Research – Viv Ellis

Bargaining for change: School Direct and ITE reform in England

A new paper from the PETE project, about to be published in the British Educational Research Journal and co-authored with David Spendlove from Manchester, reports on our study of the enactment of the School Direct teacher education reform in England between 2010 and 2014. In the paper, we focus on our interviews with university leaders in two large regions of England, analysing their retrospective accounts of enacting the policy during a particularly turbulent time in education in England – including in higher education – under Michael Gove as Education Secretary. School Direct, as a teacher education reform, coincided with some of the biggest changes to university financial models ever made in the UK – the withdrawal of direct state funding for courses in the arts and social sciences by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government and the tripling of the tuition fee originally introduced by New Labour.

Entitled ‘Mediating School Direct’, the paper examines the mediations of the policy from a socio-cognitive and activity-theoretical perspective; to that extent we are aligned with the James Spillane tradition of policy enactment research. We identify two policy enactment activities (in the activity-theoretical sense) that involved bargaining within and re-brokering relationships between universities and schools. However, we also identify three emotional frames for perceiving School Direct within the policy environment, working with the Vygotskian concept of perezhivanie; here we draw particularly on the work of Marilyn Fleer and colleagues. The most striking thing about our data was the heightened emotion – at the level of perceived existential threat – recollected by the university leaders.

Consequently, we argue that the mediations of School Direct reported by the university leaders in our sample can be understood as limited appropriations of the policy within a highly charged emotional context where institutional risks were felt to be ever-present. In the paper, we also identify the role played by Dominic Cummings, then Michael Gove’s special advisor (now de facto chief of staff to the UK Prime Minister), in the rapid growth of School Direct and its purposively disruptive intent. However, rather than seeing School Direct as the ‘pure’ marketisation of teacher education provision, we suggest instead the logic of the market was simply the most obvious tool with which to shift control and resources away from the universities. Even the concept of privatisation does not fully capture either the intent or the dynamics of change involved in School Direct.

The paper concludes that, in their accounts, these university leaders did not believe that School Direct achieved a transformation of ITE on the basis of a reconceptualization of existing practices. And despite seeking to shift control and resources away from the universities, School Direct was instead re-appropriated into the status quo and ultimately served to entrench the universities’ important structural position in initial teacher education in England, albeit at reduced cost.

If you don’t have institutional access to the British Educational Research Journal and would like a copy of the article when it’s published, please use the contact form.

From landscape to political economy: change in teacher education

Teacher education is now characterised by greater organisational diversity in provision in many countries. Markets or quasi-markets for teacher ed programmes are not a universal feature, of course, but even in the Nordic countries, where there remains a stronger, state- planned model, there are modest but sometimes influential new providers at the margins. In the US, the universities, as legacy providers of initial teacher education (ITE), have been seriously challenged in recent years by a new cadre of private providers in what has always been more of a genuine market, one characterised both by price competition and strongly differentiated brands. And England is a highly distinctive case internationally where both the ‘model of the market’ and the state’s interventionist, controlling instincts have led to a sector characterised by historically important providers like public universities and groups of schools (‘SCITTS’) but also new entrants that might be described as ‘enterprising charities’ or even sole trader entrepreneurs.

Our ‘Changing Landscape of Teacher Education’ research is now moving into a different phase with new articles in press and under review that address some of this diversity from a political economy perspective. The first new article, about to be published in the Journal of Education Policy, takes the first round of the Teaching and Leadership Innovation fund as a point of departure and shows how a new political economy of teacher development in England has emerged, arising out of the elision of ‘teaching quality’ and ‘social mobility’ over the last decade of austerity policies. In particular, the paper argues that we are seeing new developments in what Jennifer Wolch (1990) called ‘the shadow state’ – non-state organisations that do work formerly undertaken by the public sector but still within state control.

