Is combining research and teaching a way to thrive and survive in Initial Teacher Education?
June 29, 2020
Yesterday, I was excited about having a conversation about what it means to be a teacher educator. We are nearing the end of the first year in our newly restructured faculty and, faced with the prospect of another merger in the midst of this, it seems to be timely to be asserting ourselves and working out what it is that we want. However, I came away having been reminded about the turbulent times that we are living in and how easy it is to slip into focusing on what we are not. Teacher educators are no longer seen as schoolteachers and we are not necessarily seen as researchers either. Relationship maintenance (Ellis et al., 2014) is not seen as academic work. We are stuck between university, Ofsted, and schools. We sometimes feel underacknowledged, undervalued and unimportant.
I’ve been working in Initial Teacher Education for ten years now. This working environment with others who want to continue to learn and grow professionally and support others in doing so is a real privilege, particularly as the teacher educator role is challenging. This is acknowledged in the literature: Entry and induction to teacher education has been described as a ‘rocky road’ (Wood and Borg, 2010) and practicing teacher educators often feel unprepared to assume their role (Goodwin et al., 2014). Establishing a professional identity is challenging, particularly in terms of developing a pedagogy for Higher Education work and becoming research active (Murray and Male, 2005). We are trying to fulfil multiple roles: ‘teacher of teachers, researchers, coaches, curriculum developers, gatekeepers and brokers’ (Lunenberg, Dengerink and Korthagen, 2014). No wonder we feel exhausted and torn between these roles much of the time! We are juggling too many balls.
The literature claims that we don’t know enough about how we teach about teaching (Biesta, 2019; Rowan, Brownlee and Ryan, 2019). Enabling our ‘secret stories’ to take the centre stage as ways of making new knowledge can help our practice to become public (Berry and Forgasz, 2018). When did you last talk about teaching about teaching in your subject with a colleague or dare I say (whispers), a student? When did you actually discuss why an approach you took, in order to further your or their learning, was successful or not?
Second-order practice (Murray, 2002) is what teacher educators are experts in. Teaching about teaching requires us to be able to articulate our pedagogical decision making for the benefit of our students’ learning. They are learning about teaching from us, in a space that has been designed to foster deep learning about the act of teaching. This means that we require skills and competencies to be able to realise and acknowledge what, for many of us with a long teaching career behind us, has become tacit. This tacit knowledge is not always known to us, so we need professional conversations to be able to recognise why we do what we do. It is the ‘why’ that gets removed from the what and the how (Fletcher, 2016). We need to be able to reveal our own moment to moment thinking to make learning and teaching a ‘site for inquiry’ (Darling Hammond, 2006).
So how can we thrive and survive as teacher educators? We need to seize the opportunity to develop our expertise in teaching about teaching AND promoting our knowledge in relation to this. There is very little consensus on what knowledge for teacher education is (Davey, 2013). Creating spaces to have conversations centred on teaching about teaching, along with having chances to discuss our pedagogical strategies and to expose our professional decision making is a simple way to begin examining our own practice. Mansfield and Loughran (2018) claim that being comfortable with uncertainty in exploring our pedagogical dilemmas can enable us to develop our practice. Could we learn to be comfortable with pedagogical uncertainty? We already are experts in teaching about teaching, however researching our own practice and making this public could help others to learn about our unique knowledge. Then we could in effect be helping others to learn whilst adding to knowledge about teaching about teaching.
How ready are we to be able to share the nature of our pedagogical existence, to develop our expertise in teaching AND research? This is about thriving AND surviving and combining what we do to celebrate what we are rather than what we are not.
This blog post was written by Karen Vincent.
References
Berry, A., and Forgasz, R. 2018. Disseminating secret-story-knowledge through the self-study of teacher education practices. Studying Teacher Education, 14 (3), 235-245.
Biesta, G. 2019. Reclaiming teaching for teacher education: towards a spiral curriculum. Beijing International Review of Education, 1 (1), 259-272
Darling-Hammond, L. 2006. Powerful teacher education: lessons from exemplary programs. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Davey, R. 2013. The professional identity of teacher educators. New York: Routledge.
Ellis, V., Glackin, M., Heighes, D., Norman, M., Nichol, S., Norris, K., Spencer, I., and McNicholl, J. 2013. A difficult realisation: the proletarianlization of higher education-based teacher educators. Journal of Education for Teaching: International Research and Pedagogy, 39 (3), 266-280.
Fletcher, T. 2016. Developing principles of physical education teacher education practice through self-study. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 21 (4), 347-365.
Goodwin, L., Smith, L., Souto-Manning, L., Cheruvu, R., Tan, M. Y., Reed, R., and Taveras, L. 2014. What should teacher educators know and be able to do? Perspectives from practicing teacher educators. Journal of Teacher Education, 65 (4), 284-302.
Lunenberg, M., Dengerink, J., and Kortagen, F. 2014. The professional teacher educator: Professional roles, behaviour and development of teacher educators. Rotterdam, Boston, Taipei: Sense Publishers.
Mansfield, J., and Loughran, J. 2018. Pedagogical equilibrium as a lens for understanding teaching about teaching. Studying Teacher Education, 14 (3), 246-257.
Murray, J. 2002. Between the chalkface and the ivory towers?: a study of the professionalism of teacher educators working on primary initial teacher education courses in the English university sector. Doctoral thesis, Institute of Education, University of London.
Murray, J., and Male, T. 2005. Becoming a teacher educator: evidence from the field. Teaching and Teacher Education, 21 (1), 125-142.
Rowan, L., Brownlee, J.L., and Ryan, M. 2019. Teaching teachers: what [should] teacher educators “know” and “do” and how and why it matters. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 47 (3), 210-215.
Wood, D., and Borg, T. 2010. The rocky road: the journey from classroom teacher to teacher educator. Studying Teacher Education, 6 (1), 17-28.
