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International Studies in Sociology of EducationPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riss20
University-based initial teacher education:Institutional re-positioning and professional renewalJon Nixon a , Peter Cope b , James McNally b , Susan Rodrigues b & Christine Stephen ba University of Sheffield , United Kingdomb University of Stirling , United KingdomPublished online: 04 Mar 2011.
To cite this article: Jon Nixon , Peter Cope , James McNally , Susan Rodrigues & Christine Stephen (2000) University-based initial teacher education: Institutional re-positioning and professional renewal, International Studies in Sociology ofEducation, 10:3, 243-261, DOI: 10.1080/09620210000200062
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09620210000200062
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International Studies in Sociology of Education, Volume 10, Number 3, 2000
243
University-based Initial Teacher Education: institutional re-positioning and professional renewal
JON NIXON University of Sheffield, United Kingdom with PETER COPE, JAMES McNALLY, SUSAN RODRIGUES & CHRISTINE STEPHEN University of Stirling, United Kingdom
ABSTRACT The emphasis on ‘partnership’ in initial teacher education is a matter not just of organisational structure but of professional practices and purposes. If universities are to remain key players in initial teacher education, they must support the occupational group that represents the sector’s interests and values: university-based initial teacher educators. Currently, however, this occupational group is awkwardly positioned between competing sets of accountability demands and institutional requirements. This article argues that only by encouraging and sustaining the professional renewal of university-based initial teacher educators will the university earn itself a continuing place in the evolving story of initial teacher education. That renewal is dependent, in other words, not only on the institutional re-positioning of the university but also on its re-commitment to initial teacher education as a core activity; a re-commitment which, it is argued, must recognise professional learning as a major ‘field’ of study across professional domains.
I. Introduction
While the mechanisms by which the institutional ‘locus’ of initial teacher education shifts from university departments of education to schools varies across the national regions of the United Kingdom (UK), the outcome is much the same: not decentralisation (as the rhetoric of ‘partnership’ may suggest), but increased central control of the professionalisation of teachers and of initial teacher educators. Furlong et al (1996) identified, on a continuum from university-based to school-based schemes, three ‘ideal
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typical’ models of ‘partnership’ that had started to emerge by 1995: ‘collaborative partnerships’, ‘HEI-led partnerships’, and ‘separatist partnerships’ (p. 43). Although their research (based on fieldwork undertaken in 1995) showed that ‘the separatist and collaborative models currently only seem to operate in a minority of courses’ (p. 53), the pull since 1995 has undoubtedly been towards increased collaboration between universities and schools and, to a lesser extent, on school-based initial teacher education initiatives. This trend towards ‘partnership’ denotes a significant shift in the balance of power away from the university sector and towards central government. Indeed, as Simon (1994, p. 144) has noted, it would seem ‘to threaten the now historic involvement of universities with teacher education’; an involvement which, Simon goes on to argue, ‘lay behind the entire development of university studies in education for almost precisely the last 100 years’.
It can be hardly surprising if, in these circumstances, initial teacher educators feel themselves to be vulnerable. The majority of this occupational group will already have pursued a career as teachers in schools, so come to their second career with a very different set of expectations and achievements than many of their academic colleagues. This is particularly crucial given the current premium placed on academic publications, since most initial teacher educators are unlikely to have begun to publish seriously prior to gaining a university post. At the point at which their colleagues may be already positioning themselves for academic promotion, they are only beginning to develop the kind of curriculum vitae that could hold its own in the increasingly competitive world of higher education.
Fully accepted neither as ‘practitioners’ nor as ‘academics’, university-based initial teacher educators are suggests Day (1995, p. 359):
caught between the rock of government policy which has raised the value of ‘practical experience’ above all else … and the ‘hard place’ of scholarship in which they are judged by their colleagues elsewhere in the world of academe. Their lived experience seems to limit opportunities for scholarship yet those outside their context often regard them as impractical or, worse, ideological.
In this article we are concerned with:
how the current situation has come about (Section II below); how university-based initial teacher educators have themselves responded
to that situation (Section III below); and how the university might encourage and sustain a revitalised role for
university-based initial teacher educators. (Section IV below).
II. Re-locations and Re-alignments
How, then, has it come about that initial teacher educators are ‘betwixt and between’ in terms of their own perceived authority and legitimacy? Our
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analysis (developed below) suggests that structural changes at the level of institutional organisation, disciplinary demarcation, and state control have profoundly affected the ‘locus’ of initial teacher education.
