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Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (2009) 602–608

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Teaching and Teacher Education

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ tate

The difficulties of inclusive pedagogy for initial teacher education and somethoughts on the way forwardq

Donald McIntyre*

University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 22 July 2008Received in revised form29 January 2009Accepted 4 February 2009

Keywords:Teacher educationUniversity–school partnershipsInclusionPedagogyProfessional development schools

q Editor’s note: This paper was prepared for a symfor inclusive education, hosted in Scotland, by the UniEducation in October 2007 in support of the School’s oinitiative and to inform and further research and devuniversities. Donald McIntyre died unexpectedly thepaper. Although he described it as ‘rough and incompipants felt it was an important paper and that theshared with a wide audience. Three referees providedassisted me in finishing the paper without alteringgrateful for their suggestions and for encouraging methe concluding section to the paper. Donald’s wifeagreed to these alterations and consented for the papein this special issue of Teaching and Teacher Educatio

* Correspondence should be directed to: Lani FUniversity of Aberdeen, MacRobert Building, King’s Col

E-mail address: l.florian@abdn.ac.uk

0742-051X/$ – see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd.doi:10.1016/j.tate.2009.02.008

a b s t r a c t

In most western countries, the problems of effective university-controlled and largely university-basedinitial teacher education (ITE) have been apparent for many decades: whatever is achieved in theuniversity, the teaching practices and attitudes that student–teachers usually learn to adopt are thosecurrently dominant in the schools. So it is difficult to introduce innovations such as inclusive pedagogythrough conventional ITE programmes. The solution to this problem is widely recognised to be the muchstronger involvement of schools in ITE partnerships (e.g. the Holmes Group’s Professional DevelopmentSchools in the USA, the Oxford internship scheme in England, the long-forgotten Learning to Teach(1978) Sneddon Report in Scotland); but research and experience have suggested that real barriers standin the way of the kind of partnership that is needed. Nonetheless, given the opportunity, the resourcesand most of all the necessary respect, the teaching profession has much more to offer than twentiethcentury teacher educators were generally willing to accept; and if an open and exploratory approach isadopted, there is every reason for optimism.

� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

By 1980, research in many countries had made evident themultiple problems embedded in the twentieth century Anglo–Saxon model of initial teacher education (ITE), for example, ITEbased in higher education institutions, with periods in schools for‘teaching practice’. Conscientious student teachers developed theunderstandings, attitudes and scholarly ways of thinking thatuniversities taught them, but generally found that these

posium on teacher educationversity of Aberdeen School ofwn teacher education reformelopment activities between

day before he was to give thelete’, the symposium partic-

ideas it contained should behelpful editorial advice that

the voice. To this end, I amto rewrite Donald’s notes as

, Anne McIntyre, has kindlyr to be included for inclusionn.

lorian, School of Education,lege, Aberdeen AB24 5UA, UK.

All rights reserved.

understandings, attitudes and ways of thinking did not help themto do well as teachers in schools, at least in the eyes of the teachersand students in the schools. So, as Lacey (1977) and later Zeichnerand Tabachnik (1985) clearly demonstrated, student teachersgenerally developed thoughtful strategies for doing well inuniversities and quite different thoughtful strategies for doing wellin schools. For example, in universities they demonstrated theirreadiness to reflect by sharing their problems in seminars, while inschools they maintained a front of competence and confidence byhiding their problems. Furthermore, they maintained their self-respect in schools by typically blaming either the pupils or thesystem for their problems, rarely themselves, and so in practicethey postponed much of their task of learning how to teach untilafter they had qualified.

Among the fundamental problems was that the universityseemed to be set up, resourced and organised to promote theiracademic learning, but the schools neither gave priority to thisacademic learning nor were they set up, resourced and organised topromote the practical kind of learning that they valued. Forexample, experienced teachers, who were clearly the best placedpeople to model classroom teaching, to plan the student teachers’practice of classroom teaching and to give feedback on thestudents’ classroom teaching, had instead to prioritise the welfareof their pupils and, in the United Kingdom (UK) at least, had noformal responsibility, no time, and no training for helping student

D. McIntyre / Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (2009) 602–608 603

teachers. So the school-based work, which student teachers valuedmost, was generally among the least well planned elements of theircourses. And also the university-based work, which might well beall right as academic work, was of very little use in schools, partlybecause very little time was given to joint planning betweenuniversity-based and school-based staff.

