Teacher Education and Pedagogy: Theory, Policy and Practice (Cambridge Teacher Series)

The Cambridge Teacher series Michael Evans This book is part of The Cambridge Teacher series, edited by senior colleagues at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, which has a longstanding tradition of involvement in high-quality, innovative teacher education and continuing professional development.

Initial teacher education continues to elicit strong views and contested prescriptions, with judgements increasingly made on the basis of international comparisons. Against this background of educational debate and polemic, there is a need for insights gained from research-based, qualitative accounts of the processes and practice taking place in high-performing institutions and contexts.

Teacher Education and Pedagogy combines critical discussion of transformative processes of teacher education policy and planning with fine-grained analysis of effective practice.

97811107626553 EVANS TEACHER EDUCATION AND PEDAGOGY C M Y K

Topics covered in this book include: • critical discussion of reform of initial teacher education in England • social capital in teacher education and the training of science teachers • co-ordination of professional development of mathematics teachers in the US

Teacher Education and Pedagogy Theory, Policy and Practice Michael Evans

Teacher Education and Pedagogy Theory, Policy and Practice

Teacher Education and Pedagogy Theory, Policy and Practice The Cambridge Teacher series

• the development of primary trainee teachers’ professional identity • the effects of perfectionism in novice teachers’ aspirations • teacher education as discursive practice in the context of cultural diversity in Israel • phenomenological analysis of mentors’ use of academic and professional literature with pre-service teachers of history.

Edited by Michael Evans

Other titles available: Teachers Learning: Professional Development and Education ISBN 978-1-107-61869-5 WORKING WITH

Teacher Education and Pedagogy Theory, policy and practice The Cambridge Teacher series

Edited by Michael Evans

WORKING WITH

c a m br i d g e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107626553 Š Cambridge University Press 2013 Th is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by Printondemand-worldwide, Peterborough A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-107-62655-3 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Notes on contributors Foreword: Peter Gronn (University of Cambridge) Editor’s Introduction: Michael Evans (University of Cambridge) Chapter 1

Analysing the fallout in teacher education: government intervention, academic drift and the higher education ‘marketplace’

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1

Jean Murray (University of East London)

Chapter 2

‘Interesting times’, or teacher education and professionalism in a ‘brave new world’

23

Norbert Pachler (Institute of Education, London University)

Chapter 3

Building social capital in teacher education through university–school partnerships

41

Elaine Wilson (University of Cambridge)

Chapter 4

Developing primary trainee teachers’ professional identity on an initial teacher education course: linking course structure, professional relationships and pedagogic understanding 60 Jane Warwick (University of Cambridge) Paul Warwick (University of Cambridge) Holly Linklater (University of Cambridge) Penny Coltman (University of Cambridge)

Chapter 5

Coordinating professional development across contexts and role groups Kara Jackson (McGill University) Paul Cobb (Vanderbilt University)

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Chapter 6

Contents

Perfection in teaching … settling for excellence

100

Helen Demetriou (University of Cambridge) Elaine Wilson (University of Cambridge) Mark Winterbottom (University of Cambridge)

Chapter 7

Teacher education as embedded in diversity: discursive connections between theory, research and practice

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Lily Orland-Barak (University of Haifa)

Chapter 8

‘The other person in the room’: a hermeneutic–phenomenological inquiry into mentors’ experience of using academic and professional literature with trainee history teachers 134 Christine Counsell (University of Cambridge)

Index

183

Notes on contributors

Paul Cobb is Professor of Mathematics Education at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. His research focuses on improving the quality of mathematics teaching and thus student learning on a large scale, and on issues of equity in students’ access to significant mathematical ideas. He received the Hans Freudenthal Medal from the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction in 2005, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Education.

Penny Coltman is an Early Years Education specialist for the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, lecturing in science, professional studies and occasionally early mathematics. She is also responsible for aspects of quality assurance on the Early Years and Primary PGCE course. Penny’s research interests include the development of self-regulation in young children and she has a particular interest in children’s ability to represent their mathematical learning through developing metalanguage. Recent research has included the ChAT project (Children Articulating Thinking), which aimed at developing and assessing the impact of pedagogical interventions designed to encourage Year 1 children’s metacognition, self-regulation and exploratory forms of dialogue while participating in peer- and teacher-led activities. Penny acts as the Eastern Regional Network Co-ordinator of the Cambridge Primary Review.

Christine Counsell is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She leads the Postgraduate Certificate of Education programme for trainee secondary history teachers. Her research interests include the relationship between knowledge and concepts in history teacher practice, the development of pupils’ writing in history and the changing role of school-based mentors in initial teacher education. She has published widely in history education and edits the journal Teaching History. She works internationally in supporting curricular and pedagogic development in history education in many countries.

Helen Demetriou obtained her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, in 1998. Currently, she is Research Associate at the Faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge and teaches on undergraduate, masters and doctoral courses. Helen’s research has included: Sustaining pupils’ v

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progress at year 3 (for Ofsted); Boys’ performance in modern foreign languages (for QCA); Friendships and performance at transfer and transition (for DFES); Consulting pupils about teaching and learning (ESRC-funded project); How young children talk about fairness; and How pupils deal with incidents of unfairness. Helen is currently working with Elaine Wilson on a Gatsby-funded project: ‘Supporting opportunities for new teachers’ professional growth’.

Michael Evans is Reader in Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. As Deputy Head of Faculty, he has had oversight of developments in the initial teacher education programmes. His research includes co-directing a national study of the impact of UK government policy on languages provision and practice at KS3 in schools in England (2009). He has published a number of papers and books in the field of foreign-language education. He is currently compiling a four-volume collection of published research papers on Second Language Education in the Routledge Major Themes in Education series.

Kara Jackson is an Assistant Professor in Mathematics Education at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. Her research focuses on specifying forms of practice that support all learners to participate in rigorous mathematics, particularly youth who have been historically under-served in classrooms, and how to reorganize schooling contexts to support teachers to develop such forms of practice.

Holly Linklater obtained her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Aberdeen.

She divides her time between teaching Year 4 in a primary school and lecturing for the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, particularly on the Early Years and Primary PGCE and M.Ed. in Researching Practice. Holly is always an autoethnographer. Her research focuses on developing ways to articulate more fully the complexity of pedagogy, or the ‘craft’ of teaching. She is also deeply committed to writing and teaching about the importance of inclusive education – how schools can and must work in ways that recognize the full humanity of all children, and enhance their experiences as learners.

Jean Murray is Professor of Education and the Research and Knowledge Exchange Leader in the Cass School of Education and Communities at the University of East London. She has worked in university-based teacher education for more than twenty years. Her research includes sociological and historical analyses of teacher education policies and practices. Jean has a particular interest in research-capacity building in teacher education and has led a number of national projects in this area, including establishing the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN) for the ESRC.

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Lily Orland-Barak is Professor in Education and Dean of the Faculty of Education, University of Haifa. Her research focuses on professional learning, mentoring and curriculum development in the context of teacher education. She has published numerous articles on these topics, and serves on national and international academic committees and editorial boards. Her recent book Learning to mentor-as-praxis:vww foundations for a curriculum in teacher education (2010, published by Springer), was awarded the Division K 2012 Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education Award at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Vancouver.

Norbert Pachler is Professor of Education and Director of International Teacher Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. Over the last ten years or so he has worked for the Deanery at the Institute, inter alia as Acting Dean for Initial and Continuing Professional Development. Between 2005 and 2010 Norbert was Co-director of the Centre for Excellence in Work-Based Learning for Education Professionals (www.wlecentre.ac.uk). Through this WLE work he fostered technology-enhanced approaches in work-based learning by facilitating innovation and developing new concepts and theoretical thinking. In 2007 he founded the international, interdisciplinary London Mobile Learning Group (www.londonmobilelearning. net), which he convenes. The group comprises researchers in the fields of cultural and media studies, sociology (social) semiotics, pedagogy, educational technology, workbased learning and learning design. His research interests include the application of new technologies in teaching and learning, teacher education and development, and all aspects of foreign language teaching and learning.