The Erosion of the Monotechnic Principle
Historically, the field of initial teacher education has gained definition through the practicalities of supply and demand: the need for local schools to be assured of a steady supply of good teachers. From the 1890s clear connections between teacher training and the world of higher education were established with the advent of the day training colleges. By 1902 there were some 20 institutions of higher education in England and Wales, providing more than a quarter of the 5000 students then in training. Initially, the courses were of two years duration and catered only for day students. Residential facilities, however, soon developed, while three-year and (from 1911) four-year programmes were designed for those wishing to pursue concurrent or consecutive courses for a degree and a teaching certificate. During this period, it should be noted, teacher training was essentially for those proceeding to employment in elementary schools: schools, that is, for the poor. Those who taught in grammar or public schools did not receive training in teaching. From the outset, therefore, the link between higher education, teacher training, and state schooling was of paramount importance (Aldrich, 1998).
The pace at which, and ease with which, specialist (‘monotechnic’) teacher training institutions have become integrated into the broader polytechnic and university system has varied considerably across the national regions of the UK. In Scotland the erosion of the monotechnic principle has been particularly pronounced over the past 20 years as specialist teacher training institutions have found it necessary to form strategic alliances of various kinds with both ‘old’ and ‘new’ universities. Traditionally, a distinguishing feature of the Scottish education system had been that teacher education takes place within specialist institutions: in 1976 there were 10 colleges of education, but only one university department of education (at the University of Stirling) providing initial teacher training. However, in 1981, and again in 1987, the system was reduced through a series of amalgamations, first to seven and then to five specialist colleges.
Throughout the 1990s these remaining colleges have, sometimes with traumatic effect, been integrated into the progressively expanding university system. Monotechnic provision (which, within Scotland, was as much a principle as a practice) has given way to a system within which initial teacher education is forced to re-locate and realign itself within a highly complex and competitive institutional framework (Kirk, 1999).
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The Rise and Fall of the Founding Disciplines
As teacher training became more firmly embedded within university departments of education, the distinction between subject-based knowledge (biology, history, physics, etc.) and knowledge of the founding disciplines (philosophy, psychology, sociology) came to be of crucial importance. Initial teacher educators became caught up in the increasingly professionalised world of higher education, where specialist knowledge had become the hallmark of professional distinction. Their strongest claim to specialist knowledge was through the practical application of philosophical, psychological and sociological insights to the field of education.
The disciplines had cachet, precisely because they had this kind of general applicability. They were the means by which teacher education ‘generated its own kingdom which was not only conceptually and attitudinally but also structurally and socially distinct’ (Wilkin, 1996, p. 65). If, as Simon (1994, p. 141) has suggested, ‘educational studies both broadened and deepened very considerably in the 1960s and early 70s’, this was largely because through the disciplines initial teacher educators came into ‘a closer relation with what might be called ‘main-line’ studies in universities as a whole’ while establishing a distinct niche for themselves within the university system. The philosophy, psychology and sociology of education thereby became the basis of the initial teacher educator’s prime claim to professional knowledge. It was what distinguished a professor of education from a professor of, say, geography.
What distinguished a professor of education from a professor of philosophy, or psychology, or sociology, was another matter. Initial teacher educators came to see this distinction as vitally important. Philosophers per se may have sought to understand the world, but for philosophers of education the point was to change it (for the better, of course, and with prime reference to ‘hearts and minds’). From the mid 1970s, the emphasis on the practical outcomes and policy-related impact of education as a field of study became particularly pronounced. Having distanced itself from subject-based expertise, teacher education needed also to place some distance between itself and the founding disciplines. The emphasis on ‘practical experience’ was the strategic manoeuvre by which this distancing effect was achieved and by which teacher education carved out for itself a niche within the academy.
There was a high price to pay for this strategic manoeuvring in the form of increased centralised control and the adoption of a highly restrictive view of initial teacher education as training. In the early 1980s, as Helsby (1999, p. 151) has noted:
government interest in courses of ITT (initial teacher training) began to grow … In 1984 responsibility for monitoring the curricula of ITE (initial teacher education) institutions was given to the newly established Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE), whose D
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members were appointed directly by the Secretary of State for Education.
