Preservice teachers respond to And Tango Makes Three: deconstructing disciplinary power and the heteronormative in teacher education

This study employs Foucualdian concepts to analyse macro and micro contexts of publicly spoken and silent discourses describing ‘homosexuality,’ ‘education’ and ‘teacher’ in order to identify teacher subject positions available to preservice teachers. The macro context is analysed by tracing heteronormative discourses found in newspaper stories involving teachers and public schools that address conflicting views of homosexuality. The macro context analysis indicates two binary teacher subject positions: martyred (unemployed) teacher/silent (employed) teacher and sophisticated teacher/unsophisticated teacher. The micro context analysis is of preservice teachers' responses to And Tango Makes Three, a picture book by Richardson and Parnell. This analysis demonstrates how preservice teachers take up and negotiate teacher subject positions found in the macro analysis. Combined, the analyses allow the researchers to consider how preservice teachers' performances of teacher subjectivity open up possibilities for re-imagining new teacher subject positions and what this might mean for the practice of teacher educators.     

Geography students as constructors of classroom knowledge and practice: a case study from Botswana

This study reports on the strategies (overt and subtle) employed by students in one senior secondary school in Botswana to keep their teachers in an information‐giving position. Contrary to the prevailing view that the ‘teacher dominance’ of classroom activities so often reported in classroom studies results from teachers' desire for social control, this study sees the dominance as a negotiated product, resulting instead from teachers and students exercising power on one another. Such a view of classroom practice is only possible where power is conceptualized not as a negative force that dominates, but as a productive force that simultaneously constrains and enables human action. Viewed this way, classroom reality becomes a co‐construction, a ‘joint project’ by teacher and students. Attempts to change this reality, therefore, must include both teacher and students.     

High‐school students’ reasoning while constructing plant growth models in a computer‐supported educational environment

This paper highlights specific aspects of high‐school students’ reasoning while coping with a modeling task of plant growth in a computer‐supported educational environment. It is particularly concerned with the modeling levels (‘macro‐phenomenological’ and ‘micro‐conceptual’ level) activated by peers while exploring plant growth and with their ability to shift between or within these levels. The focus is on the types of reasoning developed in the modeling process, as well as on the reasoning coherence around the central concept of plant growth. The findings of the study show that a significant proportion of the 18 participating dyads perform modeling on both levels, while their ability to shift between them as well as between the various elements of the ‘micro‐conceptual’ level is rather constrained. Furthermore, the reasoning types identified in peers’ modeling process are ‘convergent’, ‘serial’, ‘linked’ and ‘convergent attached’, with the first type being the most frequent. Finally, a significant part of the participating dyads display a satisfactory degree of reasoning ‘coherence’, performing their task committed to the main objective of exploring plant growth. Teaching implications of the findings are also discussed.     

Teachers talking: the role of collaboration in secondary schools in Bangladesh

Teacher collaboration and support given from one teacher to another, focused on improving teaching and learning in the classroom, are notable by their absence in secondary schools in Bangladesh. This article identifies a number of constraints to developing a collaborative culture including the difficulty of the curriculum, the perceived low ability of many students, the teachers' own educational background and contextual factors which influence teachers' motivation. It suggests that informal collaboration for mutual support has the potential to increase teacher motivation but that this will only be achieved through building more collaborative ways of working through formal programmes grounded in classroom observation. It questions the validity for Bangladesh teachers of the model of teacher development programmes focused on teacher collaboration which emphasise teaching the ‘perfect’ lesson and suggests that without attention to student learning such programmes are unlikely to lead to increased collaboration or improved teacher practice in schools.     

‘If you’re wrong for the place you just don’t survive’: examining the work of early career teachers in context

ABSTRACT

This article presents evidence from across the segregated secondary school system in NSW, Australia, through the close analysis of three cases of teachers’ work in contrasting schooling contexts. Through this comparative approach, the relationship between school context and the work of the early career teacher is foregrounded, troubling views of teaching as reflecting a certain kind of life cycle in which early career teachers in particular are seen to be subject to pressures such as stress and burnout. In contrast, I argue that specificities of context, exacerbated by a market-based policy approach which has driven greater levels of differentiation between schools, have particular consequences for teachers, both in the nature and scale of the challenges with which they are faced. In demonstrating how teachers’ work is affected by context, I also speak back against recent, often ill-defined discourses of ‘classroom readiness’ and ‘teacher quality’, which emphasise the roles of teachers and teacher educators rather the systems within which they work.     

