‘Elite’ career-changers and their experience of initial teacher education

This study explores the motivation of ‘high-status’ professionals to change career and enter teaching, and their experience of undertaking initial teacher education (ITE) programmes in England. The study builds on previous research which found that career-changers are disproportionately more likely to fail to complete their ITE studies, and that those who do complete the transition into teaching frequently experience frustration with some aspects of induction and often feel undervalued by their new colleagues. The participants in this study were largely positive about most aspects of their ITE experience, and felt their professional background enabled them to be resilient when faced with the challenges of transitioning from being an expert in one domain to novice in another. However, they report variable experiences of mentoring, and for some, a sense of their previous experience being under-appreciated by ITE tutors and schools. The study also finds little evidence of personalisation built into ITE programmes to take account of the distinctive needs of career-changers. This paper concludes that the current policy focus adopted in England and in many other countries on entry quality may detract from the more fundamental issue of ensuring ITE programmes provide the flexible and personalised professional learning environments that enable a diverse range of entrants to flourish.     

Marxist state theory and state autonomy theory: the case of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education

Abstract

In recent times, there have been a number of critiques of Marxist and neo‐Marxist analyses of the state and education policy. These have drawn on postmodernist, ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ and state autonomy perspectives. While the postmodernist and ‘quasi‐postmodernist’ approaches have attracted critical response, to date, the state autonomy perspective has, to our knowledge, gone unchallenged. To address this theoretical lacuna, this paper analyses one writer's attempt, via an historical case study, to uphold state autonomy theory by detailing the ongoing relationship between one quasi‐state agency and the practice of ‘race’ education in initial teacher education. We argue that there are serious conceptual weaknesses in this latest attempt to apply state autonomy theory to educational policy analysis. The arguments in the case study under consideration are seriously compromised by a basically flawed hypothesis, a misrepresentation of contemporary (neo‐) Marxist education policy analysis and by a failure to look at ‘the big picture’.     

Inbound,outbound or peripheral: the impact of discourses of ‘organisational’ professionalism on becoming a teacher in English further education

This article explores constructions of teacher identities at a time of significant changes to public service professionalism. The article draws on different discourses of professionalism, contrasting ‘organisational’ and ‘occupational’ professionalism, with discourses of ‘personal’ and ‘critical’ professionalism, to explore changing meanings and enactments of teacher professionalism in the 2000s. Narratives of three novice teachers, followed over eight years, are used to consider the impact of dominant discourses of ‘organisational’ professionalism in English further education, resulting in inbound, outbound and peripheral trajectories. In response, the article considers how practitioners might engage critically with current changes, arguing that it is necessary to work with what matters to teachers, such as their relations with students, teaching and learning and subject specialism. Such work might create, at least temporarily and locally, spaces in which more favourable conditions towards socially just and enabling educational practices can be worked towards.     

’Always knowing’ and ‘never being sure’: familial and institutional habituses and higher education choice

In 2008, the UK Labour government unveiled plans to abolish the Learning and Skills Council and transfer funding for the education and training of 16–19‐year‐olds in England to local authorities (LAs). The transfer of 16–19 funding complements the responsibilities that LAs have already acquired in relation to the raising of the education and training ‘participation age’ and ensuring that all young people have access to a full 14–19 curriculum entitlement in their area. Such a move might be read as part of the ‘new localism’ that has gained currency under the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, as well as an opportunity to rein back from an English education and training system that has become increasingly centralised and ‘top‐down’. Indeed, some commentators have argued for a new model of governance based on ‘devolved social partnership’, with input from a wider range of stakeholders and the space for policy levers to be shaped more at local level. Drawing upon interviews with key personnel in LAs and other stakeholders, this paper examines the opportunities and challenges that LAs face in their new role, whether this amounts to a genuine devolution of power, and the prospects for ‘devolved social partnership’.     