The criteria for the approval of courses were revised and strengthened in 1989 and the remit of CATE widened:
These criteria have increasingly encouraged a greater emphasis upon academic knowledge in a main teaching subject, with correspondingly less attention paid to pedagogy. They have also led to the virtual disappearance of the educational disciplines of sociology, psychology, philosophy and history as separate studies and to a renewed focus upon practical training, with an increased role for practicing teachers. (Helsby, 1999, p. 151)
The hegemony of the founding disciplines was thus broken to the extent that, as one authoritative commentator put it:
the two disciplines which had made a dramatic impact in the 1960s and 1970s, philosophy and sociology of education, both, to all intents and purposes, evacuated the field in the 1980s and early 1990s. (Simon, 1994, p. 144)
The New ‘Quangocracy’
Central control was further strengthened in England and Wales by the establishment in 1994 of the Teacher Training Agency (TTA), which in conjunction with the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) published plans for a national framework for the assessment of initial teacher education (Ofsted and TTA, 1996). The following year the TTA produced a consultation document (TTA, 1997). This formed the basis of a new national curriculum for all initial teacher education courses (Department for Education and Employment, 1997), which (as Hartley, 1998, has pointed out) shares a number of common features with the national curriculum for schools: standardised curriculum prescriptions, national testing, external inspection and league tables of institutional performance. It also represents a general dumbing down of what is learnt and of how teacher professionalism is conceived and defined: ‘the emphasis is on pedagogic skills and classroom management techniques and issues of values, equity and purpose are excluded from the teacher training curriculum. The teacher is reconstructed as a technician rather than as a professional capable of critical judgement and reflection’ (Ball, 1992, p. 92).
It is unlikely that this takeover from the centre would have proved as politically effective as it did were it not for the fact that, across the UK, initial teacher education (and the professional interests that sustain it) had already become deeply ambivalent towards the founding disciplines and their legacy. In England and Wales, as we have seen, the heavy artillery was brought on in the form of the TTA and Ofsted. In Scotland the centralising tendencies
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could afford to be more gently managed given the traditional emphasis north of the border on subject specialism as a defining feature of teacher professionalism. (In Scotland, unlike England and Wales, teachers are registered as teachers of a particular subject.)
Scotland may have escaped the TTA and Ofsted, but only because the deep ‘codes’ of teacher professionalism north of the border reinforce many of the priorities and myths of central government. Why risk the imposition of TTA and Ofsted, when since 1966 Scotland has had its own General Teaching Council (GTC) which oversees the registration and training of teachers according to precepts and principles that are already in line with central government thinking?
The Scottish Executive defines the competencies required of teachers, while the GTC and Her Majesties Inspectorate (HMI) ensure, through ‘visits’ to and ‘inspections’ of initial teacher education courses, that these competencies are delivered: much the same kind of relationship as that between the Department of Education and Employment, on the one hand, and TTA and Ofsted on the other. The institutional and cultural mediation may differ (the GTC and HMI are, arguably, more ‘gentlemanly’ and in closer ‘touch’), but the political agenda being pursued is much the same north and south of the border. (For recent accounts of the GTC, see: Clark, 1997; Kirk, 1997; Sutherland, 1999.)
University-based initial teacher educators have, then, been particularly vulnerable to these centralising tendencies both north and south of the border. The reason for this vulnerability is not just that they constitute a relatively small and diverse group (which they undoubtedly do), but that this small and diverse group is both institutionally and professionally isolated. In the absence of strategic alliances with other professional and social groupings (even those located within its own institutional settings), university-based initial teacher educators as a group have tended to rely on policy makers to construct appropriate contexts for their professional activity. This tendency, as Gardner & Cunningham (1998, pp. 252–253) argue, has left them particularly exposed to the re-locations and re-alignments of the past three decades:
when the direction of policy development was relatively conducive to the furthering of the status, self-confidence and relative autonomy of the profession, it was not difficult for teacher trainers to suppose that there was some fundamental unity of interest between their professional concerns and the goals of policy-makers. The fracturing of that perception … has been particularly painful for teacher educators.
III. In Search of Professional Credibility
So how have university-based initial teacher educators responded to these re-locations and re-alignments? On the basis of interviews conducted between
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1998 and 1999 with colleagues in a single institution [1] we present below a number of ways in which university-based initial teacher educators seem to be defining their own professional credibility in terms of claims to particular kinds of authority: the authority of their subject specialism; of their contextual understanding of schools and the school system; of their pedagogic expertise as this relates to school teaching; and of their capacity to manage the new ‘partnership’ arrangements. The categories employed in this section are, it should be emphasised, a device for distinguishing the claims the interviewees make regarding their own professional ends and purposes (their ‘telos’). They do not provide us with a typology of practice.
