Becoming a teacher by learning in two contexts in the Netherlands and England

Authors: Elizabeth White, Miranda Timmermans

We were delighted to receive an IPDA Scholarship for our project ‘Learning from student-teachers’ experiences of school-university partnerships in the Netherlands and England’. We are both involved in school-university partnerships and have seen many changes in policies around initial teacher education. We started collaborating in 2016 over our shared interest in the professional learning and development of teacher educators working in school-university partnerships. Previously we have listened to the stories of the dilemmas that teacher educators experienced working in these partnerships. We chose to use stories as they allow the complexity of the phenomena being dealt with, to be captured and for ‘ambiguity and dilemma as central figures or themes’ (Carter, 1993, 6). The findings were used to develop professional learning and development resources that are available open access to practitioners in English, and in Dutch and are explored in our articles (White, Timmermans and Dickerson, 2020, 2022).

The IPDA Scholarship enabled us to explore the experiences of student-teachers in these partnerships, focussing on what enables them to connect their learning across institutional boundaries, discovering where they encountered problems and how they resolved them and what/who supported them in this, and additionally, what went well and why it went well.

We wanted to explore the experiences of student-teachers especially on what they needed from teacher educators, and the qualities required of teacher educators within these partnerships.

In workshops, student-teachers identified the guiding team around them who were involved with their professional learning and development (Fig. 1). They reflected on how they experienced learning in the two contexts (school and university) and the connection between them. Some remembered moments when there was friction, and others noticed instances where it had gone well in linking the learning in both contexts during their development to becoming a teacher. We collected their stories to see what professional learning was there for us, as teacher educators, were there things that we could do better to enable developing professionals to connect their learning across institutional boundaries?

Fig. 1. Guiding team around the student-teacher.

We have ten stories so far and have plans to collect some more. Our initial findings revealed complex inter-relationships between the guiding team around the student-teacher, which was reflected in the complex interactions in the stories. Enabling was largely fortuitous, and in the best experiences involved guiding team members from both contexts. One story demonstrated linking of practice and theory through deliberate design of a learning activity and assignment. Linkage between theory and practice occurs particularly when the content benefits classroom practice directly, although student-teachers, to a lesser extent, do draw on theoretical learning when they experience new situations later in their practice. The stories tended to be about links made during practice. Each story contained learning points that the student-teachers were able to reflect on. All the stories contain learning points for teacher educators involved in partnerships.

We are using the findings to develop resources for the professional learning and development of teacher educators, and for those involved in developing partnerships, thus increasing student-teachers’ voice in partnerships.

References

• Carter, K. (1993) ‘The Place of Story in the Study of Teaching and Teacher Education’, Educational Researcher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 22(1), pp. 5–18. doi: 10.3102/0013189X022001005.
• White, E., Timmermans, M. and Dickerson, C. (2020) ‘Learning from stories about the practice of teacher educators in partnerships between schools and higher education institutions’, in Swennen, A. and White, E (eds) Being a Teacher Educator: Research-Informed Methods for Improving Practice. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 126–141.
• White, E., Timmermans M. and Dickerson, C. (2022) Learning from professional challenges identified by school and institute-based teacher educators within the context of school–university partnership, European Journal of Teacher Education, 45:2, 282-298, DOI: 10.1080/02619768.2020.1803272

About the authors

Elizabeth White is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, England. Miranda Timmermans is Applied Professor at Marnix Academie of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands.