Expertise,competence and reflection in the rhetoric of professional development

This article explores the rhetorical work done by discourses of professional development in education. In particular it outlines the ways in which the rhetoric of technical expertise, competence and reflective practice are deployed to mobilise professional practices and identities in particular ways and position certain practices and dispositions as specifically professional. The article explores the ways in which audiences are mobilised and the strategies to persuade educators that particular discourses of professionalism are about and for them. This is illustrated through an analysis of a particular discourse of professional development for academics in the UK. The authors argue for and illustrate the illuminating potential of rhetorical analysis to an understanding of different practices of professional development.     

Living in Plurilingual Spaces: Self-Study,Critical Friendship,and the Plurality of Publics

ABSTRACT

In this article, we engage in collaborative self-study through a critical friendship that is specifically designed to evoke our personal histories in relation to how we approach our practices as teacher educators. In particular, we focus on understanding the conceptual origins of our pedagogies of teacher education and how our identities as teacher educators were shaped, and continue to be shaped, by colleagues, teacher candidates, and by the process of self-study itself. We argue that the multiple studies that are available to any self-study research programme create a plurality of publics in which we identify, and are identified, in particular ways by particular members of the teacher education community. One significant avenue for our developing line of work concerns the ways in which our shared bilingualism plays out during our critical friendship, and how the use of multiple languages helps us to reframe our identities as teacher educators, particularly whilst engaged in translanguaging practices.     

Developing Teachers' Leadership Knowledge: Pillars for the “New Reform”

This work describes how teacher education programs can inform teachers' knowledge and practice of leadership. We introduce a leadership typology to illustrate how teachers can lead organizational reform for pedagogical excellence and socially just practices. The model provides teacher educators ways to identify and resolve conflicts generated by imparting innovative pedagogies to teachers who in turn use them in antiquated and inequitable school environments. The model can also be used to develop teachers' professional knowledge of the contexts that mitigate or marginalize their leadership potential. Several examples from current teaching practices in teacher education are used to illustrate how teachers develop leadership knowledge.     

Rooted in resistance: women teachers constructing counter‐pedagogies in post‐authoritarian Brazil

This study focuses upon the narratives of women educators (educadoras) who contributed to radical democratic school reforms in post‐authoritarian Brazil. We illustrate through three of the teachers’ narratives how their professional identities and actions were shaped partly by their experiences of resisting the military regime and by their participation in professional development opportunities that grew from liberatory social movements. Our analysis focuses on their efforts to construct counter‐pedagogies in their disciplines of history, mathematics, and physical education that resisted colonizing, authoritative practices and moved toward more liberatory, humanizing pedagogies. We consider how these counter‐pedagogies reflect both women’s ways of knowing that emphasize dialogue, collaboration, community, and the value of personal knowledge and relationships, as well as feminist principles of consciousness‐raising and social action. This analysis highlights possibilities and challenges of radical democratic reform in education by focusing on the work, experience, and identities of women educators engaged in the day‐to‐day efforts to bring about lasting change.     

The Professionalisation of Adult Educators in the Baltic States

Adult education and lifelong learning together form one of the priorities for development in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The important historical and social context in which the professional development of adult educators has been taking place in the Baltic States since they regained their independence in the 1990s is the changes that occurred in the socio-political, economic and social life since then. There is greater concern about the need to qualify adult education practitioners so as to enhance quality in the provision of adult education and training. However, the prerequisites for the professional development of adult educators are a neglected area of research when compared with other fields of education and training.
In this article, we shall analyse the professional development of adult educators as follows:

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  How transformational changes in the Baltic States during the past decade have influenced adult education policy and practice, the adult education profession itself and the professional development of adult educators;
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  How adult education policies, initial education and training practices affect the process of professional development among adult educators;
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  What the professional development of adult educators consists in.

     

Qualification paths of adult educators in Sweden and Denmark

The qualification of adult educators is a central aspect of the quality of adult education. However, within current policy discourses and adult education research on the professional development of prospective adult educators, little attention is paid to teacher qualification when compared to other fields of education and training. In this study, we analyse the qualification paths, or learning trajectories, of prospective adult educators in Sweden and Denmark. The analysis is based on narrative interviews with 29 students in training to become adult educators. The career paths of adult educators are often long and winding roads. Becoming an adult educator could be their primary desire, but it could also be their ‘Plan B’, a second choice. Individual motives and external demands interact in the professionalisation process. A shift in focus from teaching subject and methods to teaching context and the relation to the learners is part of the professional development. Finally, we argue that both academic studies and hands-on work in the adult education community are crucial parts of the adult educator's qualification path.     