Teachers' developing ‘practical theories’ of the contribution of information and communication technologies to subject teaching and learning: an analysis of cases from English secondary schools

This article examines teachers' ‘practical theories’ concerning the contribution of information and communications technology (ICT) to teaching and learning, as they are elaborated and refined in action. The study arose from a collaborative programme of 10 small‐scale projects through which participating teacher‐researchers aimed to develop a range of pedagogic strategies involving the use of computer‐based ICTs within their subject areas (Classics, English, Geography, History, Science and Design Technology). Within‐ and cross‐case analyses drew on multiple sources of data and characterised teachers' initial statements of practical theory in terms of five key themes: broadening classroom resources and reference; enhancing working processes and products; fostering more independent pupil activity; mediating subject thinking and learning; and improving pupil motivation towards lessons. Three cases are presented to illustrate how teachers developed their ideas in action, and issues that prompted teachers across cases to adapt their approaches are discussed.     

In‐school Experience Designed to Meet Individual Needs

Current policies at both the state and national levels emphasise the need for increased attention to teaching children with special needs and more extensive school‐based experience in teacher education courses. This paper reports an in‐school experience which was an integral part of an on‐campus subject that focused upon teaching children with special needs. It also addressed a range of issues currently of concern in pre‐service teacher education, including the nature of the in‐school experience, managing the needs of children with learning difficulties in an integrated classroom, overcoming the socialising effect of block practice teaching, reinforcing the relevance of campus‐based subjects, maintaining a balance between the formal teaching expectations and the nurturing roles of teachers, providing teacher educators with recent and relevant in‐school experience, and producing reflective teachers with an understanding and appreciation of the ‘art’ and the ‘science’ of teaching.     

Improving Practice through Reflective Enquiry: confessions of a first‐time action researcher

A number of key constructs underpin educational action research. This paper focuses on the concept of ‘truth’ and by doing so hopes to highlight some debate in this area. In reflecting upon what ‘truth’ might mean to those involved in action research, I shall critically evaluate Thorndike's ‘Law of Effect’ and Bruner's ‘Three Forms of Representation’, and explain how these perspectives might help us find ‘the truth’ of an area under study and how they might inform the methodology of research. I shall close by suggesting that teacher‐researchers should allow for a constructivist approach in their action research methodology in order to help them in their sense‐making process.     

REJOINDER

In this paper, we explore the influence of the teacher on the language games being played in a Grade 3 mathematics classroom. The kinds of listening strategies used by the teacher seemed to have an impact on the kind of language game being played as a small group of students engaged in a problem‐solving activity. Understanding classroom conversation from a language‐games perspective is used to explore the kinds of sense‐making, student engagement, and new understandings evolving through classroom discourse. Language games may also be important for encouraging students to extend and transform their understandings. We describe how learning to ‘teach etcetera’ as a way of helping students ‘see‐as’ and move beyond narrowly defined predetermined content may entail playing more open‐ended language games and learning how to ‘listen’.     

TEACHING ‘OUT-OF-FIELD’ AS A BOUNDARY-CROSSING EVENT: FACTORS SHAPING TEACHER IDENTITY

Teaching ‘out-of-field’ occurs when teachers teach a subject for which they are not qualified. The issues around this increasingly common practice are not widely researched and are under-theorised. A qualitative pilot study using teacher interviews in 3 rural schools examined meanings, support mechanisms and teacher identities associated with out-of-field teaching. A thematic analysis isolated factors influencing whether teachers self-assessed their practice and identities as out-of-field. The ‘boundary between fields’ model was developed to emphasise support mechanisms, contextual factors and personal resources that influenced the nature of teachers’ negotiation of subject boundaries and its impact on professional identity. These findings provide insight for policy makers, school leaders and teacher educators into the conditions required for such teaching to be considered learning opportunities.     

Question‐posing and question‐responding: the heart of ‘Possibility Thinking’ in the early years

Drawing on research that sought to explore the characteristics of ‘Possibility Thinking’ as central to creativity in young children's learning, this paper considers question‐posing and question‐responding as the driving features of ‘Possibility Thinking’ (PT). This qualitative study employed micro‐event analysis of peer and pupil–teacher interaction. Events were sampled from two early years settings in England, one a Reception classroom (4‐ to 5‐year olds) and the other a Year 2 classroom (6‐ to 7‐year olds). This article arises out of the second stage of an ongoing research programme (2004–2007) involving the children and practitioners in these settings. This phase considers the dimensions of question‐posing and the categories of question‐responding and their interrelationship within PT. Three dimensions of questioning were identified as characteristic of PT. These included: (i) question framing, reflecting the purpose inherent within questions for adults and children (including leading, service and follow‐through questions); (ii) question degree: manifestation of the degree of possibility inherent in children's questions (including possibility narrow, possibility moderate, possibility broad); (iii) question modality, manifestation of the modality inherent in children's questions (including verbal and non‐verbal forms). The fine‐grained data analysis offers insight into how children engage in PT to meet specific needs in responding to creative tasks and activities and reveals the crucial role that question‐posing and question‐responding play in creative learning. It also provides more detail about the nature of young children's thinking, made visible through question‐posing and responding in engaging playful contexts.     