Subject Specialism
The interviewees are located in the Scottish system where, as already noted, teachers are registered as subject specialists (unlike their counterparts in England and Wales). Moreover, they themselves as former school teachers and now as university lecturers on an initial teacher education programme are similarly registered. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a number of those interviewed see their subject specialism as the prime source of their credibility as initial teacher educators. More surprising, perhaps, is that these interviewees invariably contrast their subject specialist knowledge with some other kind of knowledge: knowledge of the founding disciplines; of required curriculum and assessment procedures; or of the social and extra-curricular aspects of schooling. It is as if the ‘goods’ of subject specialism can only be defined negatively in terms of what they are not: a rhetorical consistency which suggests a degree of defensiveness.
There are, however, clear differences in the extent to which the comparisons that are evoked acknowledge the relevance of non-subject specific elements. One interviewee, for example, in placing a premium on subject specialist knowledge is clearly reacting against the idea of the founding disciplines having any ‘relevance’ at all to the task of teacher ‘training’:
When you are training a teacher, you see you train them in a specific subject. I did a higher diploma in education, and I could say the psychology, the sociology of everything I did was useless for language teaching, absolutely useless. It didn’t relate and, as students, we couldn’t make any bridges to our actual function as language teachers. The psychology we did had no relevance, or else we couldn’t see the relevance … So I believe, very strongly, that you prepare a subject teacher. OK, in class management, there may be techniques, there may be strategies etc for getting good order in classes, for general communication skills, for how you organise yourself, how you organise your work, how you choose objectives. But those are all in the end specific to the material that you are teaching. (3)[2] D
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For another, the emphasis on subject specific content seems to be in part at least a reaction against the way in which that content has been redefined in procedural terms for the purposes of ‘nationalising’ and standardising the school curriculum:
I want them to be agents of change within the schools but they can’t be agents of change if they haven’t changed themselves. And they change themselves by trying to be mathematicians … and by knowing inside out what school mathematics is and should be. I mean the two students I had this morning on final practice, I asked them ‘OK, you’ve got to this stage, is there anything we could have prepared you better for?’ and they homed in straight on content. So, it’s the content that I think they’re missing out on and I suspect the content that they’re getting … is good but probably modified to a great extent by all the procedural things about what standard grade is, what it’s trying to achieve and how to manage it … Just let’s push all this stuff – you know, files and files of Higher Still or what have you – just push that into the background a little bit. (6)
For this particular initial teacher educator, the pedagogy is implicit in the subject specific content. Without a sound grasp of that content students cannot know what they do not know and cannot pose problems in meaningful ways. They flourish through their absorption in the practice of their subject specialism:
They don’t know what they don’t know to start with, then they find out what it is they don’t know. Then they try and put some structure on it, and turn it from a problem to a mathematical problem, then they explore the mathematical problem and look back again at the original problem – and there’s a bit of to-ing and fro-ing here – until they start making progress and see structures … There’s a sort of growing, mathematically. (6)
There is a strong sense of the initial teacher educator being heir to a tradition which must be handed on by the initiated and of the university as being the appropriate place for that hand over of knowledge and expertise:
I say to my students ‘you’re maths teachers – if you’re not going to teach kids how to handle a calculator, who’s going to do it? Are you going to leave it to the parents, are you going to leave it to the geography teacher, are they going to be able to do it any better than you?’ So there is this responsibility that we take on. (6)
For others, however, subject specialism may be ‘a big part of who you are’ but does not adequately define the professional identity of the initial teacher educator. There are ‘goods’ other than the ‘goods’ of subject specialist knowledge; ‘goods’ that are inherent in the civic ideals of state schooling:
Yes, I’m really a school-oriented person – that’s what it is. And I went into teaching and taught Physics because that was my degree. I was really a teacher first and foremost who taught Physics and was very
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proud to do that and tried to do it very, very well. I think having a good subject teaching credential is very important, it’s a big part of who you are. But you’re much, much more than that as a teacher. (4)
The problem with this category of ‘claim’ from the claimant’s point of view is its vulnerability on two institutional fronts. (Again, the ‘rock’ and the ‘hard place’.) First, in respect of the university and the status of the interviewees as university lecturers, their subject specialist expertise may be perceived by colleagues in other university departments as second rate. This at least is a perception hinted at by several of those interviewees making this particular claim. Second, in respect of schools and the status of the interviewees as initial teacher educators, their subject specialism may be seen to be ‘out of touch’ and ‘academic’; defined, that is, in terms of the university curriculum rather than in terms of the prescribed school curriculum. As we shall see, the following categories of ‘claim’ are all to some extent attempts to overcome this second problem. The first problem, however, is more intransigent and is addressed in the final section of this article.