Jane Warwick is the Early Years and Primary PGCE Course Manager at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. In this role she coordinates all aspects of the taught Faculty course and school-based elements of the course and currently teaches Professional Studies and Physical Education. She is particularly interested in developing partnerships with local schools. Her research interests include teachers’ professional development, specifically in the area of mentoring, and she co-ordinates the Experienced Mentors course. Recent research has included how to support male trainees on an Early Years and Primary PGCE course as a minority group and teachers’ development on the ChAT project, a Faculty-based research project exploring the development of children’s metacognition through dialogue.

Paul Warwick is engaged in a range of research and teaching activities in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge that link directly with his interests in primary science education, the uses of ICT in teaching and learning, and the professional development of trainee and beginning teachers. Paul is a member of the Early Years and Primary Masters PGCE team, for which he also acts as Chair of Examiners

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for assignments. He is a member of the editorial board of Reflective Teaching, led by Professor Andrew Pollard, and is the external examiner for Primary PGCE at York St John University.

Elaine Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. As Secondary PGCE Course Manager and Science M.Ed. Route Coordinator, she has extensive experience of working with new and recently qualified teachers. Her recent research was funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and focused on the learning and lives of new teachers. She has published a number of papers in the field and has just edited the second edition of School based research: a guide for education students, published by SAGE. Mark Winterbottom is a Lecturer in Education at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. He teaches on the Secondary PGCE and Masters in Education courses, and undertakes continuing professional development courses, both in the UK and internationally. His research interests include aspects of science education, teacher education, classroom environment, and use of new technologies in education. He currently runs an EU-funded project in inquiry-based Science education. Mark has contributed to a number of books for teachers, and has authored several textbooks for use in schools.

Foreword

When, in early 1970, as a young, newly minted trainee teacher from the University of Melbourne, I commenced my first teaching appointment in a regional technical college in the state of Victoria, I was in a minority among my teacher peers. This is because I was a graduate – indeed, not only was I a graduate but, like a number of trainees who had been part of my immediate friendship circle during our preceding Diploma of Education (or PGCEequivalent) year, I was an honours graduate. What this meant was that we had completed a four-year, rather than the standard three-year (or pass), degree. The reason why this information bears recounting is not because in any sense it confers bragging rights, but because of the insights it provides into the state and status of the teaching profession at that time. There are three points in particular.

First, school teaching at the start of the 1970s was far from being a graduate profession. In Victoria, for example, most primary teachers were certificated because there were no specialist degree programmes for them. If a teacher happened to be a graduate then she or he was almost certainly a secondary teacher, although even here it was not unusual to find an abbreviation like ‘Univ. Subs.’ appearing next to the names of staff members listed in the annual magazines of schools. These words usually signalled the partial completion of a university degree. Second, there was a gross shortage of teachers generally, not merely fully qualified ones. The causes boiled down to a combination of a booming economy and a buoyant labour market, coupled with a prolonged demand for teachers arising out of a rapid and extensive post-war expansion of state secondary education. Both of these factors were exacerbated by escalating population growth as a result of a domestic ‘baby boom’, as it was known, and a massive influx of post-war European immigrants, all of which imposed huge enrolment demands on the school system. State officials struggled to cope with such pressures. This set of factors bestowed added significance on ‘Univ. Subs.’, because these words were a measure of ix

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the desperation of the employing authority (the state Education Department) to be able to staff schools. (In cases of extreme staff shortages, a joke among teachers at the time was that, provided a person could stand on two legs and remain vertical for up to six or seven hours a day, then the Department would be more than likely to offer her or him employment.) Third, most of us young graduates had been recruited into teaching as a result of the receipt of teaching bursaries. These were known as studentships. A generous scheme had been introduced by the state government in the early 1950s and, until it was eventually phased out two decades or so later, its provisions covered the cost of four (or in my case, five) years of university tuition fees. Depending on the level of one’s parents’ income, it also provided a modest weekly living allowance. In return for the state of Victoria’s largesse, each of us trainees signed an agreement to teach for at least three years following graduation and training. This teaching bursary set-up was truly remarkable, and one of its unintended consequences was to create a social-mobility conveyer belt for thousands of the offspring of middle, lower middle and working class families who benefited from a tertiary education that otherwise would have been beyond the financial reach of their parents.

Fast-forward about four decades and what do we find? For the most part, in the UK, Australia and beyond (although by no means universally across the globe), school teaching, in the primary and secondary sectors, has become a graduate profession. What this means is that preparation for training and for subsequent employment is available solely to university graduates. A number of factors have made this possible, but achievement of graduate status has been facilitated especially by the recent incorporation of what were previously stand-alone teacher training colleges into university faculties of education. Being qualified for a ‘graduate profession’, however, does not necessarily provide university graduates with guaranteed employment as teachers. This is because one can attain graduate status, and yet not be admitted to a training year (there may be insufficient funded places or one may not meet the selection criteria) and, even if admitted, one might not necessarily secure employment on the completion of training (the supply of vacant posts in a teaching subject may exceed demand). If, then, the battle to achieve a graduate profession has largely been won – ‘battle’, because, as I recall, one of the key planks in the professional action campaign of a teacher union in Victoria in the early 1970s was for ‘control of entry’ – what are the issues that are of current concern to the teaching profession?

Overwhelmingly, among OECD member and partner countries, the focus of interest is on aspects of teacher quality: the recruitment, first, not merely

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of graduates, but of high-quality graduates; second, the ongoing professional development of such top-flight teachers; and, finally, the retention of as many as possible of them in the interests of system sustainability. Indeed, the OECD published a landmark report in 2005, Teaching Matters, which outlined in detail (and legitimated) this agenda. Thus, in England, in The Importance of Teaching (the Schools White Paper), there is the following passage (p. 9, para. 7): All the evidence from different education systems around the world shows that the most important factor in determining how well children do is the quality of teachers and teaching. The best education systems in the world draw their teachers from among the top graduates and train them rigorously and effectively, focusing on classroom practice. They then make sure that teachers receive effective professional development throughout their career[s], with opportunities to observe and work with other teachers, and appropriate training for leadership positions.

However, if in fact there is broad agreement that these aspects (attraction and recruitment, selection and certification, development and retention) constitute the key ends of policy, does that mean that the ‘policy wars’ in education have reduced themselves to straightforward arguments about means, rather than ends? Are they about the respective merits of HEI-based and schoolbased training provision (or combinations of both through university–school partnership agreements), about the merits of various incarnations of graduate teaching programmes, about whether the profession is better served by the provision of undergraduate education degrees (an innovation of the 1970s and 1980s) or by the traditional model of training (at least for secondary teaching) of 3+1 HEI provision?

The answer, not surprisingly, has to be no, which is to say that despite the advancements made in teaching between then (1970s) and now, some of the key questions that required answers earlier on still demand them in 2012. Such questions are left begging by the resort to such words as ‘profession’ and ‘professional’. In respect of teaching, then: Who counts as the profession? Who speaks on its behalf? And, what does it mean to be a professional? The answer to the first question is not self-evident: lots of people teach, not simply teachers. To take an illustrative example, when the founders of the Australian College of Education gathered in the late 1950s to create a college, they wrestled with who to include and who to exclude, and they ended up inviting to the foundation seminar not merely teachers and heads of schools (from state and independent sector schools), but also university professors (including those in disciplines other than education) and officials

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from the various state jurisdictions. The answer to the question about professional voice and who should speak for teachers and teaching is also not clear-cut. At the time of writing, the idea of a college of teachers in England is gathering some momentum (in the press and in a House of Commons Select Committee report) and yet much of the tone and content of documents that have emanated from Whitehall (both from the current and previous HMGs) suggest that politicians, ministers and secretaries of state are presuming to speak on behalf of the teaching profession. Would they dare to adopt a similar stance in respect of the legal or medical professions? And, if the answer is no, then what does the fact that they do so in respect of teaching tell us about the teaching profession?

As for the question of what it means to be a professional, when many years ago the American sociologist Amitai Etzioni wrote about the ‘semi-professions’, he argued that some occupations (including teaching) exemplified semiprofessionalism at best. That is, such was their standing that they could not hope to attain the status and prestige of the likes of medicine and law. The point which Etzioni was making was that, in the end, full professional status is anchored in a claim to the possession of distinctive and complex knowledge.

While the claim to professional status may be dismissed as peripheral to the central concerns of colleagues in teaching and teacher education – because our overriding interest is in improvements in pedagogy, teaching and learning, curriculum and assessment – Etzioni’s point about knowledge is absolutely central to this interest. What, for example, are the grounds on which our claims to know best as educators and as teacher educators rest? What, if teachers are to be highly accomplished teachers who are able to improve student learning, do they need to know and to be able to do? In short, is there such a thing as a distinctive knowledge base (or bases) for teaching and, if there is, what does it comprise? To what extent is teaching knowledge and teacher education knowledge, as Linda Darling-Hammond (among others) has asked recently, grounded in something that might be thought of as the wisdom or craft of practice or in something much less elusively defined and more systematically ordered?

Some questions to ponder, then, include: • What counts as teacher knowledge, and teacher education knowledge?

• What is the justification for these knowledge claims?

• Who decides what counts as warranted pedagogical content knowledge and subject content knowledge?

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• If the answer is ‘the profession’, who or what is the profession in teaching?

And who is it that speaks for or on behalf of the profession? Are we talking about one professional voice or a number of voices?

• What, next, is professionalism? Whose territory is this and who is authorized to make pronouncements about it?

• What about de-professionalization (or even the proletarianization of teaching), which is an accusation levelled by critics over the last couple of decades at the effects of policies of governments of all persuasions? Is there any substance to this claim?

• And finally, who decides on or determines what ‘quality’ means in education and learning? If it is teachers and teacher educators, based on a warranted claim to know, then how is it that governments see themselves as being in the business of determining quality? If governments have a role to play in these areas of professional knowledge and practice, and quality teaching and learning, what is that role?

I have dwelt in this preface on these aspects of teacher professionalism, because they are implicit or partially explicit in so much that is currently said, written and done in the subject area of this book. What is clear is that, just as in 1970, there is much unfinished business to be attended to in teacher education and pedagogy.

Peter Gronn Professor of Education Head of Faculty University of Cambridge

Introduction Michael Evans

In April 2012, the House of Commons Select Committee in the UK published its final report following a wide-ranging inquiry into the government’s reforms of teacher education in this country. A salient and, for many, welcome conclusion reached by the Committee was its endorsement of the importance of university–school collaboration in this enterprise: ‘We are left in little doubt that partnership between schools and universities is likely to provide the highest-quality initial teacher education’ (House of Commons, 2012).

Despite the volumes that have been written on teacher education policy and practice in the UK and abroad, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners continue to wrestle with issues and understandings of what constitutes effective practice and the role of partnerships in this process. As part of this debate and the search for a collective vision of teacher education, the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge held an international symposium on 24–5 March 2011 entitled: ‘Cambridge symposium on pedagogy and teacher education: formulating an agenda for the future’. The chapters in this book have their origin in papers given at that symposium.

Research, theory, policy and practice are key themes and perspectives that structure the discussions and arguments represented in the chapters in this book. Different chapters focus on different combinations of these perspectives with different areas of emphasis, but the reader will find, I hope, a logic and value in the sequencing of contributions, as indicated in my summary in this introduction. Beyond the three groupings that I indicate below, the book as a whole aims to provide a broad theoretical and policy-related canvas against which a more fine-grained depiction of aspects of teacher education practice are analysed.

In the opening chapter of this book, Jean Murray presents an overview of the current context of teacher education in England that provides a fitting critical backcloth to the themes and issues that constitute the focus of the subsequent chapters. Murray provides a clear and, at times, sombre account of the development of university involvement in initial teacher education.

The analysis of the ‘fallout in teacher education’ is partly based on a historical xv

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account of government intervention in this area in England and partly on the identification of four key factors which Murray sees as defining the parameters of this context: the concentration of the majority of HEI-based training in new universities in England (many of which currently experience financial pressures in an under-resourced research environment); neo-liberal educational policies that promote an instrumental approach to teacher education driven by increased bureaucratization and regulation; the current governmental drive to increase school-centred provision at the expense of university-based pre-service training; and the adverse, diversifying effects of university research audits leading to reduction of research funding. An important theme here, which is of universal relevance beyond the English context, is the relationship between research and teacher education. Murray points out that the dilemma of the university teacher education community in England is that, in the absence of research-informed information on teacher education, universities’ confidence in influencing reform is diminished.

In his discussion of the ‘interesting times’ of current teacher education reform in England, Norbert Pachler focuses his attention on the Education Act 2011 and in particular on a review of critical responses to the White Paper and the McKinsey report which was used as an evidence base for the policy formulation. The chapter summarizes key constructs that have been applied in these critiques such as ‘the commodification of education’ and Ball’s notion of the ‘policy technologies’ of managerialism and performativity that are seen to motivate current policy-making in teacher education.

Pachler questions the extent to which the explicit aim of the policy reform to tackle the relationship between social background and educational performance is based on intuitive assumptions on the part of policy-makers rather than on a ‘solid evidence base’.

The next two chapters in this group of papers approach the policy–practice relationship from the perspective of different strands of the pre-service teacher education programme at Cambridge. In her discussion of how university–school partnerships can build ‘social capital’ in teacher education, Elaine Wilson argues that the networking interactions of such partnerships can lead to the creation of a sense of community and shared values between different participants in the process. The author uses social network analysis to outline how the collaboration of university and school-based trainers working with secondary science trainees on the Cambridge course has contributed to an integrated and convergent practice. In ‘Developing primary trainee teachers’ professional identity’ Warwick et al. approach the partnership model of teacher education from the perspective of the development of

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professional identity. The authors borrow the notion of ‘significant narrator’ (in the form of professionals in schools, university and other settings) to locate and define agency in the construction of professional identity.

The second group of chapters focuses more sharply on the relationship between research, professional development and practice, albeit from very different perspectives. In ‘Coordinating professional development across contexts and role groups’, Kara Jackson and Paul Cobb report on an ongoing research project partnered with four large urban districts in the USA that aims to design effective professional development paradigms for teachers of middle grades mathematics. The authors used findings from a preliminary research project to develop an ‘empirically grounded theory of action’ consisting of five interrelated components: coherent system of support; pull-out teacher professional development meetings; job-embedded support for teacher learning; school leadership in mathematics; and the development of schools’ capacity for instructional improvement. The paper emphasizes the importance of coordination of professional development across contexts and across role groups, as well as that of the centrality of developmental work around ‘high-leverage’ practices, defined as commonly occurring classroom practices that when orchestrated effectively by the teacher lead to enhancement of student learning. In ‘Perfection in teaching’ Demetriou et al. approach the issue of teacher development from a psychological and behavioural angle and draw on the theoretical literature on perfectionism which, broadly, identifies positive and negative manifestations of perfectionism, seen, respectively, as ‘strivings’ or ‘concerns’. The authors apply the construct to their analysis of the expressions of teaching-related self-efficacy of a cohort of trainee teachers of science at Cambridge. The data set consists of survey and blog postings produced by the trainees during completion of the pre-service course. While ultimately questioning the appropriateness of the term ‘perfectionism’ per se, the authors conclude that ‘negative perfectionism’ leads to performance dissatisfaction accompanied by low mood, while ‘positive perfectionism’ can trigger striving for effective organization and self-improvement.

The final two chapters reflect a parallel concern with theoretical framings of the work of mentors in supporting trainees during pre-service training, explicitly presented within the framework of a theory–research–practice connection. Both authors apply specific, though different, theoretical perspectives as analytical tools for examining discursive interaction between trainees and their mentors. In ‘Teacher education as embedded in diversity’, Lily OrlandBarak adopts social activity theory and critical discourse analysis to examine and interpret the missing ‘cultural lens’ in teacher education in Israel.

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The author illustrates the critical approach through a multi-layered analysis of the discourse of Druze student teachers and their mentors and teacher educators in the field of Arts education at the University of Haifa. In ‘The other person in the room’ Christine Counsell uses Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ to analyse the phenomenon of mentoring practice in the context of dialogue between Cambridge University trainee history teachers and their school-based subject mentors. The chapter provides an extended examination of the use of professional and academic literature in mentor–trainee interaction in relation to the trainees’ experience of classroom teaching during professional placement. Counsell’s rich, analytical account of the examples of mentor–trainee dialogues provides us with a deep insight into the use of literature as a medium for developing trainee pedagogical thinking for which the ultimate goal is the ‘cultivation of disciplinary thinking in pupils’.

I would like to thank all the contributors and reviewers of the chapters for their invaluable work in the production of this volume as well as the editorial staff at Cambridge University Press for their support in the final stages of production. Finally, I would like to thank Mike Younger who, as former Head of Faculty, initiated the idea of the Cambridge symposium, and it is to him that this book is dedicated.

REFERENCE House of Commons Select Committee (2012). Great teachers: attracting, training and retaining the best. London: The Stationery Office Limited.

1

Analysing the fallout in teacher education: government intervention, academic drift and the higher education ‘marketplace’ Jean Murray, University of East London There are both threats and opportunities for the School in the current scenario …

Above all, we must ensure that we maintain our place in this fast developing marketplace for teacher education.

Extract from internal memorandum from Head of School, university Y

Is teacher education still a cost-effective investment for this university, particularly given its current faltering intellectual status?

Note of remark made by an anonymous academic in a School of Education strategy meeting at university X

These two quotations date from a time in late 2010 when the then new Coalition government’s radical agenda for ‘reforming’ teacher education was becoming clear. Both quotes were posted anonymously in an online discussion forum for teacher educators concerned about current policy proposals; both show individuals in university Schools (or Departments) of Education responding to the developing policy agenda by posing questions about institutional positioning in relation to teacher education. In the first quotation the imperative of maintaining the School’s current ‘market-share’ in teacher education provision – seemingly at any cost – is stressed. In the second, the continuing viability of teacher education within the School is clearly questioned, on grounds of cost-effectiveness but also because of questions around the intellectual status of such work.

These individuals and their Schools of Education are not alone in discussing such issues of the survival and health of teacher education. Current government policy for teacher education, combined with the national climate of economic austerity, the ongoing ‘marketization’ of universities, the effects of the Browne Review on Higher Education (HE) and a significant decline in research funding, create a ‘perfect storm’ for teacher education and the wider discipline of education itself. As a recent report from two of teacher education’s most powerful interest groups, the University Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET) and the British Educational Research 1

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Association (BERA), shows, the future of many Schools may be at risk (BERA and UCET, 2012).

This chapter takes these quotes as the starting points to explore some of the many and complex underlying factors which have led teacher education to this state of affairs. The chapter opens with an overview of the current contexts for teacher education within universities, including some of the government reforms to which pre-service education has been subjected in the interests of serving a school sector increasingly dominated by instrumental constructions of teaching and learning. Reflecting the ‘turn to the practical’1 (Furlong and Lawn, 2010, p. 6) which these reforms epitomize, there has been much analysis of changing government policies and their effects upon institutions, curricula and practices (see, inter alia, Furlong, 2007; Furlong et al., 2000; Menter, Hulme and Murray 2010). The aim here is not to re-analyse this recent history of government intervention in a beleaguered sector at any length, but rather to provide relevant contextual information.

This recent history, stretching back to 1984, is sometimes portrayed as the root cause of many current problems in teacher education. Research on teacher education in England has been accused of ahistoricism (McCulloch, 2011), of failing to bring knowledge accrued from the study of the past to bear on understanding the present and anticipating the future. Addressing such critiques, part of this chapter aims to take a longer view of the field, going further back in time to analyse more enduring factors from the history of teacher education. This is on the assumption that the past lives on in the present, leaving significant historical resonances in the field as a whole, sedimented into its institutional structures, principles and practices and surviving as collective and individual memories of ‘what once was’ (Kirk, 1986).

Much analysis within the chapter centres on the issue of research in and on teacher education. Being able to provide research-informed teacher education within the research-rich environments of universities is a shibboleth for many Schools of Education. Most university-led pre-service programmes would therefore claim to combine perspectives from educational research with the imperatives of providing pre-service programmes which are ‘demanding, relevant, and practical’ (Furlong et al., 2000, p. 144). In this chapter research-informed teaching conducted in research-rich environments is seen as central to high-quality teacher education.

Teacher education research is ‘nested inside of, but also braided with, larger developments in … education research generally’ (Cochran-Smith and Demers, 2008, p. 1009); in other words such research is a sub-field within the broad field of educational research.2 Teacher education research is a ‘young’

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Analysing the fallout

field of research, which has been the subject of much critique (Menter et al., 2010). Because many teacher educators are also its researchers, research on teacher education is therefore also research in teacher education (Murray et al., 2009). Whilst research-informed modes of teacher education are clearly influenced by many forms of educational research, this chapter takes the view that teacher education research, as the knowledge base which informs and develops practice in the field, is particularly important. Ensuring its health is therefore central in ensuring that high-quality teaching is informed by research and taught by research-active teacher educators. Further factors about research for teacher education are discussed in later sections of the chapter.

Perceptions of the low academic status of teacher education are often traced back to its origins, as a later section of this chapter discusses. Less well known is that the early history of teacher education, including the early development of the training colleges outside the mainstream of Higher Education (HE) and the later ‘academic drift’ (Pratt, 1997) of the college sector, has also left significant structural legacies for teacher education, not least in the ways that the field is currently instantiated in the university sector.

Pratt’s term ‘academic drift’ is deliberately used here rather than other alternatives, for example, ‘universitization’ (Menter, Brisard and Smith, 2006).

The word ‘drift’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (1990) as ‘a slow movement or variation … caused by a slow current’; the word has connotations, then, of both direction and leisureliness which capture something of the history of teacher education’s evolution. But a drift is usually propelled by a clear initiating movement – a push perhaps – into the slow current. In the case of teacher education’s academic drift into the university sector, the Robbins Report on Higher Education (1963) may be seen as providing that initial impetus, as the analysis below shows.

As this chapter will argue, the institutional outcomes of that academic drift have had particular consequences for research activity in and on teacher education. Here emphasis is placed on the adverse effects which the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s (HEFCE) policies for the allocation of core research funding for education have had on teacher education, hampering the development of research infrastructures in many universities, limiting the development of a research base, and providing little assistance in struggles to create and implement research-informed modes of teacher education.

Some contextual information on the field of teacher education is necessary at this point. Despite the diversification of teacher education routes in England, at the time of writing the majority of pre-service teacher education students are still based in the HE sector.3 The HE institutions currently providing

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programmes for those students are diverse, ranging from long-established, research-intensive universities, which ride high in international research league tables, to the newly established teaching-intensive universities. Central to understanding the field of teacher education is the fact that most HE-based pre-service programmes operate from Schools of Education in new universities.4 These institutions educate the majority of students (70–72 per cent between 2008 and 2010) for both primary and secondary teaching. They have particularly high numbers in primary teacher education, where students are predominantly female and where much pre-service work still takes place at undergraduate level. Of the approximately 30 per cent of students studying in old universities, the majority are intending secondary school teachers on oneyear postgraduate programmes. Although provision within old universities is small, much of it has been judged to be of high quality,5 and there is certainly symbolic importance in the continuing investment of these universities, particularly the Russell Group ‘élite’, in teacher education.