These pervasive problems were obvious by 1980, and indeed inScotland in 1978 a joint committee of the General Teaching Counciland the Scottish Education Department, the Sneddon Committee,concluded that:

We are convinced .. that teacher training has failed so far tomarry theory and practice satisfactorily; and it is unfortunatelytrue that many students still regard their initial training asconsisting of two separate and alternating experiences – theircollege course and their teaching practice. (SED/GTCS, p. 17)

It was very clear to the Sneddon Committee that ‘significantimprovement’ in initial teacher education was necessary andachievable through much fuller collaboration between teachereducators in higher education and teachers in schools, which inturn would depend on enhanced resourcing of schools to providetime for this work. And the 1980s was a decade when universitiesand higher education institutions in Scotland, and also in Englandand in North America, were under some pressure to develop suchpartnerships with schools. But while there were some enthusiasticinitiatives in all these contexts, there was also a widespreaddefending by higher education institutions (McIntyre, 2006) of thedominance over initial teacher education, and the resourcing for it,that they had enjoyed for a century and had learned to take forgranted. The result is, I believe, that the problems of which we wereaware 30 years ago are still very much with us today, although theyare now complicated by the different kinds of reform that havebeen attempted in different countries.

2. Models of partnership in initial teacher education

The concern here is with the specific difficulties that have to beovercome in the development of an effective ITE programme forinclusive pedagogy.1 Many of these difficulties, however, reflect themore general difficulties that have been encountered in university-based ITE programmes, and that seem likely to be resolvable onlyby appropriate kinds of partnership between universities andschools. So it will be helpful here briefly to consider the strengthsand weaknesses of some of the models of partnership that havebeen developed over the last quarter-century.

2.1. UK context

In looking at ITE partnership models, it quickly becomesapparent that differences among kinds of partnerships reflect thedifferent purposes that they have been intended to achieve. A goodplace to start is the model of partnership that has emerged as themost common in England, shaped as it has been primarily by therequirements of national government and its agencies. The right-wing government that was in power from 1979 to 1997 was able by1992 to present itself as having lost patience with higher educa-tion’s failure to itself reform its approach to ITE, despite the veryevident need. Although teacher educators in higher education

1 Editor’s note: inclusive pedagogy refers to a collaborative approach to teachingbased on the idea that all children can learn together, and that participation inlearning requires responses to individual differences among learners that do notdepend on ability labelling or grouping, or the withdrawal of the learner from theclassroom for additional support.

protested, the government was able, as it was not in Scotland,unilaterally to impose new arrangements whereby ‘schools shouldplay a much larger part in ITT as full partners of higher educationinstitutions’ (DfES, 1992), with student teachers spending muchmore of their time in schools and with higher education institu-tions being obliged to pass on to the schools a large share of theirITE income. Furthermore, the national government over subse-quent years imposed through its agencies strong requirements forwhat student teachers should learn to do.

The dominant model that emerged reflected very well thegovernment’s purposes, which were simply that student teachersshould learn to be competent beginning teachers, fitting in withestablished school practices and not being corrupted by any of theradical ideas that they might previously have learned in universi-ties. As Furlong, Barton, Miles, Whiting, & Whitty (2000) discoveredfrom their thorough national study, the most common type ofpartnership was one in which the universities played a primarilymanagerial role, putting high priority on quality control, with theschools being guided in the delivery of training for student teachersin the government-specified competences. In such partnerships,the student teachers’ school-based mentors and their schools haveto be businesslike, but there needs to be no fundamentally newthinking about their role in ITE. And the academic role of theuniversity is minimised, so that there could be an increased relianceon temporary and part-time staff for the ITE work, with establishedacademic staff concentrating their energies instead on higherdegree work and research. As Furlong et al. (2000) found, newlyqualified teachers and their head-teacher employers reportedalmost universal satisfaction with this kind of preparation forteaching; but they also found that it was quite rare for studentteachers to have developed ideas or habits of reflection on theirpractice that involved ‘critically reviewing their personal experi-ence in the light of other forms of professional knowledge’ (p. 138).The latter finding is remarkably similar to those of Stark (2000) inrelation to the unreformed Scottish system.