‘A New Political Economy of Teacher Development’: forthcoming in the *Journal of Education Policy*

Also under review, a paper that looks at bargaining at times of reform and whether these negotiations stimulate meaningful change in initial teacher education provision. Then, at the end of this year – fingers crossed – we hope that the book reporting on the different strands in our research and taking a comparative perspective across England, the USA and Norway will be published.

Warwick Mansell, freelance investigative journalist and the founder-editor of Education Uncovered website, is a key partner, co-researcher and co-author in several of these writing projects, representing a unique collaboration (in the field of teacher education research, anyway) between academic researchers and investigative journalism. Other collaborators include David Spendlove (Manchester) and Sarah Steadman (ESRC-funded doctoral researcher at KCL).

It’s been a genuinely fascinating experience completing the underlying research over the last couple of years. One previously unexperienced oddity was an intervention by the DfE (the Education ministry in England) who asked our potential research participants not to work with us (the details of which we confirmed through a Subject Access Request)! We’ve also met and talked to a wide range of people and companies that I am certain I would never had encountered if we hadn’t done this research.

So, given the analytic focus we have adopted and the concepts we use to explore the field, it seems the right time to change our project title from the ‘Changing Landscape…’ to the ‘Political Economy of Teacher Education’ (PETE). PETE seeks to:

Examining the relationship between privatisation policies framed through discourses of equity and justice, the pedagogies of teacher education and professional identity of the school teacher;
Analyse the emergence of new relationships of co-production between the state and teacher education enterprises, including the co-creation of shadow state structures;
Understand the rhetorical production of reform ideas and how these create funding opportunities for policy entrepreneurs;
Theorise questions of novelty, scale and value in teacher education innovations internationally.

So farewell ‘landscape’ and hello ‘PETE’. More to come.

Learning, Assessment and Boundary-Crossing in Teacher Education (LAB-Ted): New research project

I recently tweeted about the successful outcome to a research funding application that will bring together a group of researchers to carry out an intervention study in the teacher education setting in Norway (a study we’re calling ‘LAB-Ted’). Here is some more information about the study, its background and the funding.

Background

Reforms of teacher education in Norway from 2010 have emphasized the development of methodological competence for student teachers when working on research and development (R&D) assignments designed to improve their own practice. Subsequently, from autumn 2017, further reforms required all students undertaking upper primary/lower secondary teacher education to follow a Master’s degree programme culminating in a research-based thesis. Crucially, however, the research for this Master’s thesis had to be practice-based and professionally-oriented, developmental in intent and take as its starting point the formulation of a research problem connected to existing practice in the school setting. The overall aim was that teachers improve their teaching by developing deeper and more sophisticated R&D competence; by focusing on student teachers improving their methodological competence for the thesis, the expectation was that, eventually, higher methodological expectations would contribute to improved processes for developing teaching practices in schools on a continuous basis.

The aims of LAB-Ted

The overall aim of the project is two-fold: first, to develop collaboration between universities (teacher educators), schools (teachers and school leaders) and student teachers in order to build capacity for practice-based, professionally-oriented research in teacher education of the kind required by the 2017 reforms; second, to research these processes using an innovative methodology that will uncover obstacles and barriers to change that will be more widely useful across the system in Norway and, potentially, internationally. Overall, therefore, the project itself is conceptualized as R&D in the tradition of formative interventions (specifically, the variety known as Developmental Work Research [DWR] elaborated by the leading Finnish researcher Yrjӧ Engestrӧm, an advisor to the project). The professional context for the intervention will be teachers’ practices in five school subjects: English, social science, natural science, mathematics and physical education.

Additionally, LAB-Ted will seek to understand the distinct challenges in creating assessment criteria for Master’s level academic work that is practice-based and professionally-oriented, challenges often unaddressed even if frequently recognized in the development of Master’s-level teacher education systems globally. In developing such criteria, the project will also explore new potential new models of supervision towards the thesis. Further, LAB-Ted will seek to test and explore the specific methodology it deploys – DWR, informed by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). It is often claimed that DWR is uniquely well-equipped to stimulate and study change in practice settings through processes of historicisation and participant conscientisation and so the study will aim to understand the usefulness of a theory (CHAT) in stimulating change in practices in the contexts of educational reform.