Current scenarios and recent histories Some factors underlying the opening quotations of this chapter will immediately be apparent to readers familiar with recent teacher education policy in England and with the HE sector. First, the sector globally has experienced radical change in the last two decades, driven in large part by neo-liberal policies for its reform and the need for universities to compete in both national and international markets (Barnett, 2000; Morley, 2003). Schools of Education, like other disciplinary groupings, now compete for internal and external funding to ensure their continuing economic viability. In teacher education the main market is the government-funded programmes for pre- and in-service education, an increasingly competitive forum in which the Training and Development Agency (now the Teaching Agency) dictates and allocates student numbers to providers of programmes. Such government funding underpins – to varying degrees – the financial health of many Schools of Education (BERA and UCET, 2012). Schools in old, research-intensive universities are more likely to have diversified income streams, with additional funding coming, for example, from national and international students on Masters or doctoral programmes. These Schools have different positions in the marketplace of teacher education, since less dependence on government funding means more autonomy and, possibly, more choice around future

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actions. Nevertheless, a threat to income derived from pre-service funding has major implications for the economic viability of many Schools and for the maintenance of their entire range of activities including postgraduate degrees and educational research.

The second factor is that, like schooling and HE, teacher education has been changed beyond recognition by over two decades of neo-liberal educational experimentation. The effects of these regimes have included the construction of teaching and learning as instrumental, with educational endeavours in many areas driven by high-stakes testing regimes and performativity and audit cultures, dominated by the overarching threats of Ofsted inspections. Pre-service education, in particular, has been viewed by governments of varied political hues as a lever for achieving educational change in the school sector. Consequently, wave on wave of ‘reform’ has hit the sector since 1984, gradually ratcheting up the importance placed on classroom ‘competence’, as a narrowly conceived form of professional knowledge and teacher professionality (Hoyle, 1975). Since 1992 universities in England have – by law – had to run their programmes in partnerships with schools.

The curricula, pedagogy and assessment of those programmes, as well as the recruitment criteria for teacher educators, all emphasize the importance of the ‘discourse of relevance’ (Maguire and Weiner, 1994) in teacher education, centring on experiential and contemporary knowledge of school teaching in the field. As indicated above, many universities struggle to combine these closely specified forms of training with the provision of research-informed teacher education.

The bureaucratization and increased regulation of teacher education since the mid-1990s mean that programmes are conducted in a ‘national framework of accountability’ (Furlong et al., 2000, p. 15) and a ‘culture of compliance’ (Menter et al., 2006, p. 50). In general, universities have proved to be good at complying with the regulatory devices of teacher education. Ofsted, the regulatory body which inspects pre-service programmes, stated in its 2010 report (Ofsted, 2010) that 47 per cent of HEI partnership provision had been judged to be ‘outstanding’, whilst a total of 94 per cent was ‘good or better’. Such results have led to celebrations by universities, government agencies and other stakeholders, triumphantly identifying institutional successes and, nationally, proclaiming the production of ‘the best trained teachers ever’. In contrast, some commentators (see, inter alia, Lawes, 2011; Menter et al., 2006) have critiqued the overtly instrumental approaches to pre-service education adopted to ensure compliance.6

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The third factor is that, as has already been indicated, this chapter is written at a time when pre-service teacher education is undergoing yet another series of reforms’, this time by the Coalition government which came to power in spring 2010. One of the current emphases is, in the words of Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education (2012), to ‘reform teacher training to shift trainee teachers out of college [sic] and into the classroom’. In terms of funding, the aim is to ‘shift resources so that more heads can train teachers in their own schools’ (Gove, 2010, p. 6). These are intentions now being translated into action through the School Direct route and the development of other employment-based schemes for pre-service teacher education (DFE, 2011). In Gove’s formulations teaching is positioned as a craft with an essentially practical knowledge base, best learned in the arena of practice ‘as an apprentice observing a master craftsman or woman’ and through observations ‘acquiring mastery in the classroom’ (Gove, 2010). Such positioning of the profession and the knowledge base to be acquired by intending teachers provides the rationale for school-based or school-focused training. Needless to say, these proposals were greeted with alarm by many stakeholders, including Universities UK, UCET, Schools of Education and individuals working in teacher education (see SCETT, 2011).

After the stark policy pronouncements of 2010, Schools of Education took some comfort in 2011 from the apparent softening of government thinking around the pace and scale of these reforms. The UCET Report for 2011, for example, states that policy documents in that year have ‘confirmed that universities will continue to play a central role in teacher education’ (UCET, 2012, p. 3). But there are still fears that many Schools of Education will be destabilized in the long term (BERA and UCET, 2012; UCET 2012). And in the short term, HE-based teacher education remains under attack from a variety of directions. For example, the undoubted successes in university compliance outlined above are now being seen in a sceptical light or swept aside altogether. Smithers and Robinson (2011, p. i), commenting on the fastincreasing number of universities rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, state that ‘it seems unlikely that this explosion could all be due to real improvement’, although they cite no evidence for their scepticism. Further indications of policymakers’ attitudes to evidence of the quality of HE-based training as provided in Ofsted databases can be seen in the timing of the publication of the Schools White Paper (DFE, 2010). This document outlined plans for the shift away from the supposedly proven quality of university-based programmes and towards less highly rated school-based schemes and came out very shortly after the publication of the Ofsted results in 2010. For ideological rather than

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evidence-based reasons, future government policy seems, then, unlikely to maintain the current dominance of HE-based provision (Whitehead, 2010).

The fourth factor is that global and national pressures for excellence in HE, alongside drives for higher levels of student participation, have led to an expanded and seemingly more diverse university sector in England (Barnett, 2000). But the sector is also highly differentiated, with each institution occupying relative positions of dominance, subordination and equality in an essentially hierarchical system. These positions relate not only to the current forms of the institutions, but also to their histories, through the institutional sedimentation they have accrued. And, while in many ways the HE system may have become diversified, global quests for excellence have provided further reinforcement for many of the traditional differentials around institutional status. This is in part because rankings in national and international league tables are now powerful factors influencing universities’ aspirations and missions and student choices in the marketplace of HE. The research excellence and productivity of each institution are key parts of the methodology used to draw up such league tables. This has led institutions to place increasing significance on research activity and quality (Stromquist, 2002), particularly in countries where research audits occur regularly.

In Schools of Education in the UK, quinquennial research audits have become, according to Gilroy and McNamara (2009, p. 322), ‘a key feature of university life in the last twenty years or so’. The various audits conducted since 1992 have been interpreted as bringing varying consequences for education research in general (Gilroy and McNamara, 2009; Oancea, 2010). But for teacher education, in particular, they have clearly had adverse effects, being detrimental to enhancing the quality of research in the sub-field and teacher educator participation in research (Gilroy and McNamara, 2009; Murray et al., 2009). And both these factors have held back the development of research-informed models of teacher education across the sector as a whole. Many Schools of Education have additional disadvantages in that they attempt to play the ‘research game’ from positions within new universities which already face significant structural challenges around research engagement across all disciplines (Murray et al., 2012). These disadvantages and the reasons for their evolution are discussed in more detail below.

Within the broad discipline of educational research, some of the issues around teacher education research have already been identified above – notably that it is relatively underdeveloped and the subject of critiques. It is also important to note again that research on teacher education is therefore also

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research in teacher education. A more detailed analysis is provided by the Teacher Education Group (TEG) work identifying 446 teacher education research studies in the UK7 and disseminated in academic journals between 2000 and 2008. The analysis of these studies (Menter et al., 2010) found that, whilst some of the studies in its scope were high quality, others could be accused of deficits. These included: a lack of generativity (in that studies did not always build clearly on previous findings and the literature of the field); methodological limitations or flaws (including an overemphasis on ‘reflection’, rather than being underpinned by more developed research methodologies); limited theorizing; and limited contextualization in the past and present of the field. Much of the work was small-scale and qualitative, conducted as one-off, ‘bootstrap’ studies (Menter et al., 2010) by those involved in the field. The predominance of practitioner research, the paucity of largescale, longitudinal studies and the dissemination of work across forty-nine journals made meaningful collation of findings and identification of collective significance challenging, to say the least. Needless to say, these factors reduced the cumulative and developmental impact of this body of research for understanding teacher education.