While there were some attempts to develop partnership modelsin Scotland during the 1980s, they did not come to much. Subse-quent efforts have been equally unsuccessful (cf. Smith, Brisard, &Menter, 2006). And therefore, as one might expect and as theavailable literature seems to show (e.g. Elder & Kwiatkowski, 1993;McNally, Cope, Inglis, & Stronach, 1994; Stark, 2000; Cope andStephen, 2001), the problems identified by the Sneddon Committeehave continued relatively unchanged.

These two systems of ITE, the old Scottish system and the newEnglish system, although very different, are equally ill fitted toprepare student teachers to engage with inclusive pedagogy. TheEnglish system is obviously inadequate for that purpose, beingaimed only at preparing beginning teachers for the status quo, andvery deliberately being planned to avoid them being encouraged tothink critically of that status quo. The Scottish system, in contrast, isinadequate for quite different reasons, and demonstrably so in thatthere is a vast amount of evidence, accumulated internationallyover half a century, that a theory-into-practice approach simplydoes not work, and especially does not work when there are nodeveloped and properly resourced partnerships between univer-sity-based and school-based teacher educators.

2.2. US context

If the dominant type of partnership created by English reformsis characterised by preserving the status quo, the exact opposite hashappened on the other side of the Atlantic. Going back to the 1980s,several different reports in the USA seemed to address broadlysimilar problems and seemed to suggest some broadly similarsolutions. The central perceived problems were the alarmingly bad

D. McIntyre / Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (2009) 602–608604

state of the USA’s public schools, of student achievements in theseschools and of the teaching these students received. (One mightbelieve that, as Berliner and Biddle (1995) persuasively argued, thecrisis was a politically ‘manufactured’ one, but it certainly causedserious concern.) A second problem, contributing to the first, wasclaimed to be the inadequate and unrealistic initial teachereducation provided by the country’s universities.

Solutions to these problems were similarly seen as closelylinked. Goodlad (1990), for example, generated the phrase simul-taneous renewal to capture his vision of how radical reform inteacher education could also be a key to solving the problems ofpublic schools. The phrase professional development schools wasthat chosen by probably the most influential series of reports, thoseof the Holmes Group (1986, 1990, 1995), to describe an institutionthat was central to its thinking about such simultaneous renewal.Professional development schools (PDSs) have been seen by somein the UK (e.g. Kirk, 2000, pp. 39–40) as offering the ideal model ofschool–university partnership for ITE.

2.3. Professional development schools

Darling-Hammond (1994) describes PDSs as:

Supporting the learning of prospective and beginning teachersthrough creating settings in which novices enter professionalpractice by working with expert practitioners, enabling veteranteachers to renew their own professional development andassume new roles as mentors, university adjuncts and teacherleaders . In many reform models . all prospective teacherswould undertake an intensive internship in PDSs. There theywould encounter state-of-the-art practice and a range of diverseexperiences under intensive supervision . Ideally, PDSs willalso provide serious venues for developing the knowledge basefor teaching by becoming places in which practice-based andpractice-sensitive research can be carried out collaboratively byteachers, teacher–educators and researchers (pp. 102).

Mayes (1998) describes the Holmes Group as ‘a coterie of deansand professors from colleges of education in American researchuniversities’ (p. 775); and it may be argued that the substance of thereports’ recommendations, their centrality in recent Americandebates about teacher education, and many of the criticisms madeof them reflect this authorship. Thus while introducing the ideas ofPDSs in their first report, Tomorrow’s Teachers (1986), the Group’smain solution to the perceived crisis appeared to be one ofstrengthening the academic preparation provided for teachers, andthe standards that they should be obliged to meet. And a commoncriticism (e.g. Labaree, 1992) has been that a primary purpose of therecommendations was simply to strengthen the influence of thecolleges of education themselves. Mayes (1998, p. 786) summarisesother criticisms of these reports by suggesting that

they regale us with rhetoric that is long on lofty claims but shorton critical interrogation (Popkewitz, 1997), internal consistency(Labaree, 1992; Labaree & Pallas, 1996) and empirical evidence(Dunkin, 1996).

Nonetheless, the idea of PDSs clearly captured the imaginationof many people in American university schools of education and ledthem, during the 1990s, to develop hundreds of PDS schemes inpartnership with local groups of schools. This has led in turn to anextensive literature describing, celebrating, evaluating or investi-gating these initiatives. One is struck most of all, in studying thisliterature, by the extraordinary ambition of the enterprise. WhileITE does emerge as a central theme, it is clear too that Goodlad’sidea of simultaneous renewal has been of central importance and

that the ambition has been to reform schools through school–university collaboration, with ITE and the professional develop-ment of experienced schoolteachers being two strands of thisreform movement. The ‘internal inconsistency’ complained aboutby critics such as Labaree (1992) and Mayes (1998) becomes a littlemore comprehensible when one sees the Holmes initiative not somuch as a single coherent plan for reform as a broad university-ledreform movement with many interacting threads.

This multi-faceted nature of the PDS reform movement is verywell exemplified by Valli, Cooper, and Frankes (1997) review ofresearch on PDSs. These reviewers found that researchers hadfocused on a considerable variety of themes, with collaborativerelations – an intended means towards other reforms – being theonly focus common to most studies. Having examined thesestudies, the reviewers were struck by the very great gap betweenthe grand ambitions of the Holmes Group rhetoric and the morenarrow aspirations and much more modest achievements revealedin practice:

Tomorrow’s Schools offers an ambitious and compelling visionof reform. Partners are, however, having great difficulty incarrying out that vision. In many instances, the vision hasbecome so narrowed as to be almost unrecognisable (p. 298).

Valli et al. (1997) suggest that, however attractive the vision, therhetoric may be counter-productive if, as it seems, it is unrealisti-cally ambitious. Other evaluators too have questioned the realismof the Holmes vision of what PDSs can do. Ross (1995), for example,reviewing Darling-Hammond’s (1994) important collection of casestudies, notes the fragility of PDS schemes which, althoughnumerous, have characteristically been very small-scale collabo-rative arrangements. In relation to ITE, they have almost withoutexception offered small-scale alternative approaches, hardly everbecoming the main ITE programmes offered by universities. Theyhave depended, Ross points out, on inspirational individual leadersand on ad hoc financial support, and have had to deal with formi-dable obstacles, such as barely compatible state policies.

It seems likely then that much more has been expected of PDSsthan they could credibly hope to deliver. Even if the full weight ofuniversity schools of education had been committed to them,instead of only the few enthusiasts who have normally beeninvolved, it seems unlikely that university schools of educationcould have had the power, the resources or the unity of purpose tobe effective as the primary external change agents in a trans-formation of public schools. While the idea of multi-purposepartnerships that PDSs embody seems entirely admirable, theweight of expectations upon these partnerships seems to have beenunreasonably and damagingly heavy. Attempting too much withtoo few resources, it was easy in practice for them to fall prey toinconsistencies between the assumptions implicit in differentstrands of their enterprise.

One very important inconsistency both illustrates this generalpoint and also, sadly, explains why I find little in the PDS literaturethat persuasively suggests that it offers a good model of partnershipfor ITE. The idea of collaboration between schoolteachers anduniversity staff is regularly highlighted, but ambiguities consis-tently arise with regard to the nature of that collaboration. Princi-ples of equity and mutual respect are asserted and there isoccasional mention of the complex nature of teachers’ practicalknowledge and of the fact that such knowledge is not ordinarilymade explicit. In practice, however, the university staff’s greaterconfidence in their own knowledge and its value for schoolrenewal, together with experienced school teachers’ eagerness tolearn new ideas, seems to have meant that PDSs have generallybeen used to strengthen the old theory-into-practice version of ITErather than to offer anything fundamentally new.

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The published literature shows this tendency with differingdegrees of awareness. Many studies (e.g. Allexsaht-Snider, Deegan,& White, 1995; Stanulis, 1995; Grisham et al., 1999) describe thework of PDSs with enthusiasm and little apparent awareness of thelack of respect revealed for practising teachers’ expertise. Otherstudies adopt a more consciously critical role in reporting whatthey see as a failure to move beyond the traditional ways ofthinking about student teachers’ learning. Bullough, Draper, Smith,& Birrell (2004), for example, report a study of the perceived andexperienced roles of clinical faculty associates (CFAs), the clinicalprofessors proposed by the Holmes Group (1995). Clinical profes-sors were to come from ‘the ranks of distinguished school practi-tioners’ and would ‘form a living bridge between campus andpractice’ (Bullough et al., 2004, pp. 505–6). They found howeverthat ‘a general view held by the CFAs (was) that their central role isto ensure that student teacher practice is congruent with what istaught on campus. Generally speaking, the CFAs have understoodthemselves not as professionals who generate knowledge butrather as bearers of others’ knowledge whose task it is to carry thisknowledge intact from the university to the schools’ (p. 506). Thiswas also the view of most permanent university staff. Bulloughet al. (2004) are quite clear that this represents a failure and expresstheir dismay at this continuation of ‘transmissive’ teacher educa-tion and at the failure to achieve genuine collaboration amongequals.