Norwegian student teachers just embarking on the new five year Master’s programme

Research team and funding

LAB-Ted is led by Rachel Jakhelln (University of Tromsø) along with Co-Principal Investigators May Britt Postholm (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Viv Ellis (King’s College London). LAB-TEd is funded by the Norwegian Research Council (FINNUT) to the value of 12 million NOK (£1.15 million) with additional funding of 5 million NOK from key stakeholders. The project will begin in August 2019 and continue for four years.

The Changing Landscape of Teacher Development

The ways that schools have changed in England since 2010 are pretty obvious to see. Ideas like ‘academies’, initially proposed by New Labour for ‘failing’ schools, have become (more or less) normalised as the preferred future for all schools and the marginalisation of local education authorities has been accomplished in many parts of the country, especially in terms of secondary education. Purely from the perspective of policy analysis, the Coalition and then the Conservatives have been very successful in changing how we think about schools and the school system and if it hadn’t been for a ‘little local difficulty’ like the result of the EU referendum and a failed general election, it is likely that their white paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’ would have allowed them to achieve even more.

What is less obvious for people to see – especially those without ‘niche’ interests in teacher education and development – are the changes to the ways in which we prepare and the develop the teaching workforce, initially and then in a classroom. It is not only the well-known School Direct initiative that has been significant; indeed, perhaps what makes School Direct interesting is that, despite the political noise at the time, universities are/were still very heavily involved in School Direct, very often behind a curtain, still pulling many of the levers, rather like a cut-price Wizard of Oz. Or Chucky doll, depending on your point of view.

School Direct – who is that behind the curtain?

What is interesting about the changes to the ways we prepare and then develop teachers in the classroom is that a new eco-system has been emerging to replace the local education authorities, on the one hand, and in some sort of readiness to replace existing university provision on the other. I don’t want to over-emphasise the last part as I think those that might have aspired to replace the universities have realised just how hard it is to do that. But when you deliberately change the eco-system the way that Coalition and Conservative governments have, new entities (organisms?!) emerge to take advantage of conditions in the new environment.

For the last year, a research team across King’s College London and, for the first phase now completed, the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, having been studying the new eco-system. Our first paper is about to be published from phase 1. We are now in phase 2 and focusing on the changing landscape for in-service/continuing professional learning.

‘Landscape’ is an appropriate analogy in a few respects: first of all, it suggests that even though the surface features may look very similar, the sub-structure can be profoundly different. Second, the surface features often have interesting relationships to the sedimented layers below. The new grassy hillocks of teacher development are nonetheless laid over geological structure that can lead to some surprising and unintended new features. Another interesting aspect of the landscape analogy is the mix of old and new features, some retained and conserved through protective regulation; others approved by a parallel, more or less systematic planning process. What you end up with in a landscape is never what you initially envisaged. But it is proving interesting finding out how new kinds of developments emerge, are either cultivated or starved of resources and, ultimately, where the energy is coming from.

Teacher research groups in a Chinese primary school: What if …?

Teacher research groups have been a feature of the Chinese school system for over 50 years, including outside the special regions (such as Shanghai and Bejing) with which westerners are most familiar. Sometimes traced to Soviet influence on the Chinese system, they continue to be a contractual feature of teachers’ work for which time is protected on the timetable. They have never been something teachers were just expected to do after school.

As with most things that any employee is contractually obliged to do, they become routine, automatic, to some extent lose their meaning, and can end up as ‘just another thing’ to prepare. From my own observations in Chinese schools and in translated conversations with teachers, Chinese teachers don’t necessarily see teacher research as their salvation from the pressures of a challenging job.

What has always interested me about the way that these research groups are often used in schools, however, is the focus on curriculum development. And in two ways. First, the broad trend underlying curriculum development in China after 1974 (and the reforms of Deng Xiaopeng) has been to embrace the movement known as progressivism. Not the caricature invented as a Twitter device by educational conservatives¹ in England but the broad movement informed, in particular, by Dewey and then by ideas derived from western educational research such as ‘problem based learning’. Secondly, this broad, curriculum-focused trend giving direction to the work of many teacher research groups does not isolate the curriculum from pedagogy nor ossify it, again in distinction to some of the uses of ‘curriculum’ we see in England.

In research and development underway at Central China Normal University, Professor Qiming Mao has based an intervention on these teacher research groups in a small sample of primary schools to see how they may (or may not) be useful in the context of pre-service teacher education as well as school-based curriculum development. By incorporating a school’s student teachers into these groups and allowing the school’s teachers to determine the focus of the teacher research group’s work, Professor Mao is studying what and how the teachers are learning and to what ends. Each group meeting is being video- and audio-recorded and he (and I) are using the D-analysis protocol developed by David Middleton at Loughborough University to analyse the interactional data.

teacher talking to class — The teacher begins the lesson

In one group meeting and associated lesson at a primary school in a large central China city, we observed a teacher planning to teach a lesson to (the equivalent of) a Year 5 class. The lesson we observed consisted of a short introduction (using Powerpoint and video clips) of the history of paper-making and then a short demonstration of how to use the materials the teacher had assembled to make paper. The class was then divided into groups (determined by the teacher) and the children started to make paper according to the teacher’s guidance. She intervened in each group’s work then, with an eye on the clock, started to get the students to clean up and pack away. With about 7 minutes left of the lesson, she then asked one child from each group to say something that they had learned about the process of making paper that would be useful to know if they tried again. And then the lesson ended and it was morning break and we all went outside to see the most spectacular but normal (I was assured) morning break I have ever seen….

The discussion and debate in the teacher research group that followed later in the day was unremarkable in two ways that I have encountered previously in China. First, the analysis of and feedback on the lesson from many of the teachers was brutal and unflinching in its genuinely open questioning. Second, when Professor Mao contributed to the discussion, his observations were met with the same brutal and unflinching critique. I have seen this response many times in China; the first time I was very anxious about the potential vulnerability of the observed teacher to the critique of her work (and it usually is a woman in Chinese primary schools). I needn’t have worried – and this cultural difference is something in which Professor Mao and I have become interested, comparatively.

The discussion was also remarkable in two ways, though. First, in that the close, shared observational focus on the lesson began with non-inferential judgements that were pedagogic in nature and shifted to the detailed deliberation of curriculum concepts and aims. What did the teacher want the students to learn? Was there a tension between a group activity focused on ‘making’ with the teacher’s avowedly historical aims for students’ learning? Were there missed opportunities in the lesson to raise issue of environmental sustainability (the paper being ‘made’ was, in effect, being recycled) – not in abstract terms but as an immediately useful question (the school was next to a rubbish dump and occasionally swarms of flies would invade the classrooms)? The discussion only ended when the siren went off to signal a lesson change

teacher res group — Teachers in the research group meeting room

Secondly, what became clear in talking to the student teachers at the end of this particular teacher research group meeting – and at the end of the sequence – was that they saw these meetings as an important way into participating in a professional discourse; as an opportunity to see teacher judgement and decision-making in action; and as a realisation that teacher judgement and decision-making are not technical exercises but value-laden ones in context.

What remains to be seen, however, is what is going on in the teacher research groups themselves and what traces of learning are evident in the interactional discourse. Although the Chinese context means this is not a ‘teacher-friendly’ intervention (i.e. one to which they are very likely going to be well disposed because it is new), the perceptions of the student teachers alone are not going to get us very far when trying to understand what is actually going on.

the posse — The CCNU posse/guides/translators/food-finders

Professor Mao’s research is ongoing and – fingers crossed – we will have an opportunity to talk about in at AERA next year.