In contrast to this body of research by academics, there is a great deal of evidence about pre-service teacher education in England, gathered by government agencies and audit systems. But whilst this government database, particularly when collated by researchers such as Smithers and Robinson (2011), certainly captures something of the ‘numerical landscape’ (p. 30) of teacher education, such analyses are rooted only in the policy of the moment and fail to engage with the multiplicity of variables in the sector which produced them. Furthermore, by reproducing and sanctioning what Popkewitz (1987) terms ‘the public discourses’ of the sector – for example, TDA (Trainee Development Agency for Schools) and Ofsted criteria about what counts as ‘quality’ or ‘accountability’ – such evidence serves to dull ‘sensitivity to the complexities that underlie the practices of teacher education [by] a filtering out of historical, social and political assumptions’ (Popkewitz, 1987, p. ix).

Overall then, teacher education may be characterized as a young and under-theorized field of research, with a paucity of high-quality research findings. Many of the fundamental aspects of pre- and in-service teacher education remain under-researched. And the available research has neither created a clear body of knowledge about teacher education and how teachers learn, nor established the benefits of inquiry to explore Schon’s (1987) swampy lowlands of professional practice in learning to teach.

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Taking the longer view Back to the future, forward to the past?

If the factors above underpin the current contexts for teacher education in England, what, then, does looking further back into teacher education reveal?

In 1984 William Taylor stated that teacher education was ‘Janus-faced’, looking towards the school in one direction and the university in the other. This image has been much quoted, often without analysis of the accompanying senses of difference and opposition between the two ‘faces’ which are, perhaps unwittingly, supplied. A better conceptualization of the field is perhaps offered by Alexander, Craft and Lynch (1984, p. xv), who see teacher education as ‘suspended’ between the worlds of schooling and higher education: One provides its raison d’être and the occupational imperatives to which it is bound to respond, and the other the framework within which such responses must be located, and which has its own cultural and academic imperatives.

This sense of teacher education as dualistic is in no way new, having characterized the field in England since its establishment in the HE sector well over a century ago (Dent, 1977). This dualism brought into teacher education a series of enduring bifurcations including academic/professional and theoretical/practical (Maguire, 2000), which play out in past and contemporary struggles around whether pre-service provision is education or training and whether it be should be predominantly located in schools or universities. As Lance Jones stated in 1923 in his text on the training of teachers: The part of the field which we are to examine has long been a battleground for the expert, and many questions call for discussion. What, for example, should be the purpose of professional training? – its character and duration? Where should it be given and by whom? … and is a system of apprenticeship desirable?

Jones, 1923, quoted in Gardner (1993, p. 21)

Neither the Coalition’s proposals nor the opposition which they have provoked are new, then. Indeed, as Philip Gardner’s (1993) analysis of the history of teacher education indicates, there were attacks on HEIs as remote, limited and overly theoretical in their pre-service provision in the 1890s, 1960s and the mid-1980s–mid-1990s. And warnings about the dangers and inadequacies of school-based apprenticeship models characterized the field in the 1880s, 1920s, 1970s, and again in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s. Each of these struggles should, of course, be understood within the changing social and educational contexts of their times. Within those contexts each struggle – and the

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policy changes which often accompanied it – can be read differently. This is also because as Ball (1994, p. 16) states, policies are ‘representations which are encoded in complex ways (via struggles, compromises, authoritative public interpretations and re-interpretations) and decoded in complex ways (via actors, interpretation and meanings in relation to their history, experiences, skills, resources and context)’. But the recurrence of these basic struggles in teacher education across changing times and very different social and educational contexts clearly signals enduring tensions within the field.

A number of historians of the field (see, inter alia, Aldrich, 2002; Dent, 1977; Hencke, 1978) have argued that the humble origins of teacher education in the poverty of nineteenth-century elementary schooling and the pupil-teacher apprenticeship system have left a historically pervasive sense of low academic status and marginality. This is not least because the knowledge base of teacher education was, from its origin, powerfully conceptualized as a form of craft knowledge. This was to be acquired, with relative ease, by neophytes with the approved dispositions and aptitudes (Reid, 2011), following the close guidance of experienced teachers. Although much contested over time, this limited conceptualization of teachers’ knowledge and learning processes continues to haunt teacher education policies and practices. Many commentators (see, inter alia, Aldrich 2002; Hencke, 1978) have identified the field as often needing to struggle for legitimacy and frequently being measured against ‘traditional’ academic disciplines and found wanting. And, as John Furlong has commented, despite various attempts to identify relevant theoretical and disciplinary knowledge as fundamental to learning to teach, the knowledge base of teacher education continues to be characterized by the ‘endemic uncertainty’ of professional knowledge (Furlong, 1996, p. 154).

As indicated in the introduction to this chapter, the early history of teacher education has also left a significant structural legacy, particularly in the ways in which the majority of HE-based teacher education is now located in new universities. From the pupil-teacher system the college sector emerged, set up outside the university mainstream of HE, to become the training route for intending elementary school teachers. The establishment of day-training colleges under the auspices of universities in 1890 aimed to strengthen this elementary training system and was the first point at which teacher education touched the university sector (Gardner, 1993). But, as they evolved into University Departments of Education (UDEs) in the 1920s, the day-training colleges opted out of elementary training, preferring to focus instead on one-year training for aspiring grammar (elite secondary) school teachers.

This early divorce of the college and university traditions in teacher education

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meant that by the 1930s the UDEs were established as a secondary-focused, élite and minority, albeit highly influential, part of pre-service work (Alexander, 1984; Thomas, 1990). In the UDEs, intending grammar school teachers followed one-year postgraduate courses after completing university degrees whilst in the colleges, elementary school teachers in training, most of them women, followed two-year Teacher’s Certificate courses.

Early in the twentieth century, then, the scene was set for a dual system of different routes and institutions in teacher education which reinforced many of the power differentials of class and gender instantiated in British society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Alexander (1984, p. 118) has stated, the system ‘embodied and reinforced the mutual exclusiveness of the two central traditions in British education: minority/élitist/academic and mass/elementary/utilitarian’.

Poverty – both intellectual and financial – as a consequence of isolation from the mainstream of HE continued to be the inheritance of the colleges well into the mid-1940s. As the McNair Report (1944, p. 6) commented, A trail of cheapness … dogged the elementary schools [and] has also cast its spell over the training colleges which prepare teachers for them. What is chiefly wrong with the majority of the training colleges is their poverty and all that flows from it.

For the UDEs of the same period, teacher education’s place in the university system meant that ‘poverty has not, therefore, set its mark on them’ (p. 13).

Nevertheless, the report clearly identifies that university-based teacher education faced status issues ‘partly from the poor regard in which education has in the past been held by some universities’ (p. 14). Even when located in the well-established university sector, then, Schools of Education in general – and teacher education provision in particular – could not shake off their low status and the sense of being judged and found academically inadequate; the ‘swampy lowlands of professional knowledge’ were compared to the ‘hard high grounds’ of knowledge (Schon, 1987) in more ‘traditional’ disciplines such as the sciences.

The post-war years of social austerity and the imperatives to train new teachers through emergency schemes offered limited opportunities to implement all the recommendations of the McNair Report. But the publication of the Robbins Report in 1963 triggered development of the HE sector as a whole and of teacher education in particular, starting the process of ‘academic drift’ in the colleges. In 1963 the majority of teachers for both primary and non-élite secondary schools were trained through sub-degree level work in small, low-status monotechnics; by 1993 most teachers were educated

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through under- or postgraduate courses at universities, working in partnerships with schools.

