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Education Publications Curriculum Vitae

Dr. McDonald’s scholarship, teaching, and research focus on teacher education and the preparation of teachers to work in hard to staff schools. She addresses two related strands of research in teacher education. The first strand emphasizes programmatic efforts to prepare prospective teachers from a social justice perspective. In particular, her work looks at how programs implement social justice, multicultural education, and culturally relevant teaching across program structures, curriculum, and pedagogy. Currently, she is coordinating field placements in community-based organizations for the elementary preservice teachers at the University of Washington and conducting a longitudinal study on the implementation of this innovation across program components. The second strand of her work focuses on teacher education programs as learning organizations. As a post doctoral researcher on the New York City Pathways Study of Teacher Education, she collaborated with a group of researchers to examine the relationships among the features of teacher preparation, teacher retention and outcomes in academic achievement for K-12 students. Currently, she is engaged in a research project with Cap Peck that investigates how teacher education programs engage performance assessment data of their candidates for programmatic learning and change. Morva employs sociocultural theories of learning, including cultural historical activity theory to understand the work of teacher education.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Washington, Morva was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has worked as a public elementary school teacher in San Francisco, California.

Education

Ph.D. Stanford University
M.A. Stanford University
B.A . Tufts University

Publications

Grossman, P., Hammerness. K., & McDonald, M. (Forthcoming, 2009) Redefining teaching, Re-imagining teacher education. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice.

McDonald., M., & Zeichner, K. (2009). Social justice teacher education. In Ayers, W., Quinn, T., & Stovall., K (Eds). Handbook on social justice in education. Erlbaum Press.

 

Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Hammerness, K., Lankford, H., Loeb, S., McDonald, M., Reininger, M., Ronfeldt, M., Wyckoff., J. (2008) Surveying the landscape of teacher education in New York City: Constrained variation and the challenge of innovation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Grossman, P., & McDonald, M. (2008). Back to the future: Directions for research in teaching and teacher education. American Educational Research Journal 45 (1), 184-205

Grossman, P., McDonald, M., Hammerness, K., & Ronfeldt, M. (2008) Constructing coherence: Structural predictors of perceptions of coherence in NYC teacher education programs. Journal of Teacher Education.

Grossman, P., McDonald, M., Hammerness, K., & Ronfeldt, M. (2008). Dismantling dichotomies in teacher education. In M. Cochran-Smith & S. Feiman-Nemser, McIntyre J., and Demers, K. (Eds.), The handbook of teacher education: A project of the Association of Teacher Educators (3rd Edition), pp. 243-248. New York, NY Macmillan.

McDonald, M.(2008). The Pedagogy of Assignments in Social Justice Teacher Education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 41 (2), 151-167

McDonald, M., (2008). Desafios para a implementação da justiça social na formação de professores. In Diniz-Pereira, J., & Zeichner, K., (Eds), Justiça Social: Desafio Para a Fromação de professores. pp.105 – 140.Belo Horizonte.

 

McDonald, M. (2007). The joint enterprise of social justice teacher education. Teachers College Record, 109 (8), 2047 -2081.

McDonald, M. (2005). The integration of social justice in teacher education: Dimensions of prospective teachers’ opportunities to learn. Journal of Teacher Education, 56(5), 418 -435