Contextual Understanding
The ‘much, much more’ evoked in the last quotation is defined by other interviewees in terms of the importance of a contextual understanding of classrooms and schools, teachers and learners, subjects and curricula:
There always was, right back in the ’70s, tremendous issues as to just how much should be devoted to general issues or general context. The movement in the ’70s even was away from having general courses and I taught in the ’70s and on to the mid ’80s a course … on the sociology and politics of education, which was contextual. Eventually that was replaced by more specific, more issues-based courses, as that’s how teacher education has evolved … Gradually teacher education has put more emphasis on the actual pedagogy of the classroom and on the work of teachers and on the worker in the classroom, less on the general background ... We have a very traditional teacher education programme, because we are also trying to provide people with a degree. So that we have an academic course, not just a professional course. And it’s this odd mixture which leads to the survival of quite significant courses on the general background of teaching. (1)
This same interviewee staked out his position with reference to ‘awareness’ and to the contribution of social theory and the founding disciplines in ‘creating awareness’:
What I’ve always seen sociology as doing is creating awareness. For example, of social class and educational achievement, of the relative levels of achievement of pupils, of the problems that creates, of areas of the politics of education – it merges into the administration of education. Getting people to be aware, for example, of the comprehensive debate, of
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the selection debate. All these seem to me to be essential things for teachers to be aware of and knowledgeable about. So, I think that the sociology merges, really, into broad themes. What we’re trying to do … is to give people a broad knowledge of where they are, and we’re abandoning the disciplines in so doing. The disciplines might provide an avenue in, but that’s all. (1)
This ‘broad knowledge of where they are’ is, according to another interviewee, capable of addressing quite specific issues relating social interactions, and the interpretation of those interactions, within a wide variety of teaching situations:
The kind of sociology of education that I first became interested in was driven by a sense of empathy with the client, particularly the pupil, and so the pupil’s experience of education … As a social scientist you’re more conscious of the pupil’s experience than the school structures, and so on, and perhaps having a readiness to identify with the client, the pupil and their experience of it … Particularly as a social scientist with an interactionist, interpretive kind of background in which one tries not to take sides at all but simply kind of takes an interest in how people perceive things. (8)
Although clearly informed by the foundation disciplines, this perspective is wary of identifying itself too closely with those disciplines as traditionally understood. It remains ‘easy’ in its relations with other subjects (particularly those located within the humanities) and claims for itself a cross-curricularity of purpose:
In a way, I’ve always been struck over the last two decades I suppose how sociology itself is kind of respected by teachers and educationists as an area of knowledge that held the secrets to all the answers to the questions gathered … And yet it always seems to me to be the wrong kind of sociology because it tended to be structuralist sociology and managerial kind of uses of sociology rather than the more critical sociology (either the kind that deconstructed systems and structures or the more empathic kind that took the side of the underdog and the disadvantaged and pupils generally). So I’m just trying to look at the question we originally started out with which was about me and how, as a social scientist attached to education, it had had an effect on me. I think I’ve just been trying to talk about the way in which it leads you to look at things, the kind of more detached, kind of marginal deconstructionist kind of interest in education. But I think the other kind of feature of it is a general ease in working across the curriculum, since the kind of knowledge you have, or the experience, the way you look at things, is not at odds with any of the subject areas and so, for instance, in my previous college I worked with the humanities tutors, the RE tutors, the English tutors and so on, where they were looking at knowledge and particularly how children interpreted knowledge and
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made sense of it and so on, so … that being a social scientist actually allowed me to fit in quite well and move across boundaries that subject specialists tend to make but I didn’t really make relatively easily. I think, perhaps, here, being able to slip into RME (Religious and Moral Education) has not been too difficult a task because its way of thinking now and its way of construing knowledge is not very far from the way humanistic social scientists, for instance, tend to operate. (8)
Ironically, perhaps, given the way in which the founding disciplines have been marginalised by recent developments within initial teacher education, the above comments reveal a sense of professional self-confidence in the general insights that sociology can provide and in its capacity to support subject specific and thematic work in schools.