The Robbins Report (1963) recommended a massive expansion of the college system, as part of a package of reforms introducing the B.Ed. degree and aiming to increase the academic status of the teacher training institutions. The scale of this expansion was huge; nearly all the existing colleges in England expanded dramatically, and six new colleges were created (Hencke, 1978). The four foundation disciplines of education – philosophy, history and sociology and psychology – provided the theoretical underpinning of the new three-year concurrent degrees in the colleges, and came to be dominant elements of teacher education qualifications for some twenty years.

The Higher Education sector was further expanded through the establishment of the polytechnics in 1965, with pre-service located within these new diversified institutions from the late 1960s onward (Pratt, 1997). In the 1970s the college sector was dramatically reduced in size, following the White Paper of 1972; a move which wreaked havoc within the colleges (Hencke, 1978), resulting in the closure of many, and the amalgamation of others with polytechnics and large HEIs or, in a small number of cases, with universities.

Other colleges expanded and diversified. By the end of the 1970s the largest numbers of pre-service programmes were found in those diversified publicsector institutions (usually HEIs or polytechnics) and many outward traces of the old colleges of education had seemingly disappeared.

By 1992 changes in the general structure of the HE sector had acted to blur at least some of the boundaries between the established universities and the public sector institutions (Pratt, 1997). Many of these institutions, particularly the polytechnics and the largest HEIs, were now thriving institutions.

The funding and legal mechanisms of the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council (PCFC), implemented in 1989, meant that the institutions already had the corporate status and the accreditation necessary for gaining university status. In 1992 the Further and Higher Education Funding Act abolished the ‘binary line’ between public sector institutions and the old universities, creating an expanded university system. As the final movement in teacher education’s academic drift, around the year 2000 a number of university colleges of education, many with roots as denominational teacher training colleges and still heavily dependent on income from teacher education programmes, attained full university status.8 It is possible to read teacher education’s academic drift into the university sector purely as a success story which – through a combination of ‘design and drift’ – strengthened the field by taking its main locations from the

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poverty-stricken training colleges of the mid-1940s into the expanded university sector of the late twentieth century. But the nature of this drift has also left significant structural legacies for teacher education, not least that the majority of provision, particularly for primary education schooling and for women, is located in the new university sector in England. One consequence of this structural legacy is that much of teacher education now takes place in Schools of Education which are seriously underfunded in terms of core research funding from HEFCE and which therefore struggle to provide research-rich environments for their students and staff. The next section gives an overview of how this research-poverty has happened in the years since 1992.

Research in and on teacher education Historically, there was little sustained research activity, beyond practitioner action research and curriculum development, in the colleges and public sector institutions (Dent, 1977). As those institutions entered the university sector in 1992, some development funding for education was made available in the lead-up to the first national research audit in which they participated – the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) of 1992 (Gilroy and McNamara, 2009). With the benefit of this seed-corn funding, in the subsequent research assessment exercise (1996) the Schools of Education within the new universities increased the levels of their submission by 40 per cent. Bassey and Constable (1997) noted that the ‘fledgling research cultures’ these Schools had created meant that their submissions outnumbered those from Schools in old universities. The funding model used meant, however, that these new university submissions produced little research funding in real terms. This was in part because many research outputs in these submissions were given low quality-ratings. But an additional factor was that few new university Schools of Education had been able to put in place sustained policies or stable infrastructures for research-capacity building. A catch-22 situation therefore seemed to be developing in which lack of core research funding meant limited development; this in turn led to fewer opportunities to create the highquality research needed to acquire funding.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the research funding situation for the new universities – and for much of teacher education – deteriorated further with the RAE of 2001. As Gilroy and McNamara (2009, p. 327) note, the overall results for education research were ‘extremely disheartening’ and in terms of capacity building and finance ‘the impact of the RAE was quite simply

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disastrous for the sector’, not least because any capacity-building funding to strengthen research in the field was denied.

Following the readjusted funding settlements, only one new university in England (Manchester Metropolitan) received any core research funding at all. Between 2001 and 2008 the majority of universities in which teachers were being educated had no core research funding. Dadds and Kynch (2003) estimated, for example, that, as a result, 80 per cent of students in 2003 were being educated in such Schools of Education, and 50 per cent of education staff were also employed in them (Gilroy and McNamara, 2009).

This situation led to an increasing disconnect between research and teaching in many Schools.

In the 2008 RAE, education research overall was judged to be stronger than in 2001, with areas of excellence identified in many universities, including a significant number of new universities. But the results indicated that the state of health of research for teacher education was less good, as it was one area ‘less strongly represented’ than in 2001 (Furlong, 2007). In England 25 per cent of the universities providing pre-service teacher education did not enter the RAE for education at all (BERA and UCET, 2012) which may be an indicator of low levels of conventional research activity in those institutions.9 Only 40 per cent of education staff were entered into the RAE as ‘research active’, with many of those ‘missing’ from the submission working on pre- or in-service teacher education courses (Oancea, 2010).

A contributory factor to these staff figures is that Schools of Education in some new universities reproduce the effects of the discourses of relevance by re-configuring academic roles to focus primarily on teaching and management, with limited emphasis placed on individual participation in research.

Status differentials and conditions of work then mean that many teacher educators find it ‘almost impossible … to perform many of the accepted conventional roles of academia’, including sustained research engagement (Maguire, 2000, p. 163).

The original funding formula for the 2008 RAE included a commitment to funding research excellence in all universities, including the pockets or islands of such research in the new universities. But with policies for research selectivity now redefining the levels of research excellence for which core funding will be made available, funding for many new university Schools is very limited. Given the current economic climate, those funding levels look fragile in terms of their sustainability. They thus provide little secure economic capital on which further research-capacity can be achieved in the

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new universities (Gilroy and McNamara, 2009). Nevertheless, because of the market and status issues outlined above, many such Schools of Education have to attempt to play the research game, even given their limited economic, social and symbolic capital. And the catch-22 situation identified above as occurring after the 1996 RAE means that lack of core research funding continues to lead to limited research-development opportunities in new university Schools of Education. This in turn leads to fewer opportunities to create the high-quality research needed to develop research-rich environments and research-informed modes of teacher education.

This analysis has focused largely on the effects of deficits in funding for research and therefore for teacher education in the new universities. But this is not to suggest that issues around the longstanding status, and organizational issues around teacher education and its knowledge base, are less acute within Schools of Education in old universities. Because of the national economic situation, the scenario for funding of all educational research is bleak indeed (BERA and UCET, 2012). And, within teacher education, problems with generating and maintaining research-informed provision also exist in old universities, even though they often have more secure and extensive core research funding. Teacher education in these Schools may still be associated with low-status teaching and research activities, and heavy academic workloads may mean that teacher educators are still effectively excluded from traditional modes of research engagement. In some Schools a ‘dual economy’ of research and teaching operates (Gilroy and McNamara, 2009), with the former activity seen as more prestigious and privileged. Pressures for success in the research audits may mean that considerable numbers of staff are employed on teaching-only contracts with no obligation to research. All these factors may lead to an increasing disconnect between research and teacher education work in many Schools of Education across the HE sector.

Overall, the fluctuating effects of HEFCE policies for the allocation of funding for education research, and particularly increasingly selective models of funding, have had adverse effects on the teacher education institutions and on research in the area. By either design or oversight, there has been a clear lack of commitment to developing teacher education as a high-status area of HE, informed by a strong research base. With current patterns of neglect in funding left unchallenged for twenty years and in the current climate of increasingly selective and STEM-centric research funding,10 it may well be too late to alter this situation, even though it signals further bad news for the health of teacher education.

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Conclusions After outlining some clear factors underpinning the current contexts for teacher education, this chapter has analysed how the academic drift of the teacher education colleges into the university sector has resulted in most HE-based pre-service programmes taking place within the new universities.

A particular legacy of the drift has been that the Schools of Education providing the majority of pre-service places are now seriously underfunded in terms of core research funding. Together with legacies of the perceived low academic status of teacher education, lack of research funding has also been detrimental to the development of research in and on teacher education, leaving only a ‘young’ field of research. As indicated above, this means that many of the fundamental aspects of pre- and in-service teacher education in England remain under-researched. Moreover, the available research has neither created a clear body of knowledge about teacher education, nor established the benefits of enquiry to enhance professional practice in learning to teach.

