Reconnecting Knowledge and Practice in Teaching and Teacher Education Through Multimodal Reflection

Teacher education has increasingly emphasized preparing educators to navigate the intersection of pedagogical practices and content expertise in complex, real-world contexts. However, traditional approaches to reflection in teaching and teacher preparation often favor written or linear responses, which may restrict how candidates explore and express their pedagogical reasoning and disciplinary understandings. Even as teachers move into professional settings, opportunities for reflective practice are limited due to time constraints, responsibilities, motivation, and the culture of the institution. Multimodal reflection, which encompasses visual, oral, spatial, digital, and performative forms of expression, serves as a powerful tool to explicitly connect theory and practice. It enables teachers and teacher educators to reflect holistically, making visible the dynamic interplay between pedagogical approaches and content knowledge. As education systems seek more culturally sustaining, responsive, and inclusive models, multimodal reflection provides a pathway to reframe our understanding and support of professional growth in diverse teaching contexts.

This research topic explores uses of multimodal reflection as a multidimensional process to connect theory, practice, knowledge, beliefs, and identity in teaching and teacher education. We aim to push boundaries of what is traditionally perceived as “reflection” and “knowledge” in teaching and teacher education, advocating for more creative, embodied forms of meaning-making leading to improved practice. Through inquiry into cultural, social, and political contexts, we examine how sociocultural factors, power dynamics, and educational equity influence reflection, thereby making visible the lived realities of diverse learners and teachers. By elevating the voices of educators, we honor teacher agency as they navigate and develop their knowledge and practice in various complex educational settings through multimodal reflection. We provide a platform for scholars and educators to share frameworks and implications that inform practice and policy, encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue and global and comparative perspectives.

This research topic invites empirical, theoretical, arts-based, practitioner-oriented, and systematic reviews that seek to provoke reimagined understandings of reflective practice. We welcome submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Multimodal reflection (e.g., integrating visual, auditory, and embodied modes) as a bridge between pedagogy and content knowledge.
• Reflection as a multidimensional process that focuses on continuity and/or sociality of experience.
• Reflective inquiry-based, multimodal frameworks grounded in lived experiences.
• Multimodal reflection as a tool for encouraging more nuanced, contextualized reflections that honor the complexities of teaching and learning across diverse settings.
• Advances in digital storytelling, video analysis, and arts-based reflection tools.
• Investigating cultural, social, and political contexts through multimodal reflection
• Multimodal reflection supporting culturally responsive and context-specific approaches through global and comparative perspectives.
• Reflection-informed identity development and decision-making in teaching and teacher education.

Submissions may address teachers and teacher education in varied settings.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Reflective Practice, Multimodal Reflection, Teacher Education, Teacher Knowledge, Pedagogical Practice, Content Expertise

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.