Pedagogic Expertise
For all the interviewees the claim to pedagogic expertise underpinned what they saw as their credibility with schools and with practicing teachers. For some, however, this claim was central to their professional identity. These interviewees defined their authority in terms of their capacity to provide frameworks for practitioners to think about and extend their own teaching skills. The emphasis here is crucial. The claim is not that initial teacher educators are skilled school teachers, but that they are skilled in framing and articulating the skills and understandings necessary for effective teaching in school contexts. The distinction is important in defining what in particular the university-based initial teacher educator can contribute: not teaching skills per se, but frameworks for thinking about the practice of teaching.
In the following statement that distinction is confirmed and the distinctive contribution of the university-based teacher upheld by allusion to the kinds of contextual understanding and subject specialist knowledge discussed above. Here, however, it is the pedagogical concerns that drive the claim to professional credibility:
One of the strengths of the system here, I think, was that we always had classroom teaching skills and research on classroom teaching skills as fundamental to the course. Whereas I went round to the various institutions as an external examiner and the students would be saying to us constantly ‘the one thing about this course is that nobody ever teaches us how to teach’. I could always come back here and feel that this was a fundamental part of the course, whichever subject that you’re in because of the micro teaching programme and the frameworks about teaching that we provided, that students were constantly being given insights into the nature of classrooms, the nature of the teacher’s role and the professional skills that were involved in doing this, so that the frameworks about teaching and the frameworks about the nature of English are the two dominating parts of my work. (2)
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The role of the initial teacher educator is not to tell the student teacher what to do in specific circumstances, but to map out the implications of the various courses of action open to them. What is being acknowledged by this interviewee is both the necessity of professional judgement and the inherent complexity and indeterminacy of exercising that judgement in particular situations:
They’ve got to decide where they want to go and I think some of them find this quite difficult to handle. To be told that nobody’s going to tell you how to teach – a lot of them want ready made lessons, tell me what I’ve got to do, tell me what I’ve got to read, teach me to teach. And, for me, that’s never been the way. It’s definitely, you’re going to make yourself into a teacher – I’m here and other people are here, there’ll be people in the schools and you’ve got to decide the kind of teacher you want to be and you’ve got to make yourself. You’ve got the opportunities in the micro teaching programmes and school experience and that’s crucial. Whether we’re going in the long term going to produce teachers still in that mould, I don’t know. But for me that’s been crucial. And I suppose really too what is crucial is drawing on a body of knowledge and understanding and trying to help students to understand better what underpins the job that they’re doing. (2)
Yet, the authority being claimed here has something to do with remaining close to the action and refusing the lure of abstraction. For at least one of the interviewees pedagogic expertise defines itself against some notion of imposed theory:
When I come to thinking of my kids physics teacher, I have to say I don’t give a bugger whether he knows about the social constructed nature of education, I just wish he knew how to explain something clearly … I think, if we’re not careful in HE, we can be a bit indulgent. I’m not saying these things aren’t important, I think they are for a profession, but I suspect they’re not as important as we make them out to be. (7)
Managing ‘Partnership’
How to manage the new ‘partnership’ arrangements is a problem which weighs heavily on all the interviewees. Often it is assumed to be an adjunct, an imposition, that somehow gets in the way of the ‘real’ business of teacher education. For the following interviewee, for example, it is a demand that is made at the expense of other more significant claims:
Managing people, yes, I’ve just been on the phone now this very minute to remind a (colleague) that he hadn’t been to see one of my students … and she wanted to know where he was … So, yes, I’m managing – D
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managing people more. Dealing with my (subject specialist) experience, it’s probably not being used, and probably atrophying. (6)
For others it is not central to the task, but is nevertheless recognised as an important aspect of whatever it means to be an initial teacher educator:
You find yourself going to a school you’ve never been to before and the relationship has to be built from scratch, and it can take a long time. (5)
For a few it involves a rethink of the power relations inherent in the complexities of evolving ‘partnership’ and provides an opportunity to reflect upon the balance of power within the existing relations:
I think we assume, in a sense the whole set-up assumes, that we’re the bosses in a way … If you look at the criteria for successful practice … university tutors’ criteria would include things like ‘theoretical coherence’ and teachers would include ‘feasibility’. Now, I suspect that those criteria have got inverse value in each context … Take them into the practice context and they’ll say ‘well, you can stuff your theoretical coherence, it’s got to be feasible’ and here, because we value theoretical coherence, that would come first. (7)
While all the interviewees were affected by the current ‘partnership’ arrangements and by the need to ‘manage’ these arrangements, none of them questioned the parameters of ‘partnership’. All of them seemed to accept (in interview) the underlying assumption that the prime axis of ‘partnership’, the axis upon which the task of management turns, is that between the school and the higher education provider.
