Journey around Leadership

Ideas about leadership in education, as in other areas of professional practice, increasingly borrow from management and business thinking. In this article I provide a commentary and critique of contemporary leadership in the form of a narrative of my own experience as an educator in a business school. My experience as a woman teacher of largely male, adult management students has underscored my learning about and critique of leadership theory and my own aspirations as teacher and leader. Personal experience is interwoven with theoretical commentary to highlight the limitations of leadership discourses—too often disembodied, de‐gendered and de‐sexualized. By inserting my responses and feelings I also seek to subvert, or at least to add some different dimensions to, intellectualized and inert critiques of leadership. Learning about leadership, including engagement, reaction and contestation, is not just a cerebral undertaking, but emotion laden and thoroughly embodied. I sought to reflect these qualities in this article.     

Changing Places: some reflections

Essentially, this is an account of my recent change of post within the world of education, from Head of English in a comprehensive school to Lecturer in English in Education in a university department of education. In reflecting on this change of places, I consider various aspects of both professions, including my own expectations, the nature of the teaching involved, educational research, partnerships in teacher education and differences in management. I attempt to draw tentative conclusions about the relationship between school life and that of teacher education and how each, through the sort of cross‐fertilisation which inevitably occurs when practitioners change places, may draw benefits from the other.     

Narratives as a tool when working for equality in action research: a description and discussion of the researcher’s experiences from a school development project in Norway

Action research as a form of professional development encourages teachers to participate in cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting, thereby creating possibilities for change and transformation. Equally important are the transformations and professional growth experienced by the facilitator in an action research context. In recent literature, the epistemological and methodological foundations of action research have come under scrutiny. Part of this debate emerges from the experience of those who actually attempt to facilitate action research with groups of teachers. In this paper I critically examine my participation (as a university‐based facilitator and researcher) in an action research group in science, technology and society (STS) education to illustrate: (a) how a second‐order inquiry enhanced my understanding of the nature of action research, while (b) simultaneously allowing me to explore and develop strategies for facilitating the process.     

Teaching diversity: a reflexive learning opportunity for a teacher educator

This article reports on a two-year self-study exploring my roles and evolving philosophy as an early childhood teacher educator teaching diversity in the US. I was interested in better understanding how and what I can learn from the complexity of my teaching experiences. Data included my professional journals, students’ reflection journals, and communication with a critical friend. I examined, when teaching diversity, how I constructed and navigated my roles, how the students constructed and perceived my roles, and how they have transformed my instructional philosophy and practices. The findings illustrated a dynamic and tension-filled experience of a teacher educator teaching diversity in the US as a perceived outsider, suggesting that it was a reflexive learning opportunity. The findings are aligned with a growing recognition that appropriate time and space is necessary for teacher educators to share and exchange their experiences and to gain support for their professional development when teaching diversity. Further, the findings are supportive of the contribution of self-study research in advancing the broader field of teacher education research.     

Horse Riding 101: The role of experience in reframing teacher education practices

For this self-study of my teacher education practice, I positioned myself as a novice in the unfamiliar context of learning to ride a horse. This gave me an opportunity to re-experience being an authentic learner and thereby to deepen my understanding of how an individual learns to teach. I recorded my experiences in an electronic journal and analysed what happened over many months of weekly horse-riding lessons. Central to my learning process was feeding key ideas, insights and tentative analyses into discussions with my students and critical friends. As I analysed their responses further, two themes emerged through pattern analysis. First, being a neophyte in horse riding allowed me to empathise strongly with my students' novice status. Second, permitting them to see the development of my expertise through horse riding was helpful to my students. Re-positioning myself as a learner challenged my view of myself as a teacher educator and transformed my teacher education practice.     

Growing scholarly teachers and educational researchers: a curriculum for a Research Pathway in pre‐service teacher education

This paper advocates the development of high‐level research capability in some students in their undergraduate Bachelor of Education course. The rationale for this viewpoint is presented in relation to three questions: ‘What is educational research?’ ‘Why should universities develop high‐level research capability in some pre‐service teacher education graduates?’ and ‘What type of curriculum can support the development of high‐level research capability in some pre‐service teacher education graduates?’ The first two questions are addressed broadly. The latter question is addressed with reference to an existing Research Pathway within a Bachelor of Education course. The paper concludes with the identification of a priority issue for subsequent iterations of the Pathway and a reflection on the shift in my role as a teacher in this Pathway from ‘teacher researcher’ to ‘scholarly teacher’.     