Pawns against the devil

Abstract

This article outlines the innovative methodology I have developed for a study of young women, classed‐hybrid‐subjectivities and Australian government policies of ‘mutual obligation’. This methodology further develops and disturbs existing notions of research methods involving young people. I argue that in order for research involving young people to be inclusive it needs to attend to issues of ‘sameness, difference and diversity’. Central to this study are the notions of feminst praxis (Lather ¹; Weiner ²) where the feminist‐researcher as feminist‐teacher grapples with issues of classism, racism, sexism, reflexivity and self‐reflexivity whilst attempting to take on and fulfill the roles of teacher‐researcher, researcher‐teacher in an ‘inclusive’ classroom.     

Pink ... with shades of grey: mediating moments of diversity in urban secondary classrooms

In this paper, the authors trace the policy documents and legislation in Canada that have set, over the last twenty years, the context for ‘inclusion’ in Ontario's public schools. The authors then enliven this historical account of multicultural policy innovation by turning to a particular critical episode in a secondary classroom wherein they consider the pedagogical strategies of a teacher in a drama classroom who deftly navigates the unsettled terrain of race and power. Using a provocative monologue set in South Africa's apartheid, the teacher opens up a space for dialogue and whole‐group interaction with her class of Grade 11 (16‐ 17‐year‐old) students. Serving as an illustrative episode from a larger ethnographic study of four school sites (2 Canadian, 2 American), the analysis here, of one teacher's interactions with her students, and the students’ engagement with one another, points to many of the features of drama pedagogy that elucidate the study's broader interests in understanding the problems of social cohesion in richly diverse urban schools. In this discussion, the aims of inclusion and the possibilities of interactive pedagogy are clear, as are their limits, in the charged public space of an urban classroom.     

Teacher as Conceptual Artist

Teachers in arts education frequently struggle with their professional identity. When asked, arts teachers often answer that they believe that their main responsibility is education at the expense of understanding themselves as artists. The Mexican‐American artist and teacher Jorge Lucero questions whether an occupation as teacher necessarily impedes a creative practice. The finding that both progressive pedagogy and conceptual art share certain characteristics forms the basis for his concept of ‘teacher as conceptual artist’. In short, Lucero proposes that a teacher’s practice, in and beyond the classroom, simultaneously can be his or her creative practice. This qualitative intervention study explored whether or not the concept of teacher as conceptual artist holds the possibility to narrow down the gap between teacher and artist identities. The intervention consisted of a three‐day project led by Lucero in which nine arts teacher students were familiarised with modes of operation as a conceptual artist. In the three following months, these students implemented lessons in primary and secondary education based on those modes. Prior to the project, ‘elicitation‐interviews’ were used to explore how students perceived their professional identity and at the end of project semi‐structured interviews were conducted. The findings suggest that through the modes of operation as a conceptual artist, students who mainly identified as an artist were able to integrate a teacher identity in their artist identity, but the modes of operation also gave students who withheld their artist identity from the classroom an opportunity to live their artist identity in the classroom.     

The teacher educator’s role in promoting institutional versus individual teacher well-being

This article addresses the teacher educator’s role in defining and facilitating teacher well-being. It does so by first exploring the literature on teacher well-being, resilience, resistance, morality and professional dispositions. It then examines the policies and rhetoric of two countries, the USA and England, as examples of a global tilt towards the excessive promotion of institutional well-being at the expense of individual teachers. It concludes with specific recommendations at the university programme and teacher educator levels for bringing individual and institutional well-being into better balance. These include: innovating sustained and reciprocal university–school partnerships; helping new teachers become ‘mindful’ rather than solely resistant; analysing cases of teaching to become more aware of macro vs. micro influences; and facilitating skills in taking oppositional stances, including within the teacher educator’s own classroom.     