Notes

I use the term ‘educational conservatives’ as it is clear that it is possible to hold views that might be characterised this way at the same time as describing oneself as politically liberal.
The photographs in this post are used with permission of the children, parents and school and the research approved by Central China Normal University.

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.

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 Sage Handbook of Research on Teacher Education

The Sage Handbook of Research on Teacher Education edited by D. Jean Clandinin and Jukka Husu has finally been published – and what a beautiful monster! Two volumes and so many authors I lost count. It is one of those research handbooks which will become a standard desktop reference but also a publication that not many people (myself included) will own a hard copy of. With an ‘educator’ discount it retails at £265 in print; and there is an e-book at around £150, depending on seller. So it is one that should be recommended to librarians in colleges and universities (done for KCL and HVL); and one for inter-library loan requests if you use a public library.

Jean and Jukka have done a fabulous job in organising such comprehensive coverage of research topics across the two volumes and combined this design with their meticulous editing. My favourite sections so far are the introductory section which sets out to ‘map the landscape’ of research in the field and then a later section about learning to teach ‘content’ (North American usage meaning, in the UK context, something like ‘subject knowledge’).

My chapter, with KCL colleague Meg Maguire, is about critical approaches to teacher education. It begins by discussing the sociological literature on critical pedagogy in teacher education (and does so critically, drawing on Elizabeth Ellsworth’s important essay ‘Why doesn’t this feel empowering?’) before looking at two traditions of critical pedagogy R&D in teacher ed: socioculturally-informed practice developing research; and anti-homophobia/queer pedagogy research. In 7000 words. It was tough.

As the title suggests, this isn’t a book for the bedside table nor is it one that you would necessarily plough through from page one to the end. But over two volumes, it does offer a wealth of entries on key research topics in the field. It’s a brilliant effort and wonderfully executed.

Two new articles on ‘The Uses of Poetry’

Having said several times recently that I haven’t done research in English Education/language/literacy for a while, I am reminded that, in fact, I have by the publication of two new journal articles on poetry. The articles arose out of the Arts and Humanities Research Council project I was CI on during my time at Brunel. Given how busy I was there, I don’t think that’s surprising. But it was interesting that, although I knew I had these two pieces coming out, I hadn’t connected them to English Education. Maybe here’s why.

In the article for the Journal of Aesthetic Education, ‘The Uses of Poetry: Renewing an Educational Understanding of a Language Art’, the brilliant philosopher Karen Simecek and I explore the various definitions of poetry or poetic modes of language use that have been dominant over the last thousand years or so in connection with formal education and human development. This paper also helped us elaborate a working definition of poetry that we could operationalize in our project. It shouldn’t be a surprise that we returned to the work of James Britton and some of the extraordinary work he was producing in the 1960s drawing on the philosophy of Langer and Rorty. Britton drew attention to the self-conscious ‘deviance’ (his word) of poetry in drawing attention to itself and its symbolic work.

For Changing English: Studies in Reading and Culture, Brunel’s Andrew Green, Karen and I replicated the experiment conducted by Jerome Bruner for Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. With a twist. In ‘Actual texts, possible meanings: The uses of poetry and the subjunctification of experience’, we compare the responses of a small sample of university students to hearing a poem, a literary short story and a newspaper report. We note, as Bruner did, the greater number of syntactic transformations the students made in their retellings of the short story compared to the news report. But we also noted a qualitative difference between their processing of the poem and the short story with the poem being more likely to produce expressions of contingency and complexity and even greater affordances of subjunctification than the short story. This was what we hoped to add to Bruner’s research.

These two papers are available to download from the Articles section of this website.