The enormous scale and the internal diversity of what has beendone within the PDS movement mean that any generalisedjudgement of it would be rash. It is the case, however, that despitewide reading I have found very little indeed within that movementthat seems to offer a valuable model of partnership ITE. It seemsthat the ambitious goal of reforming schools in the USA had leduniversity-based teacher educators to prioritise the promotion oftheir favourite theoretical ideas at the expense of seeking to inductbeginning teachers into a mutually respectful dialogue betweenpractising teachers and academics; and that the lack of reliableresourcing and sustained political support for the enterprise hasexacerbated that prioritisation of one goal over others. Developingthe quality of initial teacher education seems to me too importantand too demanding a task to be successfully undertaken as a sideissue; but that seems to be what has been attempted.

It could of course be argued that what I have portrayed asa weakness of PDSs – the attempted use of them to promoteinnovative academic ideas – is on the contrary a strength in relationto the preparation of student teachers for inclusive pedagogy. Thatis possible if, but only if, the schools incorporate such ideas intotheir normal practice and so the student teachers also learn toincorporate these ideas into their normal practice. This may wellhappen, although I have not encountered evidence of it happening.There would remain of course the potentially difficult problem forthe beginning teachers of transferring these new ideas from thePDS in which they have learned them to the schools in which theyfind employment. We cannot expect beginning teachers – theteachers with the lowest status among a school staff – to beeffective change agents.

2.4. Other models of partnership in ITE: the Oxfordinternship scheme

Let me return now to other models of partnership in ITE. Ireferred earlier to Furlong et al.’s (2000) conclusion that thedominant model of partnership in the new English system was ofthe university taking a managerial lead in asking the schools toensure that student teachers developed the competences specifiedby government. They did however find that a few universities hadestablished more ambitious ‘collaborative’ kinds of partnership, of

which the best known example, they suggested, was the Oxfordsecondary school postgraduate ITE partnership (the Oxfordinternship scheme), that had been introduced in 1987 and whichcontinues today to be among the most highly rated ITE courses inEngland. I was heavily involved in the development of the Oxfordpartnership and especially in articulating the theoretical rationalefor it (McIntyre, 1988, 1990a,b, 1991). While its organisationalarrangements had much in common with the national schemeintroduced 5 years later, such as student teachers spending thegreater part of their time in schools, and the allocation of resourcesto schools to allow school-based teacher educators the necessarytime to play their part, it was very different in rationale and inapproach. And again, this was because our purposes were different,much more ambitious than the government’s purposes, but quitedifferent from the simultaneous renewal purposes of the HolmesGroup. As well as wanting to prepare competent beginningteachers, we wanted to prepare teachers who understood andrespected the nature of experienced teachers’ professional craftknowledge and recognised how much they had to learn from it, butwho also recognised the very different nature and the value ofother more theorised and research-based kinds of professionalknowledge; and we aimed to prepare them to use both experience-based and scholarly knowledge in their continuing learning asteachers.