Reviews

In Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination: Autobiography, Conversation, and Narrative, Florio‐Ruane and deTar present an account of their investigation of the use of autobiography and the role of conversation in teacher education. To facilitate rich autobiographically‐focused teacher‐to‐teacher conversations, Florio‐Ruane draws on a book‐club format. As a veteran primary‐grade teacher who has worked hard to enact culturally‐informed, child‐responsive literacy practices in the classroom, as a teacher educator who advocates the use of autobiography as a site for teacher learning, as a curriculum theorist who sees autobiography as a rich source of both curriculum theory and curriculum practice, and as a researcher who witnessed first hand the power and potential of the ‘book‐club’ model for teacher professional development, I found Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination both engaging and informative. In the essay that follows, I discuss the significance of this new book in terms the enduring realities in US education. I also situate the book within the educational literature concerning autobiographical‐based curriculum inquiry, and, finally, I link Florio‐Ruane's new book to my own research on the professional lives of teachers working under intensified conditions of educational accountability.     

Action research in initial teacher education: an explorative study

The aim of the study was to describe students’ and teacher educators’ practical experience with action research and to identify a number of special points for consideration (opportunities and limitations) which could play a role in putting research into practice in concrete terms in the courses. Students and teacher educators on three Dutch initial teacher education programmes which treat action research as both a means of professional development and a necessary professional qualification were involved. These were programmes for specific teaching levels and subjects in Dutch schools. Four special points for consideration are identified: action research and the educational core qualifications of the profession; difference between action research by student teachers during their initial education and experienced teachers in their own workplace; students’ mixed experiences and perceptions of research; and embedded research‐based activities in the programme. The authors conclude that action research should be considered from different perspectives: as a professional approach, a body of skills that is needed to make the connection between knowing that and knowing why; and as a way of improving practice by systematically building up practice‐based knowledge.     

Understanding Candidates’ Learning Relationships with their Cooperating Teachers: A call to Reframe my Pedagogy

Abstract

This self-study frames the influences of cooperating (or mentor) teachers on teacher candidates in my teacher education classroom as an action-at-a-distance on my pedagogy of teacher education; that is, a tacit set of influences and expectations that teacher candidates develop about my course before it even begins. Interviews with teacher candidates enabled me to develop two conceptual metaphors to think about the relationships candidates develop with cooperating teachers on practicum. The first, freedom with foundation, reflects the fact that teacher candidates hope to have considerable autonomy in their practicum placements while simultaneously having the support from their cooperating teacher to receive meaningful, regular, feedback. The second, power and performance, names the tensions teacher candidates feel in experiencing the practicum as a site of performance rather than as a site of learning. I offer some specific pedagogical ways in which I have responded to these issues before making a turn to self. I examined journal entries from my own experiences as a teacher candidate 20 years ago with a view to understanding the ways in which the two metaphors may have played a role in my own development as a teacher. This research compels me to attend explicitly to action-at-at-distance forces in my teacher education classroom, such as candidates’ relationship with cooperating teachers and my relationships with my former cooperating teachers.     

‘Me at university doing teacher training – what a big laugh’: narrative and parrhesia

This paper uses Foucault’s notion of parrhesia to analyse the story of another and to interrogate teacher education in terms of the particular moral order or the forms of socialization that it uses. I examine the context of my own teaching in terms of truth‐telling and the normative expectations that were found to exist. Through reflection and analysis and using the patterns of action research came the realization that some of what we do within teacher education examines a student’s moral performance rather than their pedagogical ability. The particular moral code that fits within teaching and teacher education needs to be considered in terms of social justice and social change. It argues that there exist collegial restraints and the typifications that serve to find the kinds of students and future teachers we consider appropriate. As an example of an action research study, the paper raises many questions that need to be further considered particularly in regard to ‘regimes of truth’ within teacher education.     

Taking a Return to School: Using Self-Study to Learn about Teacher Educator Practice

The work of teacher educators is complex and multifaceted and requires knowledge of pedagogy and practice in both schools and teacher education institutions. This complexity, combined with calls for teacher educators to work in close partnership with schools, sees some in teacher education working in hybrid roles and across the boundaries of schools and universities. Drawing on a self-study conducted over a one-year return to teaching, I explore my return home to teach in a secondary school and I examine the continuing impact of this experience on my practice as a teacher educator. Using the concept of tensions as a conceptual framework to analyse the data I explore three tensions in this article: (1) teacher as technician versus teacher as pedagogue; (2) challenging versus being responsive to other’s views of learning; and (3) teacher versus teacher educator identity. I explore how a return to teaching in school and the tensions I experienced enabled me to develop my practice and understandings as a teacher educator. I argue that rich professional learning can result from using self-study to examine teacher educator practice, particularly for teacher educators working in hybrid roles and partnership contexts.     

中国内地教师领导的障碍与条件

研究证明,教师领导对教师专业发展和提高学生的学术成就有一定的好处。然而,教师领导不会自动实现,它需要人为的努力,并为其扫清障碍。在中国内地,教师领导面临着三大障碍:(1)行政权力对教师自主与选择的压抑;(2)应试教育对教师领导多方面的破坏;(3)行政对骨干教师各方面的支持不足。与此相应,发展教师领导需要三个基本条件:一是权力下放和市场介入,二是重建教师发展的专业价值,三是学校领导给予领袖教师更多的支持。     

‘Teacher leadership’: values and voice

This article focuses on teacher leadership, an important dimension of the work of the Leadership for Learning network which is the focus of this special issue. More specifically, the article focuses on the launch of a journal – Teacher Leadership – as a strategy for promoting key values: shared leadership, teachers’ leadership of development work, teachers’ knowledge building and teachers’ voice. Material published in the first two issues of this new journal is used to illustrate how these values are realised in action enabling teachers to lead innovation and contribute to the development of professional knowledge. The article begins with an exploration of the place of teacher leadership within the wider context of shared or distributed leadership.     

Professional identity and educational reform: confronting my habitual practices as a teacher educator

This essay explores my role as a teacher educator within a changing policy and curriculum landscape, including managerial attempts to define acceptable educational ‘outcomes’ and other globalising pressures to regulate education. I interrogate my professional knowledge and experience as a teacher educator, raising questions about the adequacy of my support for student teachers as they enter this new landscape. I conceive the key challenge facing me at the moment as a challenge to my professional identity that requires me to find new ways of understanding and talking about my work (cf. Teaching and Teacher Education 19(1) (2002) 5). The essay might be read as a ‘self study’, in which my ‘self’ is conceived as a function of the networks or relationships in which I operate as a teacher educator and the larger structures that shape my professional world.     

What I ‘Know’: Literary Studies and the Teaching of English

This essay unfolds through a series of juxtapositions, involving storytelling and writing of a more analytical nature. In thinking about what I ‘know’ as an English teacher, my aim has been to present my ideas in a form that might do justice to the contradictions and complexities of my professional life, including my continuing efforts to negotiate a pathway between the rich particularities of the educational settings in which I have worked and my knowledge and values as an English teacher. My primary focus is on how my literary education has shaped and been shaped by my work as an English teacher vis-à-vis a devaluing of teachers’ disciplinary knowledge that has occurred through standards-based reforms. I attempt to make the standpoint from which I am writing an object of scrutiny, thus producing an account of what I ‘know’ that arises out of my work as an English teacher and returns to it as a necessary dimension of a politically committed praxis.     

Reflective Practice,Literature, and Critical Theory

In this article, I offer a case of the predicaments I encountered in conducting teacher education research at my own institution and re‐examine these predicaments using an ethic of mindfulness and compassion. I explore how this Buddhist perspective might help researchers navigate what can be a lonely, ethically complicated research journey among their own colleagues. Based on this analysis, I propose that an ethic of mindfulness and compassion holds potential for guiding teacher education research and challenging researchers to see differently. I argue that conducting teacher education research using the lenses of mindfulness and compassion might propel social change aimed at increasing educational and social opportunity for all people and, in doing so, further the hope for justice in our relationships, teaching, and research.     

Adapting the boundaries in primary physical education: an account of my learning,my educational influence and improved practice

In this paper I explore how I have come to theorise my work as a critical emancipatory practice as a lecturer in primary physical education (PE). I give an account of what I understand to be the epistemological foundations and practices of practitioner research and my potential educational influence in my own and other practitioner-researchers’ learning. I explain how I have generated my living educational theory of practice and discuss the changes in my learning from a propositional approach towards a dynamic epistemology of practice that is grounded in inclusional and dialogical ways of knowing. Within my paper I position myself as a professional educator and researcher, and share the exciting and transformational experiences of teaching and learning in evolving action research cycles of practice. I view my learning to date as an active act, working with the novice teachers I support to offer improvement and change in our future practice. I celebrate my reconceptualised view of education as a learner from within my practice and explain my move from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-creation. I make an original contribution to educational knowledge by explaining how I try to inspire others to research their practice and contribute to a new scholarship of educational enquiry.