainability, and social action. Our identity is expressed in the shared values of openness, fairness, anti-racism, and anti-oppressive pedagogy. It is through dialogue that inquiry becomes a hallmark of teacher education and development. Teacher candidates inquire systematically into their practice, enhancing learning experiences for all learners in school settings and contexts while, at the same time, understanding teaching as a moral activity guided by ideals of human good, conceptions of what is educationally valuable, and perspectives about how people ought to treat one another. Systematic inquiry is essential because it provides tools to observe and analyze judgements about curriculum and pedagogy. The UBC program is designed to engender in beginning educators a strong sense of professional inquiry and appreciation of the importance of research in understanding teaching and learning.
Finally, although we are committed to preparing our graduates for provincial certification, perhaps more importantly, we are inspired by ways of being and becoming and by serving the educational community in ways consistent with a research-oriented faculty. Thus, we are committed to critically examining our practices and to bringing research to bear on our programs.