Disrupting Continuities – Re‐thinking Conceptions of ‘Growth’ in English Teaching

In this piece I explore the concept of ‘growth’ in English teaching. Starting with John Dixon's ‘growth’ model, I argue that, by re‐imagining his ideas in current contexts, practitioners might re‐focus and re‐invigorate the priorities of English teaching. Dominant conceptions of ‘growth’ are explored, along with their influence on teacher working cultures and the speech genres they draw on. I argue that, by critically challenging dominant discourses and cultural perspectives, it is possible to generate new narratives and open up new possibilities for the subject.     

Calling for ‘urgent national action to improve the quality of initial teacher education’: the reification of evidence and accountability in reform agendas

In early 2015, the Australian Government and an associated Ministerial Group called for ‘urgent national action to improve the quality of initial teacher education’. Following this call for action, the Australian Government launched a series of reforms into initial teacher education, targeting ‘teacher quality’ and ‘classroom readiness’. The reforms are based on a logic of deficiency within initial teacher education, mandating new accreditation processes, standardized assessments and the National Literacy and Numeracy Test for pre-service teachers. In this paper we set out to explore these reforms, considering the policy trajectories, technologies and technicist network in which they are operationalized. We propose the concept of reification and objectification to examine the institutionalization of auditing, standardization, and accountability. These reforms aim to intervene in both the content and delivery of initial teacher education. We argue that reforms such as these recondition our conceptions of professionalism and teacher quality. There is a contraction in scope for progressive or experiential teacher education, and moreover, the ongoing de-professionalism of teachers and teacher educators, whom are subjected to constant surveillance.     

The Democratising Potential of Dialogical Focus in an Action Enquiry

This article considers the role of classroom‐based action research in the development of media education in British schools. The first part of the article offers some general observations on the contribution of action research in this field, and on the relationship between action research and broadly ‘ethnographic’ approaches within media and cultural studies. It identifies shared dilemmas in the politics of such research, and in the relationships between researchers and their subjects. The second part of the article develops these themes through brief accounts of two contrasting forms of classroom practice, drawn from collaborative research between an academic (DB) and a classroom teacher (JSG) in a largely working‐class North London comprehensive school. First, there is an examination of the difficulties of ‘reading’ students’ creative media productions, with particular emphasis on questions of gender and subjectivity. Secondly, there is an account of classroom work in which students themselves carried out research projects on aspects of media consumption, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.     

The University as Microcosm

This paper puts forward the model of ‘microcosm‐macrocosm’ isomorphism encapsulated in certain philosophical views on the form of university education. The human being as a ‘microcosm’ should reflect internally the external ‘macrocosm’. Higher Education is a socially instituted attempt to guide human beings into forming themselves as microcosms of the whole world in its diversity. By getting to know the surrounding world, they re‐enact it intellectually. Such a re‐enacting is a guiding theme in certain philosophies of education studied here. It is with the Neo‐Humanist tradition culminating in Humboldt's reforms that an additional step was taken: the university should become itself the reflecting ‘microcosm’. This role is nowadays taken up by unconventional LLE, though with far‐reaching changes.

The paper is divided into four interconnected Sections each one developing a specific manifestation of the micro‐macro relationship.

The main thesis is that: (I) contemporary schemes of never‐ending higher education or of so‐called ‘transformative learning’ and of ‘universities‐multiversities’ have their intellectual underpinnings either in similarity or in direct contrast to specific predecessors. Inherent tensions found in these predecessors have left their mark on this micro‐macrocosmic model to the extent that it is present in them; (II) the proposed analysis in terms of this model enhances significantly our in‐depth understanding of some latent aspects in current trends in LLE and related innovative university schemes; at the same time this model helps us structure appropriately and without anachronisms our humanisticly‐inspired critical response to them for abandoning the ideal of the ‘wholeness’ of the human person.     

SMART moves? A case study of one teacher’s pedagogical change through use of the interactive whiteboard

This case study investigates how the use of an interactive whiteboard (IWB) leads to pedagogical change within a UK secondary school classroom. A teacher’s experiences as recorded in a reflective journal, and the responses of students as recorded in a questionnaire, are set within the context of rhetoric about the value of IWBs. It is argued that this action research approach is particularly valuable because of the insights a teacher has on the complexities of the classroom environment. Assumptions about the way in which IWBs should (and do) change the dynamics of interactivity within the classroom are considered by questioning the definition of terms such as ‘interactive’ and ‘pace’. The case study concludes that if a teacher understands and utilises appropriate strategies to meet given learning objectives, pedagogical change will emerge, with teachers empowered by the IWB to consider how learning takes place, and match activities to learners’ needs. However, IWB use will be within the context of the philosophy of the teacher and how much he or she wants to pursue new ideas in order to support learning.