Charting the past to understand the cultural inheritance of concert hall listening and audience development practices

Although often thought of as a contemporary practice, audience development and pedagogies for listener education can be traced throughout the history of the public concert where their origins were forged. This paper unpacks how western listening and audience practices have developed over time, the changes in listening and behaviour norms, the emergence of early practitioners who developed ideas and pedagogies for listener education within the concert hall in Europe, and exposes the current paucity of research on the educational dimension of audience development and pedagogies of listening in the contemporary orchestral concert hall. It is argued that by understanding the past we can better understand the current concert hall and the ways we ourselves actively participate and create our own histories in the ongoing evolution of classical music performance. The paper concludes that this cultural inheritance has implications for arts organisations, educators, audiences, and listeners alike.     

Dominant Discourses and Teacher Education: Current curriculum or curriculum remembered?

Research findings from a longitudinal, classroom‐based study of Bachelor of Education students in Tasmania suggest that three dominant discourses of schooling are powerful shapers of pre‐service teachers' pedagogical decisions in relation to the teaching of SOSE (studies of society and environment). These discourses appear to inform teaching practices and contribute to uncritical SOSE learning experiences for children. The findings from this naturalistic research grounded in teacher education suggest that teacher preparation programs should encourage far greater critical reflection on curriculum documents. In particular, the findings highlight tensions for teacher educators in selecting between experiential and/or interdisciplinary, critical approaches to teacher education. These issues are illustrated in the teaching of SOSE as locality focused knowledge. What this means for the selection of fieldwork sites for children's learning and teacher education pedagogies is explored in this paper.     

The Importance of Community Knowledge in Learning to Teach: Foregrounding Māori Cultural Knowledge to Support Preservice Teachers' Development of Culturally Responsive Practice

Culturally responsive teaching is an essential component of reframing educator preparation for equity and has particular resonance when working in partnership with indigenous communities. As teacher educators in Aotearoa New Zealand, we continually seek to enhance our practices to ensure that Māori cultural values, pedagogies, and epistemologies inform all aspects of our teacher education curricula and support Māori educational aspirations. In this article we describe a preservice teacher education program co-constructed with our local Māori community that foregrounds Māori cultural knowledge. We focus particularly on two signature features of the program, a co-constructed framework for teacher growth and development and community-based learning experiences, highlighting the ways that these features engage preservice teachers in learning through Māori epistemological perspectives and pedagogies. We conclude by reflecting on the generative nature of engaging community expertise and knowledge to create contextually meaningful learning experiences for preservice teachers that support their development as culturally responsive teachers.     

A contested profession: employability,performativity and professionalism in Irish further education

Further education typically represents the vocational, technical and practice-based forms of education, but this is now being repositioned in a neo-liberal era that is driving a performance-based and market-orientated vision of education in the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere. The implacable drive of neo-liberal economics in everyday practice is evident in the current economic and training discourses of further education, which aim to upgrade the employability of low-skilled and marginalised sectors of the population. The article provides an overview of shifts in educational policy and practices that align Irish further education with what has occurred in the UK and elsewhere through processes of professionalisation and performativity. Analysis of the potential impact on notions of professional identity in the sector helps to articulate the principles, pedagogies and philosophies that will be vital when contesting the performance cultures of New Managerialism that seem likely to ensue. We explore the implications in terms of the policy discourses, organisational structure and professional practices of further education. We contend that changes in these areas have profound impacts on the learning and knowledge base of further education, constraining its social justice and transformative capacity for the learners at the heart of further education.     

Designing for Critical,Relational, Practice-Immersed Teacher Preparation: Weaving Threads into Tapestry in a Critical Project-Based Literacy Partnership

As teacher educators located in K–12 and university contexts, we had experienced the often-highlighted disconnections between university teacher education and preservice apprenticeships in schools. Thus, calls for innovations in preparation programs aimed at deeper immersion in practice spoke to our desires to move literacy methods preparation into schools in ways that allowed teacher candidates, children, classroom teachers, and university instructors to be together in practice. A central goal of our work was to use our partnership as a path toward deeply intertwining practices of literacy teaching with critical lenses and pedagogies centered on justice. In this article, we situate our partnership in the landscape of research on practice-based teacher preparation and critical scholarship in teacher education. We describe our partnership, including its layers of contexts, relationships, and opportunities for critical, mediated practice, and our methods of studying our work over time. Our findings illustrate how the design of our partnership has afforded opportunities to (a) trace how critical ideas and practices thread across contexts of participants’ learning and (b) critically reframe problematic language, policies, and practices with novice teachers. We end by highlighting implications of our work for others invested in critical project-based partnerships.     