IV. Renewing the Professional Power-base
Notwithstanding the challenges initial teacher education presents for higher education, we are sure that the university has a key part to play in the development and elaboration of a school focused system of initial teacher education based upon the principles of partnership, public accountability and quality assurance (see Darling-Hammond, 1999; Murray, 1999; Carroll & Harrison, 2000). We are equally sure, however, that universities will be unable to fulfil this role unless they learn how to support initial teacher education and integrate it more fully into their future planning. The problem of institutional positioning, with regard to the overall provision of initial teacher education, is therefore contingent upon the problem of professional purposefulness in respect of university-based initial teacher educators. It is a moral/teleological matter; not just a technical/strategic matter.
Put bluntly, the university must find a way of recognising university-based teacher educators as constituting a significant occupational group with its own professional ends and purposes; or else it must give up on any hope of being a long-term strategic player in the unfolding drama of the
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‘partnership’ arrangements surrounding and shaping initial teacher education. In our view that ‘recognition’ necessarily involves finding ways of enabling initial teacher educators to become more outward looking; to build a broader power-base with other professional and social groups on matters of common concern and interest; and to position themselves centrally in the development of the ‘new’ learning as it relates to current developments within higher education.[3] It involves, in other words, a reconceptualisation of ‘partnership’ as both inclusive and partner-led.
Notions of ‘partnership’ in respect of initial teacher education have tended to be policy-driven and restricted to relations between universities and schools: relations from which other ‘user’ and ‘provider’ interests have been largely excluded. Following the analysis of Gardner & Cunningham (1998) and the line of argument developed by Nixon (2000), we are suggesting a broader notion of ‘partnership’ encompassing: collaboration across departmental divides within higher education; linkage between different institutions and different sectors; and, crucially, a sense of connectedness with families, young people and parents as school ‘users’. Renewing the power-base of initial teacher education through an extended notion of ‘partnership’ is in our view a pre-requisite of the professional regeneration of university-based initial teacher educators – and, crucially, one which universities must themselves take a lead in establishing.
Given a more generously defined notion of ‘partnership’ and the institutional wherewithal to sustain it, we would see university-based initial teacher educators as having a potentially vital role to play in the future development of ‘the idea of the university’ and the articulation of the underlying purposes of a university education in respect of professional learning.[4] In particular, university-based initial teacher educators would have a key role in:
Developing the university as a place of inter-professional learning: Initial teacher education is centrally concerned with professional learning and should in our view connect more closely with other sites of professional learning within the university context. Faculties of health and social care are not uncommon [5] but initial teacher education has tended to develop in isolation from other professional groups. The result is a serious reduction in the opportunities for inter-professional learning by trainee teachers. Initial teacher education is well placed to seize the initiative in this area. University-based initial teacher educators understand that professional judgement is complex, that the knowledge professionals require is in need of constant updating, and that professionals have to reach out to empower their clients. Whether I am a nurse educator, an initial teacher educator, or a lecturer in business studies, one of my central concerns must be the recognition and sustenance of complexity, provisionality, and participation within my field of practice. We sense the need for organisational structures that more fully reflect similarities and differences at the level of pedagogic purpose rather than at the level of
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traditional demarcation (whether this be ‘subject’, ‘discipline’ or ‘field’); organisational structures, that is, that allow for flexibility and change of professional outlook and alignment through shared learning. We further believe that there is a strong role for initial teacher education to play in shaping these new structures of inter-professional learning and in ensuring that the shift towards shared learning is driven by educational as well as operational concerns. Developing professional learning as a major ‘field’ of collaborative research and scholarship: We see the university-based initial teacher educator as also having a key role in developing and defining a tradition of research and scholarship within the ‘field’ of professional learning. Within the current system, initial teacher educators are invariably playing the research ‘game’ according to rules that seriously disadvantage them. What is required of universities is a more sophisticated view of what constitutes research, and research relevance, and a more robust response to the inadequacies of existing research selection mechanisms. We see the RAE (with its emphasis on specific ‘units of assessment’), along with many of the programme initiatives of the relevant research councils, as inadequate to the task of developing a strong research base within and across the various fields of professional learning. Initial teacher education does not have a monopoly on research into professional learning, but