Handling challenge and becoming a teacher: an analysis of teachers’ narration about life competence education

Abstract

This article takes an interest in how teachers handle new challenges. The challenge in focus is a nonmandatory yet widespread subject in Swedish education called Livskunskap, Life Competence Education (LCE). The purposes of the present study are to identify and discuss notions of being a teacher actualized in teachers’ narratives about the challenge of LCE, and to discuss how narration may help teachers to handle and reflect upon professional challenges. Seven teachers were interviewed about their experiences from teaching LCE. The analysis showed how acts of defending, exploring, presenting, or resisting LCE were performed in the teachers’ narratives. LCE seems to actualize a narrative tension between two dominant aspects of teacher identity. On the one hand, there is an image of a socially committed teacher who cares about the emotional well-being of and relations to his/her students. On the other hand, there is an image of a knowledge-oriented teacher who connects with the students mainly by focusing on subject matters. Drawing upon the theoretical work, mainly by Michalinos Zembylas, I found that the teachers had opportunities to use narration as an arena for personal agency, but these opportunities were not necessarily taken in the present narratives.     

Reforming teacher education in England: ‘an economy of discourses of truth’

This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a fundamental aspect of policy analysis.     

The teacher ‘problem’: an analysis of the NSW education policy Great Teaching,Inspired Learning

This paper seeks to understand the construction of teachers within one New South Wales education policy, querying this construction in relation to both local and international processes and factors. As such, it also looks to contribute to a growing body of international literature which grapples with the role and nature of neoliberal policy development in education more broadly. To accomplish this, the paper analyses Great Teaching, Inspired Learning (GTIL), a policy with wide-ranging and potentially significant ramifications for teachers. Ultimately it is argued that although aspects of neoliberal thinking are evident in the policy, particularities of context have mediated this push. It is suggested that this has led to a particular neoliberalisation of policy that variously targets and supports individual teachers and the systems and structures surrounding them, while the place of GT IL within both local state politics and the global imaginary is questioned.     

Deconstructing the Carter Review: competing conceptions of quality in England’s ‘school-led’ system of initial teacher education

The commitment to establish a ‘school-led’ system of teacher education in England, announced by the Coalition Government in 2011 and relentlessly pursued thereafter, represented a radical departure from previous kinds of initial teacher education partnership. While it is entirely consistent with a neoliberal agenda, with its strong regulatory framework and appeal to market mechanisms, it is also underpinned by a particular conception of teaching as a craft – ‘best learnt as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’. In 2014, the government established a Review of Initial Teacher Training, led by a primary school head teacher, Sir Andrew Carter. This signalled the recognition of teacher education as a ‘policy problem’, adopting Cochran-Smith’s term. The ensuing report, published in early 2015, was more nuanced than might have been anticipated, although a number of profound tensions emerge from a closer analytical reading; four of these tensions are similar to those previously defined by Cochran-Smith and two are newly emergent. This paper identifies and discusses these tensions as they appear in the Carter Review and relates them to wider debates about the links between teaching, teacher education, evidence and research and to policy-making processes in education.     

End of an era: the collapse of the ‘buffer’ approach to the governance of Australian tertiary education

For almost thirty years Australian tertiary education was administered by independent statutory commissions of one sort or another. They were based on the buffer principle of having an intermediate organisation between governments and institutions; a format that owed its origins to the British UGC model. The most recent of the commissions - the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission (CTEC) - was established in 1977 and made responsible for all sectors of post-secondary education. For the first eight years or so of its existence CTEC functioned as a relatively self-contained entity in the commonwealth bureaucratic arena and enjoyed a very high degree of authority over the development of the nation's colleges and universities. It earned an impressive reputation for stability, coherence and high standards in policy-making. During the mid-1980s, however, policies introduced by the newly elected Hawke Labor government to counter a rapidly deteriorating economic climate had a significant impact on tertiary education as a whole and on CTEC in particular. Under Labor, tertiary education came to be viewed as a vital infrastructure resource for industrial development. Federal government departments, which had previously taken little interest in tertiary education, became actively involved in the affairs of universities and colleges. This involvement eventually undermined the viability of CTEC's role. First, a variety of demands were imposed upon the Commission which it found impossible to meet. As a consequence it was depicted as unresponsive and incompetent. Second, a number of agencies developed new policy initiatives in the tertiary education sphere over which CTEC had no control. The outcome was a fragmented and confused policy environment. Third, initiatives introduced by departments provided fresh sources of external funds for institutions. The sudden availability of this finance created divisions within the tertiary education community which seriously compro-mised the Commission's planning procedures. By mid-1987 the combined influence of these developments had substantially attenuated CTEC's effectiveness as a policy-making body. At the end of 1987, as part of a wide-ranging series of reforms, the government decided to disband the Commission and transfer most of its functions to a newly created super department. The presiding minister now possesses direct control over the activities of universities and colleges. This situation amounts to a significant change in the style of policy formulation and implementation in Australian tertiary education.     

Agency in the darkness: ‘fear of the unknown’, learning disability and teacher education for inclusion

This paper proposes inclusion phobia as a sharper and more operative definition of the ‘fear of the unknown’ often cited as an explanation for resistance to inclusive education. Using ‘severe and profound learning disability’ as the paradigm case, we situate the phobia surrounding this label in its social and historical context. Our hypothesis is that resistance to inclusion for this group is not rational but amounts to a thought disorder in a psychiatric sense. Using qualitative case studies of pre-service teachers on practicum and headteachers engaged in decisions about admissions, we demonstrate the workings and impact of inclusion phobia. We illustrate its trajectory from a general social dysfunction, to the systems that channel it to the individuals caught up in it. Our aim is to expose inclusion phobia so that, teacher educators, teachers and pre-service teachers might, in knowing it, find new ways to remedy it. In doing so, long standing resistance to inclusive education is made more tractable. We conclude with our own proposals for an anti-phobic curriculum for teacher education.     

Imagination, emotions and scientific thinking: what matters in the being and becoming of a teacher of elementary science?

Christina Siry and Johaira Lara in researching pre-service teachers field based experiences of elementary science education bring to the fore the importance of teacher identity. In this paper, an alterative reading of pre-service teaching experience is given, one that complements the analysis provided by Siry and Lara, but which utilizes the cultural-historical concepts of emotions and imagination and creativity. It is argued that these important concepts give further insights into becoming a teacher of elementary science.     

Bridging the teacher/researcher divide: Master’s-level work in initial teacher education

There is much current debate about the purpose and usefulness of educational research and the perceived communication gap between teaching professionals and academic researchers. UK government intervention into initial teacher education has in recent decades contributed to this divide by favouring school-based training. The most common route into teaching in England remains, however, the Postgraduate Certificate in Education, provided by higher education institutions and therefore required to comply with the higher education qualifications framework. The majority of initial teacher education in England therefore lies at the cusp of these two worlds, pulled in apparently opposing directions. The ‘teacher-as-researcher’ movement is widely seen as a bridge spanning these tensions, though there is discussion about the quality of practitioner research as well as about the appropriateness of a rigorous academic approach for investigating practice. This article offers examples of the use of small-scale research projects as a valid means of ‘discovery learning’ in pre-service teacher education. It argues that induction into research techniques as a means of exploring practical challenges can lead to knowledge production and ownership.     

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.     