The Social Construction of Parent Involvement in Head Start

In the field of early childhood education, dominant discourse is premised on assumptions and values that privilege uniformity, generality, and even the "essential" nature of children and programs that should then be judged according to common criteria. In this article, we focus not on common factors that vary but on particular social practices that have very different meanings for people in two social settings (Taylor, 1979). Specifically, we describe how parent involvement- and parents themselves-were socially constructed within Head Start programs located in different communities, and we suggest how these social practices made particular forms of involvement possible and even necessary. We argue that discourses do not merely represent; they constitute, and different discourses construct both subjects and social relations in particular ways. Finally, we suggest how alternative ways of structuring knowledge and social practice in early childhood might become "communal tools" for exploring yet to be realized possibilities.     

The Social Construction of Parent Involvement in Head Start

In the field of early childhood education, dominant discourse is premised on assumptions and values that privilege uniformity, generality, and even the “essential” nature of children and programs that should then be judged according to common criteria. In this article, we focus not on common factors that vary but on particular social practices that have very different meanings for people in two social settings (Taylor, 1979). Specifically, we describe how parent involvement- and parents themselves-were socially constructed within Head Start programs located in different communities, and we suggest how these social practices made particular forms of involvement possible and even necessary. We argue that discourses do not merely represent; they constitute, and different discourses construct both subjects and social relations in particular ways. Finally, we suggest how alternative ways of structuring knowledge and social practice in early childhood might become “communal tools” for exploring yet to be realized possibilities.     

Inadequacies in the concept of neutrality 1

While the need for humanising education is pressing in neoliberal societies, the conditions for its possibility in formal institutions have become particularly cramped. A constellation of factors – the strength of neoliberal ideologies, the corporatisation of universities, the conflation of human freedom with consumer satisfaction and a wider crisis of hope in the possibility or desirability of social change – make it difficult to apply classical theories of subject-transformation to new work in critical pedagogy. In particular, the growth of interest in pedagogies of comfort (as illustrated in certain forms of ‘therapeutic’ education and concerns about student ‘satisfaction’ in universities) and resistance to critical pedagogies suggest that subjectivty has become a primary site of political struggle in education. However, it can no longer be assumed that educators can (or should) liberate students' repressed desires for humanisation by politicising curricula, pedagogy or institutions. Rather, we must work to understand the new meanings and affective conditions of critical subjectivity itself. Bringing critical theories of subject transformation together with new work on ‘pedagogies of discomfort’, I suggest we can create new ways of opening up possibilities for critical education that respond to neoliberal subjectivities without corresponding to or affirming them.     

Decolonial innovation in teacher development: praxis beyond the colonial zero-point

ABSTRACT

Despite a rich repertoire of inventive and robust practices, and stated commitments to equity, social justice, and diversity, teacher education has continued to struggle to produce educators capable of enacting culturally sustaining pedagogies, and providing historically marginalized youth and communities with meaningful learning opportunities. This paper contends that ontological distance between educators and youth of colour, and the ways Eurocentric epistemologies exist as a colonial ‘zero point’ in teacher education praxis, are a core element of this existential crisis facing teacher educators. Drawing on decolonial theory and epistemologies of the global south, I suggest that teacher education is in need of epistemic innovation; radically revising our approaches to preparing educators by anchoring them in the epistemic and ontological perspectives of the global south, and in so doing, crafting pedagogical imaginaries through which we might disrupt the ways coloniality lives (often invisibly) in, and is reproduced by, our assumptions about best practices, ways of being, and measures of success. Such a decolonial approach to innovation in teacher education holds promise for ensuring our praxis, and the educators we prepare, are positioned to engage with a hyperdiverse world in humanizing ways.     

Constructing the Good Teacher in Higher Education: The discursive work of standards

Professional development for academics in higher education is increasingly important in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Promoting better teaching practices through professional development is part of the drive for quality and excellence. However, the focus has been on teaching as a "technical" activity, defined as competence in a particular domain of practice. This has obscured the social and discursive practices through which a very particular sort of teacher identity is produced. It is possible, therefore, to examine the ways in which the standards of competence operate to normalise and fashion what it means to be a "good teacher". In this article, we examine extracts from course documentation produced by a UK university through which the professional standards of those working in higher education are being constituted. Our focus is not the quality of these particular materials but the work the documentation performs in building up a particular notion of what characterises a professional teacher in higher education.     

Fostering meaning-oriented learning and deliberate practice in teacher education

Meaning-oriented learning and deliberate practice may be expected to promote student teachers’ continuous professional development. We interviewed twelve expert teacher educators to explore their understanding of these concepts, as well as pedagogies to stimulate them in teacher education. The experts understood deliberate practice in two ways: an enactment conceptualization focusing on pupil learning, and a regulation conceptualization focusing on teacher learning. Pedagogies were operationalized in twelve design principles, which integrated ideas previously scattered in the literature, and added to it with respect to anticipatory reflection, diverse ways of “modeling”, and student teacher agency in creating a powerful learning environment.     

Paying Attention to Bodies in Education: theoretical resources and practical suggestions

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education (ECE) and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education (since 2001). These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary that dominates ECE and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators.