Events – Viv Ellis

Responding to Melissa Benn: ‘We need to bring public education back into public hands’

On 4th July this year, the writer and campaigner Melissa Benn gave the Annual Education Lecture at King’s College London. To a full house in the Great Hall at the Strand, she presented an argument for a ‘new settlement’ around public education, one that has been formed into the case for a National Education Service. You can read more about Melissa’s argument in her recent book ‘Life Lessons’. I was asked to give a formal response to the lecture and this is what I said:

Thank you, Melissa, for a wonderfully critical and also optimistic lecture. It is the combination of insightful analysis and the generous provision of a ‘map that has utopia’ on it that marks out the genuine ‘public intellectual’ and Melissa is certainly one of our most persuasive and necessary public intellectuals. The ‘real thing’.

If the organising committee thought I might be critical of Melissa’s lecture, to excite debate and provoke discussion, then I’m going to disappoint. I share many of the same commitments – politically and educationally – as well as what I think might be a similar feeling of responsibility to articulate a hopeful plan – or at least enumerate some ideas that are available to be picked up after this current crisis is over. And I do think that it is a crisis, as Melissa has said, nationally and educationally. Crucially, though, none of these discussions should end with critique alone.

Thank you also to the organising committee who invited me to respond. It is a genuine privilege to be given time to present my own comments before we open up a wider discussion through the Q&A. So thank you to Meg Maguire, our chair this evening, and the other members of that committee, including Olivia Beckhurst, our Communications Officer.

I’m going to use the short time I have to make two sets of brief comments. The first are by way of direct response to what Melissa has said tonight – and what she has also written in Life Lessons, which I thoroughly recommend. The second set of comments even more briefly reflect on what Melissa’s arguments might mean for university departments of Education, like ours, that historically have had responsibilities for the initial preparation and continuing development of education professionals as well as to the production of educational research.

In diagnosing the causes of the current crisis in education, Melissa I think rightly identifies pervasive marketisation – or quasi-marketisation – of public services as part of the problem. The failure of the supposed lever of apparent choice – if not exactly price competition – between professional, public services now reconfigured as ‘providers’ subject to the techniques of New Public Management. Addressing the negative effects of marketisation and competition is clearly a strategic part of constructing a National Education Service. But I would also want to isolate some other factors that have led to the crises (national as well as educational) that now confront us here in the UK or, even more specifically, England and so give a different emphasis in my response. One of these factors is central government’s attack on local government that started in the 1980s and that has at times escalated into attacks on public institutions and ‘experts’ more generally. In the 1980s, there were two apparent bases for these attacks: a question of competence (the allegation that local authorities lacked basic organisational competence) and questions of interference (that they, like ‘experts’ more recently, were obstacles to legitimate reforms by central government).

In 2019, the idea that central government alone has a unique claim to competence now of course looks quaint if not downright ridiculous. And in my personal experience, even the most ardent advocate of academisation would accept, within a few conversational turns, that there were – are, indeed – good and effective local education authorities who support their schools to get better just as there are incompetent and corrupt multi-academy trusts who don’t. For me, an essential part of creating a National Education Service would therefore be to strengthen local and regional government and, crucially, broader democratic processes, to ensure that local priorities and community needs are fed in to what might otherwise become the national, statist priorities of a system in the abstract.

One of the often repeated mantras of the ‘New Education Establishment of edu-Twitter’ that Melissa has mentioned is that ‘we are where we are; academisation can’t be rolled back; local authorities are relics of the past’. And the New Educational Establishment has been very successful in promoting that message. But of course they are wrong. As Melissa has said and, indeed, as Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings demonstrated, if you have the political will and energy and the ideas are there, available for you to use, things can change quite quickly.

So in addition to the distortions that market mechanisms produce in a public education service, an important aspect of the current crisis is what is sometimes rather portentously called the ‘democratic deficit’ – the withering away of both representative democracy at a local level as well as opportunities for active participation in democratic processes that affect both the ‘delivery’ and the experience of the service.

Crucially, it’s not only a question of regulatory oversight – so that senior school leaders like the head at a stand-alone academy can’t pay himself £260,000 a year. It’s about much more than regulatory oversight. It’s about the right of people – students, parents and the wider community – to inform the development of their local school and to insist that it is responsive and accountable to them and not only accountable to central government.

Politically, another factor in the current crises is undoubtedly the crisis in Conservatism, something we see played out every day now on the news. On the one hand, a libertarian, relatively free market right, happy to let the market decide and committed to Milton Friedman’s elision of capitalism and freedom. On the other, a paternalistic, culturally nostalgic right, terrified (and I don’t think that’s too strong a word) of letting the market decide in abject fear of getting the wrong ‘outcome’. So right now in education, we seem to have both a ‘reluctant’ state and an ‘authoritarian’ one – a state that regrets ever getting involved in public education and is keen to withdraw and a state deeply afflicted by something that Paul Gilroy has called ‘postcolonial melancholia’ and wishes to turn back the clock to a mythic ‘golden age’. To quote Gilroy:

In the postcolonial twilight, to encounter difference produces only jeopardy. In response to that threat, the historic obligation to conserve culture produces a different conservatism: readily racialized, nationalized and now gene biologized.

So, in the current educational crisis, we end up with an official definition of knowledge that consists of the Arnoldian ‘best that has been thought and said’ (a direct and unattributed quotation) and the promotion of a ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum without asking whose knowledge – and to what ends?

Some of my own resources of hope in responding to this crisis of culture – of postcolonial melancholia – are some of the youngest people in society, whether school-age young people’s impatient insistence on the declaration of a climate change emergency or university students confidently asking their lecturers ‘why is my curriculum so White?’ And equally impatiently insisting on decolonising the curriculum. However society deals with these legitimate demands from its citizens, they have to be dealt with. As Melissa has said, you can’t just get just put young people in blazers to chant Wordsworth in rows and pretend these questions don’t exist, as much as it is clearly possible to try.

Which brings me to my final point. If we accept that Melissa has given us some of the tools to think about how we get out of the current crisis in education, what role do university departments of education have to play? How can we contribute?

Well, sadly, I think we are currently woefully unprepared to be of any assistance whatsoever. Generally speaking (and I am aware this is something of a generalisation), I think education departments in England are split between two groups of people playing two entirely different games: the REF game and the Ofsted ITE (and perhaps the TEF) game. On the one hand, an ever smaller number of researchers who are producing an ever smaller number of ‘high quality’ papers that very few people actually read and can make use of. And on the other hand, a group of people who help to prepare next generation of teachers and other education professionals who are basically delivering a product that someone else designed (for example, the PGCE and Qualified Teacher Status), whether the designers are the DfE, the former National College, Ofsted or what their colleagues put together twenty years ago. Nationally, across England, I don’t get any sense of there being many vibrant new ideas in initial teacher education, particularly ones that can help to change things for the better.

Personally, I find it deeply depressing that the energy and imagination and the new ideas are coming from those who Melissa terms the New Educational Establishment and who are committed to an entirely different view of education and, indeed, an entirely different view of society. The momentum has been in the opposite direction – focusing on the rehearsal of technical skills without always the cultivation of the professional judgement necessary to use them – and indeed, improve them. Or the promotion of ‘no excuses behaviour management’ policies on the assumption that if only the ‘unruly’ child (disproportionately Black and/or working class) would shut up, all would be well. The New Education Establishment has been very effective at connecting these ideas to the issue of teacher workload – quite misleadingly, in my opinion (you don’t need to ‘flatten the grass’ to make the job of teaching do-able). But where are the other voices being equally adept rhetorically adept at promoting humane and humanising alternatives. I would tentatively suggest they are few in number from within university departments of education, at least, and we kid ourselves if we think this question can be addressed entirely on Twitter.

Of course, there are exceptions – and we have several exceptions in the room tonight from King’s School of Education, Communication and Society. For example, Dr Mel Cooke’s work with teachers of English to speakers of other languages. Or Dr Tania de St Croix’s work with youth work professionals. Both integrating close and mutually beneficial engagements with educational professionals in the context of critical analyses of society. And there are, of course, others I don’t have time to name. But generally-speaking, my view is that academics in English university departments of education, particularly in the context of teacher education, have not even started to renegotiate the terms of engagement with practice, with the professional fields we (at least officially) have obligations to work with every day.

It is the fourth of July today. So before we go home to watch the military parade in Washington DC on the television, I will end by referring to a figure that Melissa quotes from in Life Lessons, John Adams, the second President of the United States. Adams’ famous letter to a British reformer in 1785 is often quoted to remind us of the purpose of public education (something the revolutionary United States took much more seriously than Great Britain, for understandable reasons) and the duty of government to secure this obligation:

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and will be willing to bear the expense of it. …[Schools] not founded by a charitable individual but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.

John Adams also wrote the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that included, in its original draft, a ‘paragraph on education’ that might count as a very early example of formal education policy in English. Adams’ ‘paragraph on education’ called for the diffusion of virtues and values as well as knowledge generally ‘among the body of the people’ not because it would necessarily improve their individual economic wealth but because it was ‘necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties’. The ‘duty of legislatures’ was to uphold this entitlement to public (rather than ‘state’) education because it was one of the principal ways through which the publics themselves were constituted. And the ‘whole people’ had to take on this responsibility and burden and use their agency to shape it. The people had to ‘own’ (in more than one sense of the word) public education.

To return to Melissa’ lecture, I want to repeat something she said early on: ‘We are witnessing the slow drift of public education from public hands. We need to bring public education back into public hands.’ That is the strongest and most fundamental message for me from this lecture and one that I believe we have to attend to urgently, whether we like the word ‘crisis’ or not.

Transformation: What exactly does it mean?