At the core of the Oxford partnership rationale was the idea thatschool and university staff have very different, but equally valuable,kinds of expertise and correspondingly very different perspectives.Student teachers too start their course with, and continue todevelop, their own individual ideas and perspectives; and ulti-mately it is the ideas, perspectives and practices that they developthat are most important. To enable them to develop their ideas andpractices thoughtfully and critically, it is crucial that their schooland university experiences should be part of a single integratedcurriculum. This curriculum has to be concerned with ideas fromdiverse sources but these ideas have to be expressed in the form ofsuggestions for practice in schools, since it is only in that form thatstudent teachers are likely to be able to use and evaluate ideas. Ithas to be based too on an acceptance of different perspectives, andespecially on a valuing and purposeful use of both the practical,contextualised perspectives of teachers and also the idealised,theoretical and research-based perspectives of university staff. Noconsensus is to be expected, and student teachers are expected andencouraged to use what they learn in school to critique what theylearn in the university and vice versa. It is through this ‘practicaltheorising’ dialectic that they are expected to develop both theirown professional knowledge and the practical theorising orreflective skills and habits which they should continue as teachersto bring to bear both on their own practice and on other suggestedideas. Thus if a partnership team of school-based and university-based teacher educators agrees that a new practical idea, evena complex idea such as inclusive pedagogy, merits a place in the ITEcurriculum, then student teachers will not only be introduced tothe relevant practical suggestions (clearly conceptualised andrigorously justified) in the university, but will also have opportu-nities in the schools to explore their feasibility and to debate itsmerits and their practicality.

Some, but not all of my colleagues at Oxford took this rationaleseriously: we academics do not like to think that other people’sideas should be treated with as much respect as our own. As theevaluator of an earlier Scottish attempt at ITE partnershipconcluded of some of my then colleagues: ‘. from a genuine senseof their own superiority, (they) could not accept a concept ofpartnership on equal terms.’ (Butts, 1983, p. 25). There were alsotheoretical critics, notably Paul Hirst (1990), who for exampleconsidered that the task that I was setting student teachers was

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inappropriate and entirely too demanding. Instead, studentteachers should be inducted into a professional consensus aboutgood practice. My response was that no such consensus existed andthat the available evidence suggested very strongly that in practicestudent teachers (and also more experienced teachers) do in anycase engage in processes of practical theorising, drawing on andassessing ideas from diverse sources, including their own experi-ence, processes through which they develop the ideas that inreality inform their practice as teachers; and that they can onlybenefit by having this theorising recognised, by being encouragedto engage in it, and by being helped to make it as conscious, explicit,disciplined and critical as possible (McIntyre, 1995).

2.5. Reflections on the Oxford internship scheme

Whatever the merits of the above arguments relating to studentteachers, the rationale I offered proved not to be realistic in allrespects even among those teacher educators who accepted it mostseriously. In an Oxford DPhil thesis, Katharine Burn (2003) askedwhether tutors and mentors implemented the complementaryroles that the theoretical principles suggested they should andwhether they had the intended impact on the student teachers’thinking and learning. She questioned in particular my emphasis onconsensus between tutors and mentors not being expected ordesirable, asking whether ‘if disagreement is uncomfortable’, asprevious research at Oxford and elsewhere had suggested, ‘could itreally be sustained?’ (p. 5). She noted other theoretical models,such as that of Edwards (1995), who calls for role overlap, arguingthat partnerships which seek to preserve discrete roles willperpetuate the theory-practice divide and suggests that school-based teacher educators have to learn the more powerful languageof public pedagogical discourse if student teachers are to have thesupport that they need when they need it as they develop. Focusingher investigation on the excellent programme for history studentteachers at Oxford, and including case studies of four schools aswell as the university, Burn (2003) found that

With the exception of one school, mentors and tutors do bothcommunicate, in different ways, a message that consensus is notalways expected. In practice, however, their actual suggestionsfor practice offer a rather more consensual view than mighthave been anticipated .. the over-riding impression, particu-larly in relation to the sorts of activities advocated by eachpartner, is one of consistency. (p. 261)

Consensus between mentors and tutors who had workedtogether for many years was, she found, not unusual (althougheven in these circumstances, consensus could not be taken forgranted); nor did consensus discourage the student teachers fromsubjecting all ideas, including their own, to critical analysis, giventhat this was actively promoted by tutors and mentors. Disconti-nuity in student teachers’ experience of the guidance they receivedfrom university tutors and school mentors could indeed bea greater problem. She noted that there were some ideas of goodpractice on which consensus between university and schools wasessential, such as the importance of thorough lesson planning andof critical lesson evaluation, and that it was important that studentteachers should learn to distinguish these ideas and those on whichconsensus was not necessarily to be expected. And she emphasisedthe need for student teachers to be supported in dealing withdiscontinuities in thinking between schools and university. None-theless, she concluded that, overall, ‘the principles .. represent anappropriate acknowledgement of reality’ (p. 291) and endorsed ‘thevalue of explicit role definitions and principled expectations as tohow the two halves of the partnership should work together’(p. 290). In particular, she believed that her evidence implied a firm

rejection of Edwards’ (1995) idea that school-based mentors shouldlearn to use a more theoretical language, since the student teachersstrongly recognised the distinctive value of the mentors’ articula-tion in practical terms of their own professional craft knowledge.And she concluded that ‘by creating a culture in which teaching isso readily associated with ongoing learning, the internship princi-ples serve to equip these beginning teachers with a very securebasis for their future development’ (p. 289).

I am encouraged by Burn’s (2003) work to believe that theOxford internship model could be broadly appropriate for intro-ducing student teachers to an idea such as inclusive pedagogy. Butthe school-based teacher educators would have to be persuadedthat it was an important enough idea to be included in thecurriculum and, even in the Oxford context, their acceptance of thatcould not be taken for granted. I want however to mention brieflytwo further ideas before completing this section on models ofpartnership for ITE.

2.6. School-based work as planned curriculum

The first of these ideas is developed quite fully in the bookLearning Teaching from Teachers that I completed recently withHazel Hagger (Hagger & McIntyre, 2006), who co-ordinates theOxford internship scheme. We argue that there is a need to goa good deal further in the reformation of ITE than has been doneeven in the best of the English partnerships. In particular, studentteachers’ school-based learning should be much more differentthan it is from the old pattern of largely incidental learning thatoccurs through participation in the teaching work of the school.Instead, student teachers’ school-based work should be organisedas a planned curriculum, with diverse learning experiences care-fully designed to help them to develop the diverse kinds ofexpertise that we want them to have. And it should be primarilyschool-based teacher educators who, knowing their schools, planthese curricula. At one level, this is simply asking for a more thor-ough pursuit of what we were always planning to do in theinternship scheme. The core example we use in the book is that ofstudent teachers gaining access to the professional craft knowledgeof particular teachers whose expertise they admire, something thatHagger studied for her PhD. She found that putting this relativelysimple idea into practice effectively was a very complex task,because of the preconceptions and priorities of both experiencedteachers and student teachers, and because schools are places thatare not organised to facilitate adult learning. For this specificpurpose, and all our other specific purposes, an agreed and care-fully planned curriculum is necessary. At another level, however,we have recognised a very simple principle that had not informedthe internship model. This is that, if we want student teachers tolearn to engage, as part of their normal professional practice, inserious and informed intellectual analysis of their teaching and ofhow it can be improved, they need to learn this during theirprofessional education as something that they do in schools. It is notenough to have practical theorising assignments based on theirschool experiences that they submit to their university tutors: thatmakes it university work. They need to learn instead that practicaltheorising is necessary for the quality of their teaching in schools.As we argue, ‘whatever student teachers need to learn to do asteachers in schools for their future careers, it is in schools that theyneed to learn to do these things’ (Hagger & McIntyre, 2006, p. 65).

2.7. Pedagogical discourse

Secondly, we need to return to Edwards’ (1995) suggestion thatschool-based teacher educators need to learn to use an appropriatetheoretical language if they are to be adequately helpful to student

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teachers. Does the suggestion that the core curriculum of ITEshould be school-based not strongly reinforce that suggestion? Itcertainly raises a very important question about the kind of peda-gogical discourse that is to be used for such school-based ITE. Do wehave the language for the kind of discourse that is necessary? Onthe one hand, if student teachers are to learn to engage in ‘seriousand informed intellectual analysis of their teaching and how it canbe improved’, such discourse must be rigorous. If it is to be genu-inely helpful, it must draw in a balanced and integrated way on allthe different intellectual disciplines and kinds of educationalresearch that are relevant to classroom teaching and learning. Itmust also be concerned with the very different kinds of questions,about the effectiveness of teaching, about appropriate teacher–pupil and other classroom relationships, about social justice inschooling and about the valid representation of the subjects to betaught. But most of all, it must be practical, readily applicable to thediscussion of individual student teachers’ particular lessons andimmediate learning needs. Where might school-based teachereducators find models for this kind of discourse? I suspect that, inthe Anglo–Saxon world, they might have some difficulty in findingsuch models. There is, I believe, a yawning gap between thelanguage of educational scholars and researchers, each pursuingtheir specialist theoretical concerns, and the language of the schoolstaff room. Edwards is, as Burn (2003) concluded, wrong to suggestthat school-based teacher educators should jump across this gap.But the gap does need to be bridged. And one of the very importantroles that university-based scholars should be fulfilling is devel-oping the kind of discourse that bridges that gap, discourse thatdiscusses pedagogical issues such as that of inclusive pedagogy inrigorous, balanced, integrated and practical ways. Unless they takeon this task, a task that has been severely neglected, providing boththe generalised knowledge and the models of discourse that theirschool-based partners can use to explore issues in particularcontexts with their student teachers, the twentieth century gapbetween theory and practice will continue.