Ways of knowing,outcomes and ‘comparative education’: be careful what you pray for

Comparative education as a field of study in universities (and ‘comparative education’ as practised by nineteenth-century administrators of education in Canada, England, France and the USA) has always addressed the theme of ‘transfer’: that is, the movement of educational ideas, principles and practices, and institutions and policies from one place to another. The first very explicit statement of this way of thinking about ‘comparative education’ was offered in the early nineteenth century in France and was expressed in terms of the expectation that if comparative education used carefully collected data, it would become a science. Clearly – about 200 years later – a large number of systems of testing and ranking, based on the careful measurement of educational processes and product, have provided us with hard data and these data are being used within the expectation that successful transfer (of educational principles and policies and practices from one place to another) can now take place. A transferable technology exists. This article argues that this view – that ‘we’ now have a successful science of transfer – ignores almost all of the complex thinking in the field of ‘academic comparative education’ of the last 100 years; and that it is likely to take another couple of hundred years before it can approximate to being a science of successful social and educational predictions. However, what shapes the article is not this argument per se, but trying to see the ways in which the epistemology of the field of study (academic comparative education) is always embedded in the politics of both domestic educational reform and international political relations – to the point where research in the field, manifestly increasingly ‘objective’ is also de facto increasingly ‘political’. The article is about the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of that and what has been forgotten and what has not yet been noticed.     

Relative‐change theory: examining the impact of patriarchy,paternalism, and poverty on the education of women in Kenya

Forty‐five years have passed since Kenya gained independence and almost 30 years since the feminist revolution ushered in a global gender and development agenda. While Kenya’s development agenda had a functionalist orientation aimed at modernisation, the outcome of efforts to promote education development cannot be understood without an examination of the context of women. Although development agencies acknowledge the need for empowerment of women, the interests of change agencies are accommodated within the bounds of patriarchy, poverty, and paternalism. This situation is best explained by examining the education experience of women through a relative‐change theory prism. From this perspective, change is actively pursued within limits, that is, options for change in the social, cultural, and political context are acknowledged but limited. As a result, whatever education development efforts have been put into place to benefit women in marginalised situations, the outcome has fallen short for the majority of women.     

Combining ‘subject knowledge’ with ‘how to teach’: an exploratory study of new initial teacher education for teachers of adult literacy,numeracy and English for Speakers of other Languages

This paper is based on a research project that explored a UK Government initiative to improve the quality of teaching adults, numeracy, literacy and English as a second other language. The findings will be of interest to teacher educators generally and also to those involved in teaching adults, language, literacy and numeracy. The paper reports on the main findings of the research and sets the context for the presentation of models and concepts for rethinking how to meet the diverse prior experience and qualifications of those on teacher training programmes, as well as the challenges of relating a deeper understanding of ‘what you teach’ and ‘how you teach it’. Among the many issues raised by this paper, priority is given to the importance of the sequencing and organization of teacher training courses to meet the individual needs of trainees, who in the context of teaching adults in the UK have very different levels of teaching experience, prior subject knowledge and learning needs.     

Defining the ‘good mother’ and the ‘professional teacher’: parent–teacher relationships in an affluent school district

This article examines the challenges of parent–teacher relationships in an affluent school district, drawing on 30 in‐depth interviews of mothers and elementary school teachers in the USA. Professional women who have put their careers on hold to care for their children are apt to define being a good mother in terms of the academic achievement of their children. This results in extreme amounts of involvement and advocacy in their child's education, even when such actions have questionable effects on the larger school population. Enhancement of ‘good mothering’ was found to be done at the expense of teacher professionalism. A small number of entitled‐minded mothers were able to make a large impact not only on teacher job satisfaction but on the climate of the entire school due to their extensive networks, levels of advocacy, and critical examination of school processes.     

Knowing feminism: the significance of higher education to women’s narratives of ‘becoming feminist’

ABSTRACT

Educational spaces have long provided opportunities for politicisation and activism. However, research into the processes through which students become politicised can often focus on participation in recognised forms of political action, thereby ignoring the multiple factors active in developing a political consciousness. This paper draws on narrative interviews with feminist women to consider the importance of education to their experience of becoming feminist. It considers how, for a particular group of women who were all students or recent graduates of non-STEM disciplines, academic feminism formed an important part of their narrative of becoming feminist. Each of the women referred to having a long-standing feminist inclination, instinct or feeling and indicated that studying academic feminism offered them the tools for reflecting on and articulating this.