Transformation has, rather like innovation, become a popular way of describing of change, perhaps especially in public services. There are several books with ‘transforming teacher education’ somewhere in the title and many more articles and papers. In public discourse, transformation, as a description of change, often seeks to invoke a sense of powerful and irreversible progress but, I would argue, not always in ways that also justify the radical sense of the transformative process. In my own use of transformation and transformative, I make three critical distinctions.

First, I distinguish between transformation and reform as qualitatively different kinds of change. Reform, as Williams (1973) pointed out, has at least two emphases. The first is the restoration of an ideal state – to ‘re-form’ lost conditions on the basis of cultural and/or political nostalgia. The second is that it is a kind of change imposed from outside or ‘above’ on the basis of a perceived superior rationality or ethos; historically, as Williams points out, these value-rationalities were religious whereas they became more explicitly political throughout the twentieth century. Transformation, however, I understand as change initiated from within individuals and organisations that is inherently unpredictable in outcome and leads to a profound change in both underlying abstract values as well as the concrete details of practices. Changes in these values and practices will have a dialectical relation to culture and politics but there is a profound difference in the locus of agency and the need for change. I therefore distinguish between exogenous (reform) and endogenous (transformative) change with transformative change in practices and institutions necessarily drawing momentum from participant agency.

Second, within current uses of transformation in relation to organisations and society more generally, I distinguish between, on the one hand, transformation as a kind of radical change where new kinds of practices emerge as a result of participants’/citizens’ agentic interrogation of existing values/rationalities and, on the other, transformation as a change in appearance – or even perhaps direction of travel – but informed by existing values and commitments. I understand the latter meaning of transformation – which I am speculating may well be the dominant understanding in our field today – as one both informed by a mathematical logic and requiring mathematical logic to be operationalised and measured. This meaning for transformation is sometime claimed by those working within a ‘learning sciences’ perspective, specifically as defined by the OECD (2002). With reference to educational and social justice, the latter meaning of transformation plays into broadly neo-liberal equality and ‘social mobility’ discourses. The former meaning of transformation – and the one which I deploy in my work – instead takes an equity perspective and accepts the challenge of an assets-based, culturally-sustaining approach in education (and teacher education, in particular) to broader questions of political economy.

Thirdly, my use of the concept of transformation is explicitly informed by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and the importance of the concept of the ‘object’ of activity. For Leont’ev (1978), the object of activity was its ‘object-motive’, which he explained as follows:

The main thing which distinguishes one activity from another, however, is the difference in their objects. It is exactly the object of an activity that gives it a predetermined direction. According to the terminology I have proposed, the object of the activity is its true motive (Leont’ev, 1978, p. 62)

The object of an activity is both what engages/attracts and motivates the participation of individuals in a collective activity (such as helping to prepare teachers). By initially perceiving a new, potentially shared (or shareable) idea and the reasons for pursuing it – and then by collectively working on it – the object is both fashioned and potentially changed through the volitional participation of individuals from within the activity system. Working on the object involves encountering and negotiating contradictions, conflicts, double-binds and multiple antagonisms – personally experienced, affective, but also structural constraints within social systems (including at the level of society) that need to be overcome and broken away from for new forms of the activity to emerge (see my 2015 book with Jane McNicholl for a longer explanation). Analysing these contradictions and negotiating new forms of collective activity might lead to reconfiguration of social practices through a continual re-working of the object of the activity. That is why learning, change and development, from an activity-theoretical perspective, is sometimes described as the transformation of the object of activity; it is a dialectical process that involves new ideas and new ways of organizing the work by those who do the work. Transformation, in CHAT terms, therefore, involves both cultural-historical analysis and future-oriented desires to produce new organisational arrangements and divisions of labour and to create a new social world of, in terms of my interests, teacher education. A critically important part of a transformative process is to understand it as changing the object of activity – not only what is being worked on but why and for whose interests

So, in the same way that innovation isn’t only about capitalising new products in a market and also isn’t only about uses of technology, transformation has another – and I would say – more precise meaning in theorising change and theorising change in education, in particular. First, it describes change processes that take place within social systems or formal organisations and that require the need-for-change and the work-on-change to be driven by the momentum of participants’ agency rather than only by – or primarily by – external political energy. Second, transformation involves a shift in underlying values and rationalities as well as concrete labour practices on the understanding that these are in a dialectical relation. Transformation is not driven by a mathematical logic of measurement within existing conditions but seeks to change the conditions themselves. And thirdly, transformative change is motivated by a desire not only to do things differently but to have a different object for the activity, to consider not only the how question but the why and for whose interest questions also.

This post is based on a contribution to a paper I’m writing with Mariana Souto-Manning and Jamy Stillman. We’ll be presenting it at AERA this week.

References

Leont’ev, A.N. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality. Hillsdale, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

OECD (2002). Understanding the Brain – Towards a New Learning Science. Paris: OECD.

Williams, R. (1976). Keywords. A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Croom Helm.

Teacher education reform in the North

… by which I mean the ‘real’ North, the far North, the Arctic.

Norway’s current teacher education reforms are highly distinctive internationally. They take a bi-directional approach that is unusual: they extend the main professional preparation for primary and lower secondary teachers to five years leading to a Master’s degree while also taking a ‘practice turn’ and challenging schools and universities to work together more closely, deepening the understanding of professional practice, and trying to ensure that new teachers are ‘practice-ready’. And if you factor into this process, a major restructuring of the Norwegian higher education system – with several new, larger institutions being formed through mergers of smaller colleges – you get an extraordinarily complex setting for some extraordinarily complex policy enactments.

NOKUT, the Norwegian government’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, is supporting the implementation of the new, Master’s-level teacher education programmes through an international advisory panel (APTE) of which I’m a member. So for the last two days I’ve been working with Auli Toom of Helsinki University facilitating a workshop for HE-based and school-based teacher educators here in Tromsø, northern Norway. Tromsø is the third largest urban area in the Arctic circle; the largest is the Russian city of Murmansk. It’s also a city to which tourists flock to see the Northern Lights and, in recent years, to go whale-watching (the whales have become fond of Tromsø for the herring).

The view from the workshop room at the University of the Artic in Tromsø

For me, the dynamic core of the second day of the workshop has focused on the following two questions, questions we asked the HE-based and school-based teacher educators to address together:

What should be prioritised in student teacher learning at the Master’s level?
How do schools and universities collaborate to build a research-oriented culture and a pedagogy that supports Master’s level teacher education in the long run?

The italicised phrases gave really important emphases to the questions and raised, in response to the first question, the challenge of deciding whether and how to assess high quality teaching through the academic credit system (ECTS) and, in response to the second, how you first initiate and then sustain the kinds of relationships between academic and professional partners that would allow for a research-oriented culture to flourish. And I have to say that it was refreshing to leave behind in England a narrow and polarised discourse around ‘research’ and evidence in teacher preparation. Norway understands research (‘science’) in multi-disciplinary terms and also understands that science has many purposes, audiences and modes of production. There is no cack-handed promotion of ‘progressive eugenics’ by self-regarding ‘reformers’ nor naïve fetishisation of randomised controlled trials. So there’s reassuringly little reformista flatulence up here.

Thinking through progression in student teachers’ learning at the Master’s level

It was also very refreshing to participate in genuinely open discussions about the pedagogies of teacher education and the division of labour between HE- and school-based teacher educators at national and regional levels. Do we expect all HE-based teacher educators to be able to model – or ‘approximate’ – good teaching (I.e. school teaching) opportunities in university classrooms? Is school the place where the practices of teaching can be most effectively ‘decomposed’ and different elements rehearsed by student teachers during collaboration with their mentors in ‘real-time’? Do school-based teacher educators have to support the academic, research-based Master’s thesis or is this activity best left to the HE-based teacher educators? Do Master’s-level teacher dissertations have to involve original data collection or is it just as appropriate (or more so) for the students to analyse existing data sets at a very high level?

Also refreshing was the inclusion of the student teachers’ perspectives in these deliberations. We actively sought their insights into their experiences during the first year of these new Master’s programmes. Again, it left me wondering where the student teachers’ perspective has gone in English, national-level discussions of teacher education.

Some of the fantastic Tromsø students who took part in the workshop (with their ‘thank you’ mittens – Sarah Lund pattern)

We also benefited from the participation of the Sámi Allaskuva, the university and teacher education programme dedicated to the language and culture of the Sámi, the indigenous people of the North now living across Norway, Sweden and Finland. Questions about the place of indigenous culture in transnational settings problematized concepts such as ‘internationalisation’ and ‘race’.

The advisory panel will be continuing its work with Norwegian teacher educators over the next three years. Soon, we will move from ‘listening’ and fact-finding mode to advice and support mode. There will be a national conference for all the institutions involved in making these changes work in Oslo in May next year. It really is a privilege to be involved. It is one of those jobs where you take away as much or more than you give and a reminder too what a serious, non-polarised, non-self-aggrandising discussion about teacher education can offer.

The reforms in the North have made me believe even more strongly that, in England, we need an association of teacher education/teacher educators as is the case in so many parts of the world. I know that in some local partnerships in England and elsewhere in the UK, there are some equally lively and thoughtful discussions of issues that are critical to our field. But nationally, the level of discussion about teacher education is often extremely restricted, dominated by reactions to Tory policy lunacy or by deeply compromised, self-appointed ‘saviours’ of ITE, and by those who continually bait the exhausted and vulnerable on Twitter. Neither UCET nor policy-makers can offer the kind of forum for these discussions that is needed. Indeed, I would say that our current government, especially, would actively not want a teacher educators’ association in England; the present situation is highly beneficial for them.

So perhaps until we can do policy and reform like a country like Norway, teacher educators in England (perhaps with the support of a transformed organisation like TEAN) can do this for themselves? A UK Association of Teacher Educators? Let’s see.

Innovation, evidence, reform: Key words in the vocabulary of change in teacher education

Some words are high frequency words in our public discourse about change in education, and change in teacher education, particularly. But the frequency of word-use alone does not necessarily tell us much about the speaker’s or writer’s position on the issues. The fact that they are used frequently is important but it is their function as ‘key words’ that is significant in the arguments. ‘Key words’ as an idea comes from the work of British cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams – he published a book of that name in 1976 – and he used the term to represent those words that bind us together in conversations and help to establish a very basic level of communication but the diverse and even contradictory meanings of which represent significant fractures in the culture. Philosophers sometimes use the term ‘essentially contested concepts’ to represent a similar phenomenon but Williams’s cultural perspective placed greater emphasis on the relationship between history, politics and meaning.

You can probably think of a bunch of words that crop up all the time in debates about change in teacher education. I would say that reform, evidence and innovation are three key words in our vocabulary of change and that concepts or values such as social justice and equity figure strongly in how the meanings of these key words are established.

Understanding key words like these not only helps us to understand the different frames of reference and values embedded in other people’s arguments about justice, equity and educational change; developing this understanding also helps us to establish our own frames of reference more clearly and more effectively design our own actions for change.

I’ll be talking about Innovation, evidence and reform as key words in our vocabulary of change in teacher education at the second in a series of seminars called ‘Educating Teachers Matters’ at the UCL Institute of Education on Wednesday 15th November from 2 – 4pm.

You can download the flyer for the seminar by clicking here; you can access the pre-reading by registering and emailing the convenor at the email address provided.

A Centre for Innovation in Teacher Education and Development – CITED

But there come times – perhaps this is one of them

Following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in June this year, King’s College London and Teachers College, Columbia University are steaming ahead with the development of a new joint Centre for Innovation in Teacher Education and Development – CITED. You can read about the institutional commitment to the aims – and the values – underlying this new initiative here (in terms of Teachers College) and here (in terms of King’s College). What is clear is that the Presidential leadership of both institutions recognises and understands the necessary contribution that research-led, outward-looking universities like TC and King’s can make to the preparation, support and development of the school-teaching profession. And why it is so important right now, at this time, as TC President Susan Fuhrman has put it, when ‘the highly divisive political and social climates in both the U.S. and U.K. make clear that our education systems must do more to keep the path to social justice clear and accessible.’

Our new Centre (or Center, depending on where the keyboard is situated) will support positive change in the way that universities contribute to teacher education and development whilst also studying these processes and providing educational and professional development opportunities for those who do this important and often under-estimated work. Underlying the entire CITED project will be a commitment to working towards educational and social justice in ways that recognise structural, societal inequalities whilst at the same time seeking ways to transform the opportunities and outcomes for all students within the education system. A broader commitment to civic education, the promotion of public dialogue and (President Fuhrman again) ‘an unshakeable commitment to confront prejudice and discrimination’ underpins all our plans.

Co-directed by TC Professor Mariana Souto-Manning and myself, CITED will be launched in the Spring next year and our programme will begin in earnest in September 2018. We will be working on-line as well as face-to-face in London and in New York and, eventually, our plans reach right up to the doctoral level. We are planning for bursaries and scholarships to support students and colleagues who need them. Much more information will be available in the next couple of months. Watch this space – and other ones too!

SCOTENS Conference: 13-14 October, Dundalk, Ireland

I’ll be talking at the 2017 SCOTENS conference in Dundalk in a few weeks, on the conference theme of Educational innovation – the challenge of evidence-informed change.

SCOTENS – the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South – is a network of 37 college and university education departments, teaching councils, curriculum councils, trade unions and other organisations in Ireland established in 2003 and administered by the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh. It’s a unique educational network of committed organisations across a contested border, in my experience, and I’ve really enjoyed attending their conference in previous years (the last time being in Limerick in 2015).

Here’s the conference theme description:

As teacher educators we are conscious of the contested discourse around evidence-informed change, whether in school classrooms or in terms of teacher education itself, and we feel that there is an important debate to be had around the role of evidence in driving innovation: what sort of evidence is needed? Who is producing it? Is it adequate? Are policy makers listening? What are the consequences of not listening? Are there tensions around values and evidence, and if so, how do we reconcile them? How do we address the tendency to have ‘one size fits all’ innovation? How do we obtain the best balance among decision makers: policy makers, researchers, professional educators?

The 2017 Annual SCoTENS conference theme aims to encourage speakers, panel members and delegates to consider these kinds of questions in a way that prompts reflection, discussion and debate.

I’ll be talking about my recent study of historical cases of innovation in initial teacher education in England and the particular contribution of joint curriculum work with schools. And, arising out of this research, proposing a different meaning for ‘innovation’ to one focused on technical ‘efficiency’ and cost-cutting. I’m looking forward to it.

The Induction and Development of Teacher Educators: Responding to the InFo-TED Symposium at BERA

InF0-TED is an emerging European (and increasingly international) cooperation between teacher educators interested in the improvement of their field, particularly in relation to the induction of and continuing professional development for the large number of school teachers who, in so many countries, begin second careers in higher education settings to work on pre-service or initial teacher education programmes. You can find the InFO-TED website with information and resources if you click here.

The three papers to which I responded at the BERA conference were all based on an initial questionnaire survey across teacher educator populations in the Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland, Norway and England and then, specifically for these papers, follow-up interviews with smaller samples in Ireland, Scotland and England. These samples of teacher educators were essentially self-selecting but, given the alignment of the findings with previous research, I think the papers gave a reliable sense of how teacher educators generally can talk about their work and their situations as academics. Each paper presented rich data about these teacher educators’ feelings about their positioning in universities. There was some variation in their perspectives on this positioning – for example the overwhelming majority of the Irish sample (83%) had their doctorates whereas the majority of the Scottish and English samples didn’t – but mostly, these interviewees reported a lack of a sense of direction; felt more or less inadequate in relation to some unarticulated idealised norm; also sometimes expressed guilt that they were not research active with some, implicitly perhaps, regarding this as a personal failing rather than as a consequence of structural constraints. These perspectives were advanced to varying but fairly consistent degrees across the three papers with the overall implication – and one that drove the symposium – that better induction and professional development will improve the teacher educators’ lot. This seems to be the aim of InFo-TED as a movement and InFo-TED will be offering such induction and CPD opportunities across Europe in summer schools and through other means, funded in part by the EU’s Erasmus + programme.

Together, these papers – and the InFo-TED idea as a whole – raised some really interesting questions for me which I tried to articulate in my contribution to the discussion. Here they are:

First, teacher educators are a heterogeneous group of academic workers even within the same country – actually, even within the same institution, in my experience. So, I’m wondering whether the InFo-TED project as a project inevitably has to assume a homogeneous group whose professional development can be planned for across not only a single country but across Europe? Or not? Do the arguments of these papers lead, for example, to proposals for a set of professional standards for teacher educators, a move that has been apparent in some countries like the Netherlands? Is the implication that there is a single, transferable ‘skill-set’ for teacher educators that can be generalised and planned for transnationally? Does attention to teacher educator development necessarily require a degree of standardisation that people would feel very uncomfortable about in other parts of the university, and across professional schools particularly? I’m reminded of the introduction to AERA’s report Studying Teacher Education (that huge door-stop from 2005) in which the editors suggested this idea even while they noted that no other professional school (law, accountancy, etc) was going down this route. Their suggestion at the time – I think their opinions might have changed on this – is that developing common standards and expectations around the essential ‘knowledge-base’ for ‘effective’ teacher educators would address and perhaps fend off the challenges of unwanted politically-driven reforms. So standards for teacher educators become a protective or defensive measure in high-accountability regimes.

You can also argue for greater standardisation and for having common expectations for reasons of equity and social justice and I have heard Professor Etta Hollins from the University of Missouri – Kansas City and a former AERA Division K Vice-President make just this argument at this year’s conference. Preparing teachers for racially and culturally diverse schools, so the argument goes, requires essential content and skills and – vitally – dispositions such as racial self-awareness that nice, privileged, white people (still the majority of the teaching profession) generally don’t have when they arrive in Ed school. “So my goodness, you student teachers are all going to have to meet this basic threshold level of competence before you might be regarded as ‘safe’ to teach in racially diverse, sometimes but not always ‘high-needs’, schools. And you, the teacher educators, are all required to be able to deliver that. Period”. This is a slightly different argument to the standardisation argument in the face of accountability pressures but, again, one worth considering for good reasons of justice – social and educational – that I see as related to InFo-TED’s broader aspirations.

Secondly, if InFo-TED’s interest is in teacher educators’ induction and CPD, what are these people being inducted into and to what ends are they being offered development activities? There are two aspects to this question. First, fundamentally, they are being inducted into a job, into work, work that is at least nominally academic work (only the Irish paper really gets at this key issue in reporting on a strike by teacher educators over their conditions of service when their college was being amalgamated with the National University of Ireland). Where in these papers overall is the sense of what these people are doing, will be doing, or should be doing in their job of preparing teachers? What does the work of educating beginning teachers involve but more importantly what should it involve? Because what it currently involves might not be very good; it might be silent or worse about issues of ‘race’, class, gender, sexuality, disability, religious faith and so on. Why would we want to build a professional development structure that had an inherent conservatism built into its architecture? What if, as many of us increasingly believe, teacher education is overwhelmingly implicated in the maintenance of White privilege, an activity in which teachers of colour have to leave their identities, languages and indigenous knowledges at the classroom door alongside those of the young people they are there to teach?

So the question of what should the work that teacher educators do becomes really important and it’s then not only the teacher educators in universities who should be consulted about what that is. Who else has the right to contribute to a vision for what kind of work teacher educators should do and to what ends and therefore the work that an organisation such as InFo-TED is supporting them into and helping them to become more advanced in skills and also more critical? One would hope that the teaching profession is involved, simultaneously helping to make some useful distinctions between the work of a school-based teacher educator and that of a university-based one. But I’d hope it went wider than that and that teacher educators were accountable, albeit indirectly, to communities in local contexts, taking the democratic responsibilities of what is still a programme of higher education more seriously.

But the second aspect of this question is related to the job as a university-based one: what should teacher education as academic work look like? And why, if indeed it is, is it important that teacher education remains at least in part university-based or university-partnered? What’s the ‘higher’ part of the education? Some of the usual arguments are that university-based teacher educators get teachers to reflect – which I’ve always found incredibly patronising. Another argument is that teachers come into contact with cutting edge researchers if they do a university-partnered programme. When Jane McNicholl and I studied the work of teacher educators in England and Scotland – published as Transforming Teacher Education: Reconfiguring the Academic Work (2015) – we found that the defining characteristic of their work was what we called ‘relationship maintenance’ – making complex, multi-levelled, high accountability and distributed partnerships with schools work relationally rather than producing research of any type, never mind ‘cutting edge’ work. In terms of research and how they are valued in the academy we described teacher educators as proletarianised – by which we meant that as a class of worker, they were denied the opportunity to accumulate academic capital (publications, grants, fellowships, promotions, prizes) etc. within the academic staffing system. This phenomenon has been observed in many countries including Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand, where the New Zealand Research Council funded a national replication of Jane’s and my study led by Prof. Alex Gunn from Otago University.

Available from all good booksellers – makes an ideal Christmas present

So if we want to induct and develop teacher educators into a form of academic work and design a system in which they might thrive, we could perhaps follow the Norwegian example of a National Graduate School for Teacher Education (NAFOL, currently led by InFo-TED Council chair Prof. Kari Smith) through which over 150 university-based teacher educators in several cohort groups have been supported on a fully-funded basis to do their PhDs with expert supervision from successful Norwegian teacher education academics and regular summer and winter school workshops featuring international researchers. I think this is a fantastic initiative and one to which I have been fortunate to contribute. But research production by teacher educators is not the whole story about the job of preparing teachers in the university setting.

Which brings me to my final question: if we think the induction and professional development of teacher educators are important activities and that it’s also important to study this phenomenon, why? Who gains? I’m assuming the teacher educators do – but who else? And to what ends – who else’s benefit? Because as much as it is a worthwhile aim to improve the opportunities and job satisfaction of people who work in higher education, I think there needs to be stronger arguments about why policy makers, tax-payers, university and school leaders and others should make this investment – and arguments that go beyond the flourishing of the teacher educator as an individual academic. I don’t want teacher educators to be unhappy or feel unfulfilled. But who are the eventual beneficiaries of this increased attention to teacher educator professional development. I don’t think it can be just teacher educators alone if we describe them as professionals nor, indeed, if we want to win the argument. Professions have relations of both trust and responsibility to the wider society for a start.

In fact, the new private teacher education outfits in the US and the UK take this question of teacher educator development very seriously because they see the ultimate beneficiaries as the students in schools and, particularly, whatever we may make of the connection, their ‘social mobility’. In both the US and the UK they have prepared (or are preparing) certificate courses for intending teacher educators and they are recruiting these people now in relatively large numbers. I would disagree with the easy link these start-ups often promote between training people to train intending teachers in easy moves (on the Doug Lemov model) or even in using ‘high-leverage instructional practices’ (on the Deborah Ball model) and social justice. Ripping practices out of their sociocultural and historical contexts as tips or ‘things to do’ without them being embedded in what Schwab called, in another context, the ‘syntactic structure’ of the professional knowledge of teacher education short-circuits something that can’t be short-circuited if the activity is going to be sustainable at any level of quality over time. I also think, ultimately, these approaches are both anti- and de-professionalising in terms of both the work of the teacher educator and the job of being a teacher. But these private, self-styled ‘reforming’ teacher educator organisations have nonetheless argued the link between inducting and developing teacher educators and improving teaching and improving schools in a way that I think any organisation interested, like InFo-TED, in teacher educator induction and development needs to. And it probably has to do so on the basis of having a worked-out view of what the job of preparing teachers in a university should involve and also acknowledge that the job and its demands have probably changed enormously in the last twenty years – even if we don’t always acknowledge this fact.

So I am looking forward to what’s next for InFo-TED because, together, I think these papers identify amongst the teacher educators interviewed what is sometimes called, in social psychology, a ‘need-state’, a felt need that something has to change, that things need to be done differently, even if the direction of that transformation isn’t yet clear. A need-state is an indicator of emerging change conditions and endogenous innovation. So, recognising that teacher educators are a heterogeneous group, how will InFo-TED respond to this need-state among a highly distributed and diverse occupational group? Not just across Europe but within countries and within the different sectors of higher education; in the distance between Sligo and Galway, for example?

London Conference on the Legacy of James Britton – IOE, 12th March 2016

If you were a newly-qualified teacher of English today, would you know who James Britton was? If you had done a PGCE, it is an interesting question. As an English graduate, it would have been unlikely for you to have encountered Britton in your EngLit course. But would your PGCE tutor, at any stage, have made you aware of Britton’s contribution to English and literacy teaching (a truly worldwide contribution, at that)? Would you have looked at the Bullock Report, for example, even just Chapter 4? Or Language and Learning? Or would you have read his piece ‘Vygotsky’s Contribution to Pedagogical Theory’? For it was Britton, perhaps above all others, who first made the teaching profession in England aware of Vygotsky’s work, soon after the first English translation of Thought and Language in 1962.

Britton was more than a populariser of Vygotsky, however, if indeed he was that. Britton was then and now, in my opinion, the exemplary academic educationist: once a teacher, always fully engaged with the work of school teaching and motivated by educational questions; hugely supportive of the profession developing its own leadership (through subject associations, for example); intellectually ambitious in ways that crossed the academic humanities and social sciences – in today’s grotesque parlance, a writer of ‘four star’ papers; and a researcher with huge impact, both in today’s reduced ‘REF-compliant’ terms but also over longer timescales and across continents and disciplines. Britton shows the way you might, as someone who works in a university Education department, do good work in every sense. It’s an aspiration many of us struggle with and fail at – but it’s worth the struggle nonetheless. It is ‘the Blob’, otherwise

The London Association for the Teaching of English (LATE), the longest-standing subject association for primary and secondary English teachers, is organising a day conference on Saturday 12th March at the Institute of Education in Bedford Way to look at the legacy of Britton’s work and what it means for the teaching profession today. A flyer for the event is available here. The organisers of the event – Tony Burgess and Myra Barrs (themselves highly distinguished teachers and researchers in the same mould) – have also produced a really lovely anthology of extended quotations of Britton’s work which they will introduce at the conference. The selection gives you some real insights into the depth and reach of Britton’s thinking.

If you are interested in finding out more about James Britton in the context of teacher education and the HE discipline of Education, he features prominently in an article I wrote called ‘Disciplines as Ghosts’ which is available to download from the Articles page of this site. Karen Simecek and I have also drawn substantially on Britton’s work about the poetic mode of language use in an article that will be published shortly in the Journal of Aesthetic Education.

‘Maths Talk’ at the London Mayor’s Education Conference: 27 November, City Hall

Prof Valsa Koshy and I will be at the annual Mayor of London’s Education Conference at City Hall on 27th November this year. Valsa will be presenting the findings of our two-year ‘Enhancing Mathematical Learning at Key Stage 1′ research project. We worked with 31 primary schools in London, 31 teachers and around 800 KS1 pupils, alongside the quite brilliant Davina Salmon from Wandsworth LA. In an eight-month intervention period, we focused on developing teachers’ knowledge of and confidence with mathematical concepts and also their knowledge and confidence in developing powerful classroom interaction, particularly mathematical reasoning but not necessarily in abstract, argumentative mode.

We have just concluded the statistical analysis of the pre- and post-intervention measures. Not only has teachers’ knowledge and confidence increased, so has the attainment of the 800 children according to pre- and post-intervention measures and at statistically significant levels compared to the control group. This is fantastic news for those kids and their teachers and schools. Valsa and I will be drawing out the key messages of this research for policy and practice at the Mayor’s conference.

The 'Maths Talk' intervention research received a grant of £275,000 from the London Schools Excellence Fund — The ‘Maths Talk’ intervention research received a grant of £275,000 from the London Schools Excellence Fund

Speaking at the Norwegian ‘Knowledge Parliament’ on 22nd September

I’ll be talking about the integration of higher education- and school-based work in pre-service teacher education at an exciting event at the Literature House in Oslo on 22nd September.

The Knowledge Center for Education in Norway and ProTed, the Centre of Excellence in Education (University of Oslo and University of Tromsø), have asked Norwegian universities to describe their teacher education programmes and how they are organised. Data from these explorations will be summarized, presented and discussed at the event. The event is free and open to all.

I’ve been invited to talk about Transforming Teacher Education – particularly the principles and actions developed at the end of the book – and to respond to the Norwegian data.

Sven-Erik Hansén, a professor at Åbo Akademi in Finland, is the other international guest. Sven-Erik has published many books and articles about teacher education and has a good knowledge of Norwegian teacher training – both as a member of the Norwegian funding council committee that reviewed the sector in 2005, and as a key contributor to ‘Pilot of the North’ at the University of Tromsø. Hansén will contribute experiences from Finland when it comes to the design of integrated professional learning for teachers, pre-service (or initial) and continuing).

The Norwegian Knowledge Parliament is a forum for practitioners, policymakers and researchers in the field of education. The aim of each of their events is to discuss topics of general interest for all stakeholders in the education system. Invitations are open and non-exclusive. Oh, how I wish we had such an organisation in England! And what a refreshing change from government patronage!

The invitation is attached. (In Norwegian – but easily translatable).