The importance of such a role is evident in the followingdiscussion by Hagger and McIntyre (2006) of student teachers’learning about innovations, which I think is directly relevant to theconcern with inclusive pedagogy:

The issue of the school context in which student teachers arelearning becomes even more important in relation to the thirdpriority goal that we suggested for ITE, that of student teacherslearning to respond constructively but critically to innovativeideas. Such learning depends on experiencing and dealing withthe serious tensions that innovations always bring with them,between the uncertain rewards that new ideas might bring andthe certain costs of abandoning well-learned practices in whichmuch has been invested and of having to learn new ways. Sincestudent teachers’ own practices tend to be still far from stableand well learned, their learning about such tensions must inlarge measure be vicarious. A very important condition for theeffective pursuit of this goal is therefore that the host school ordepartment would need to have committed itself to exploringthe merits of such innovations for its own improvement. Schoolscommitted to their own improvement can indeed benefitgreatly from their engagement in this aspect of ITE, boththrough having student teachers and through their partnershipswith universities. We would envisage that a partnership plan-ning group might agree on a menu of innovations that seemedattractive to the schools or departments involved. The universitycould appropriately take on the roles of advocate and facilitatorfor each of these innovations, with the task of leading bothteachers and student teachers in thinking about the benefits tobe looked for and about necessary conditions and changes for

the realisation of these benefits. The student teachers in eachschool or department could appropriately be the main actionresearchers, with responsibilities both for implementing theinnovations on a small-scale and for investigating its advantagesand its problems. Such action research projects should offerexcellent professional education for student teachers in relationto the processes and problems of innovation. But the value andindeed the practicality of such projects would depend cruciallyon the schools or departments having the active level of interestin them that would come only from seeing them as potentiallycontributing to their own improvement (Hagger & McIntyre,2006, pp. 69–70).

3. Conclusion

Over the past several years, a group of English teachers andteacher educators currently or formerly based at the University ofCambridge have been meeting to discuss the ideas put forward inthe book, Learning without Limits (Hart, Dixon, Drummond, &McIntyre, 2004). This book, based on a study of the practice of nineteachers who had rejected ideas fixed ability in their teaching,contains a theoretical account of how such teaching might beconstrued more generally. The Learning without Limits studyprovides an example of how teachers in schools and researchers inuniversities can work collaboratively on a research project that hashigh practical and high theoretical significance. The task for teachereducators in universities is no less daunting. An offshoot of theCambridge group consisting of colleagues based in UK universitiesare interested in exploring a follow up to the original study in thecontext of ITE, and especially on the problems that university-basedteacher educators have experienced in trying to help their studentsunderstand and explore alternatives to ability labelling in theirteaching. This work will be crucial as the concept of inclusivepedagogy itself is disruptive to the status quo in many schools, andwill no doubt be an uncomfortable idea for many school staff,particularly to the extent that the school itself is organised aroundprinciples of ability labelling and the identification and catego-risation of learners in need of additional support. For those whowork in schools that are organised in these ways, and that includesmost schools, the idea of introducing inclusive pedagogy as anessential aspect of ITE will require sensitive collaboration withschool-based partners. In this case, there may be discontinuitybetween the practicing teachers experience and the principles ofinclusive pedagogy as articulated in the school-based curriculum.Thus the need for the kind of open and exploratory approach basedon a deep respect for the work that teachers do, as advocated at theoutset of this paper will be key if teacher educators in highereducation wish to do more than promote a theoretical idea. Asnoted above, there is an important role for university-basedscholars in developing the kind of discourse which bridges thetheory-practice gap, so that the innovations of inclusive pedagogyare developed collaboratively with teachers in schools andcommunicated to students qualifying to be teachers in rigorous,balanced, integrated and practical ways.

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