The abolition of the ‘binary line’ between the established universities and the public sector institutions took place twenty years ago, but one reading of this chapter might suggest that, in all too many ways, this line still exists.

Certainly in terms of research-richness – or the lack of it – HE-based teacher education still takes place in a dual system of different institutions and routes, differences which continue to reinforce many of the power differentials and traditions in the British HE sector (see Alexander, 1984). But, as indicated above, the intention here is not to create further bifurcations between the old and the new universities in teacher education, particularly at a time when the sector needs to be cohesive. The intention is also quite definitely not to imply that the quality of teacher education programmes in new universities is automatically less good than in the old university sector. Many of England’s new universities have long traditions of excellence in vocational education, including teacher education and other areas of professional preparation.

And, as indicated above, disconnections between research and teaching exist in many Schools, affecting the provision of research-informed teacher education programmes across the field as a whole. But given the situation outlined above, it should come as no surprise to find some Schools of Education struggling to ensure their compliance to government imperatives for instrumental forms of teacher education whilst balancing research-informed modes of teacher education, taught in research-rich environments by teacher educators who are also active researchers. It is also much harder to resist the current

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instrumentalist attacks on teacher education without the confidence which such robust and research-informed provision gives to universities.

An indication of this lack of confidence across the field can be seen in the nature of opposition to the current reforms. As has been noted above, current government proposals have been greeted with alarm by stakeholders. But, whilst some reactions have included vehement opposition (see e.g. SCETT, 2011), there is surprisingly little defence around the shibboleth of researchinformed teacher education. And more worryingly, from other stakeholders the approaches taken to contesting the reforms might be best described as tepid, with adopted strategies being defined here as ‘negotiation and persuasion’ or, more damningly, ‘concession and compromise’. Again, the importance of research-informed teacher education, ideally taught within universities, is given little attention. In contrast, in the mid-1990s, when similar moves to a school-based system were proposed, the stance adopted by many individuals and stakeholder organizations was clear opposition to the reforms (Furlong and Smith, 1996; Gilroy et al., 1994), with the provision of research-informed teacher education within HE as the central part of the argument.

In the current scenario, most Schools of Education, like the individuals quoted at the beginning of this chapter, are explicitly concerned about the economics of their involvement in teacher education. Some universities, like the second speaker, are also concerned about the ‘faltering intellectual status’ of teacher education. Such reactions are not surprising. As this chapter has shown, it would be naive not to acknowledge that financial health and academic status matter greatly in Schools of Education at the moment, particularly given the ‘perfect storm’ which teacher education and educational research currently face (BERA and UCET, 2012). The prospect of some Schools, largely those in old and research-intensive universities, choosing to pull out of pre-service teacher education altogether is not a happy one. As indicated earlier in this chapter, the continuing involvement of such universities in teacher education is very important, not least for its symbolic significance An alternative scenario is that of other Schools of Education, heavily dependent on teacher education income, remaining invested in pre-service programmes, even if that means compromising the quality of their provision. Here, whilst ‘universities will continue to play a central role in teacher education’ (UCET, 2012, p. 3) the academic and professional price paid will be unacceptable for many in the field. Market pressures will mean that the unique contributions of such universities to teacher education will become so diluted that their provision is indistinguishable from short, instrumental forms of training by apprenticeship. Involvement in teacher education should not be an opt-in/opt-out decision around academic

18

J. Murray

status or economic viability, nor should it be an unprincipled decision to continue engagement at any academic cost.

Overall, ways of understanding the university sector’s contribution to teacher education as driven by the economic interests of the institutions and/ or the intellectual status of some Schools of Education are seen here as fundamentally flawed. They may well fit current models of HE as a market in which economic and academic competitiveness matter more than contributions to the public good, but university engagement in high-quality teacher education is surely an integral part of the HE sector’s contribution to the nation’s economic and social welfare. This is not least because high-quality professional preparation is needed to enable teachers to work in the complex and rapidly changing social contexts of twenty-first-century schools. The provision of robust and research-informed modes of teacher education should then be a fundamental commitment for the university sector, not least because, to paraphrase the Robbins Report (1963, p. 107), the health of the whole public system of education depends upon the effectiveness of that provision.

As Robbins also stated in debating the effects of reform in the college system, ‘what is surely essential here is that the teachers of the future will have had the opportunity to be better educated than their predecessors’ (p. 16).

This is surely not an unrealistic aim for the cohorts of teachers currently undergoing pre-service education. Teacher education is now faced with a series of radical government reforms driven by visions of teaching as a craft, best learned through apprenticeship in classrooms. But provision is still largely located in Schools of Education, which struggle to balance compliance with instrumental forms of teacher training against the provision of research-informed teacher education in research-rich environments. And those Schools exist within host universities which are now driven predominantly by market considerations rather than missions to contribute to the public good. In these circumstances, it is very hard to be optimistic about the future of teacher education in England.

NOTES 1 Although this ‘turn to the practical’ might be better conceptualized as a ‘(re)turn to the practical’, given the centrality of experiential knowledge in teaching and teacher education in England between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century.

2 Educational research itself is underpinned by other disciplines particularly through its foundational disciplines of psychology, sociology, philosophy and history, but it is also increasingly open to other, newer influences (Furlong and Lawn, 2010).

19

Analysing the fallout

3 The majority of pre-service teacher education provision (84%) was still located in HEIs in the academic year 2009–2010, with only 15% in Employment Based Routes (EBITTs) and 1% in the Teach First programme (Smithers and Robinson, 2011).

4 ‘New’ or post-1992 universities in the UK Higher Education sector were established by statute in or after 1992. Pre-1992 or ‘old’ universities were established by charter prior to 1992 and tend to be more research-intensive.

5 The methodology used by Smithers and Robinson (2011) to produce their league tables for teacher education has been much contested (Revell, 2006). But if their resulting judgements are to be believed, many old and élite universities provide the ‘best-quality’ teacher education programmes, through their small-scale, and often secondary, oneyear postgraduate courses which recruit graduates with very good fi rst degrees. Leaving aside such contested issues of what counts as ‘quality’ in teacher education, it cannot be denied that there is symbolic importance in ‘élite’ universities continuing to invest in teacher education.

6 Such compliance may often be strategic and could well be understood solely in the context of the very high stakes of being judged and found ‘unsatisfactory’ in an inspection.

An alternative reading of this situation, however, is that compliance with the demands of the regulators has become part of the ‘organised practices through which we are governed and through which we govern ourselves’ (Dean, 1999, p. 18), with increasing claim to authority over established professional practice in HE-based teacher education.

7 The TEG database (www.bera.ac.uk/teg-bibliography/) is clearly not a comprehensive record of all teacher education research in the UK published during this timeframe, but the scale of the collection and the rigour of its collation make claims to a high degree of representation reasonable.

8 The irony of the timing here should be noted, since this fi nal move in the pattern of academic drift was made just as growth of Employment Based Initial Teacher Training schemes (EBITTs) and fast-track routes (some operated without HEI involvement) became well established.

9 It should be noted here that there are many reasons why an institution may choose not to enter its research in particular units of assessment for these national audits. There are also many ways in which staff may engage in research and scholarship without being entered for research audits. Nevertheless, the audits continue to read as the most powerful signifiers of levels of research activity and quality in Schools of Education.

10 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics are commonly grouped together in HE and abbreviated to STEM subjects. HEFCE designated these subjects as ‘strategically important’ (www.hefce.ac.uk/aboutus/sis/stem.htm).

REFERENCES Aldrich, R. (2002). The Institute of Education 1902–2002: a centenary history. London: Institute of Education.

Alexander, R. J. (1984). Innovation, continuity in the Initial Teacher Education Curriculum.

In R. J. Alexander, M. Craft and J. Lynch (eds.), Change in teacher education: context and provision since Robbins. Eastbourne: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.