it does have traditions of collaborative enquiry and of school-focused and community-based enquiry which would be central to the development of professional learning as an inter-professional ‘field’ of study. Again, it is well placed to take the intellectual initiative in re-conceptualising and re-constructing professional learning as an inter-professional ‘field’ of study requiring cross-departmental collaboration, cross-sector linkage, and a sense of connectedness with a wide range of use groups and communities. Developing collaborative research and scholarship as a public resource: One of the defining features of a profession is that it has knowledge which is specific to itself; knowledge which members of that profession own and of which they are seen to be guardians. It is on the basis of this assumption that the teaching profession is so often criticised (as lacking that specialist knowledge) and that educational research is vilified (for its failure to provide it). There are, however, other kinds of knowledge that any professional group requires: shared knowledge of how learning takes place, how relationships work, how purposes translate into practices, how complex institutions and systems operate, how specialist knowledge may inform professional judgement … These two kinds of knowledge (specialist knowledge and shared knowledge) are not hermetically sealed: the one requires and is often informed by the other. Research and scholarship which informs inter-professional dialogue is therefore of paramount importance. Moreover, many of the questions addressed by professionals through that dialogue, and much of the knowledge generated in the course of it, is of interest and value to a wide
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range of ‘users’. A tradition of research and scholarship focusing on professional learning would, therefore, not only be inter-professional but in a sense ‘de-professional’. It would address matters of professional interest as issues of public concern. In doing so it would turn professional knowledge inside-out: rendering it transparent and, in the best traditions of educational research, relevant to policy-makers, practitioners, families, young people, parents and other ‘users’.
V. Conclusion
The problem of how the university positions itself with regard to the overall provision of initial teacher education is not just a matter of locus. It is also, crucially, a matter of underlying purposes: how might the university recognise and connect with the aims and aspirations (the telos) of the university-based initial teacher educator? In addressing that question, the ground shifts from the technical to the ethical, from the rationalist to the deliberative. In our view, one cannot talk locus without also talking telos (see Nixon, 1997, 2000; Nixon & Ranson, 1997). Both institutional positioning and professional purposefulness are the key themes in any attempt to address, at the institutional level, the need for a an emergent professionalism among initial teacher educators. In this article we have tried to highlight these themes through a carefully considered, reflexive view of our own ‘claims’ to professional credibility; ‘claims’ that inevitably have implications for other professional and social groups and for different communities of ‘users’. Initial teacher education must, in our view, reconstruct itself within a more professionally inclusive and collaborative paradigm, if it is to carry forward its own distinctive practices, traditions and purposes.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to our colleagues who participated as interviewees and discussants in this project. Thanks also to the two anonymous referees whose comments on an earlier draft were encouraging and helpful.
Correspondence
Jon Nixon, School of Education, University of Sheffield, 388 Glossop Road, Sheffield S10 2JA, United Kingdom ([email protected]).
Notes
[1] The eight colleagues interviewed were experienced university-based teacher educators who had been involved in initial teacher education prior to the ‘watershed’ educational policy developments of the late 1980s and early 1990s and who were now working on an undergraduate, concurrent programme of initial teacher education within a Scottish
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university founded in the aftermath of the Robbins Report. They represent a generation of teacher educators whose professional experience spans the 35 years between the Robbins Report of 1963 and the Dearing Report (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997). Interviews were conducted by the lead author (Jon Nixon), who is also responsible for the analysis developed in this particular article. (Other papers based on related data sets are in preparation.)
[2] The eight interviewees are numbered 1–8 for the purposes of anonymity. In quoting from the interview data we specify the interviewee with reference to this numerical code.
[3] See Nussbaum (1997) for a liberal defense of what she sees as the Socratic and Stoic roots of the ‘new’ learning as practiced and developed in American universities.
[4] The following points do not draw directly on the evidence gathered in the course of the study, but carry forward the more general contextual analysis developed in Section II above. Indeed, the points address certain deficiencies (as we see them) in the professional construction of the university-based initial teacher educator as reflected in the previous section (Section III above). Pointing to an imagined professional community, rather than one which is fully or even partially realised, they constitute the beginnings of what Werbner & Yuval-Davis (1999, p. 3) in the context of a very different argument have termed ‘a political imaginary’.
[5] For accounts of shared learning initiatives among health and social care professionals, see: Barr (1994); Arescog (1995); Carpenter & Hewstone (1996); Stew (2000).
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