Both articles connect to my recent and current interests in the pedagogies of teacher education in that poetry presents a good example of a kind of knowledge that, in its true sense of being poetry (poetry as poetry), is deeply resistant to the commodification that is so prevalent in the GERM-infected education reform movement. Rather than teaching and learning how to deal with indeterminacy and uncertainty in meaning-making, reform tends to pin poetry down into the lowest-level things that can be easily ‘spotted’ and counted. So poetry is a good example of the kind of knowledge that has to be marginalized when short-term, easily-measurable gains in learning are prioritised. Poetry, as such a culturally significant mode of language use, presents considerable problems for reformist notions of teacher development and school improvement. As well as being deviant, it is highly disruptive.

The challenge of transformation in teacher education: New article in Acta Didactica Norge

‘Reforming’ teacher education is the go-to policy area in many countries around the world. You can have a bash at teachers (they’re not good enough) and university lecturers (they’re why teachers are not good enough) and also that ‘out-dated’ model of the welfare state where general taxation provides basic services for the general population in a relationship of democratic accountability and for the public good (‘how old-fashioned!’). You need some private providers who will do some ‘disruptive innovation’ (for which read ‘high risk codswallop that will, in the final analysis, be financially underwritten by the state when it inevitably goes south’). And while what I’ve just written may be mildly sarcastic in tone, it is undeniably the basis on which English governments have operated for at least 17 years.

But ‘reform’ means many different things. Norway is one of those countries also deeply interested in reform, especially with that highly successful Finnish neighbour. Norway has a dose of PISA envy like many countries but how they are choosing to reform teacher education (and under what, for them, is a right-wing government) stands in stark contrast to the unholy clusterfuck that is the recent White Paper in England. Far from trying to dismantle a system of public or community schools, abolish teaching qualifications, reduce university involvement, generally foul things up and fall over into a ditch, the Norwegian reforms – first mooted in 2010 and announced in 2014 to be implemented in 2017 (now that’s a difference too) – entrench and enhance the university contribution, challenge the universities to do better, reorganise and restructure parts of the higher education system and put practitioner research at the heart of professional preparation.

Yet, after over five years of working in the Norwegian system, I think they and us (here in England) suffer from the same problem: we haven’t worked out the relationship between the teaching profession and a bunch of academics in universities (teacher educators) who have an important relationship to that profession but are not it. In large part, I think it is a knowledge problem in that the knowledge that tends to get people from schools work in the university is not, in the end, valued by the higher education system (as useful as it is in the preparation of teachers) and the knowledge that is valued within the university rewards system is often assumed to be capable of being simply transferred or, at best, translated into schools. And when that doesn’t work, it is usually schools and teachers (who, remember, haven’t been prepared well by the universities in the first place, so the argument goes) that get the blame. The university researchers go all hoity-toity and remind us that the effect size was significant and it was just those pesky teachers’ lack of fidelity to the design that was the problem.

A special issue of the Norwegian journal Acta Didactica Norge has just been published on teacher education and teacher education reform with a range of fantastic articles by leading Norwegian researchers. There are analyses of pilots of the 2017 reforms and the development of the new five year Master’s degree for all primary school teachers. There is a great historical analysis of Norwegian teacher education curricula from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century that shows how control of the curriculum was lost by the profession to a point in 1965 when it was just one university (Oslo) that determined what teachers were taught (and not much about teaching, it seems). There are some very interesting papers on digital tools creating new dialogic spaces for teacher development. And also reports from projects led by ProTed, the Norwegian national centre of excellence in teacher development led by Andreas Lund. I was asked to write an epilogue for the special issue that responded to the articles and drew, briefly, on the international comparison.

In making the argument I do in the article (which you can download for free from the Acta Didactica Norge website and also from the Articles section of this site), I draw on the work of Paul Carlile who works in organisational theory and his ideas about the complex processes that are required when different actors have to work together across complex boundaries. So far, I argue, we have managed to get new teachers to do some pretty difficult translation work quite successfully and the risk of the Norwegian reforms is that this situation will continue, with the struggle to translate now encoded in a Masters’ thesis. But the potential for genuine transformation is a challenge for both Norway and England and requires us to work through that question about the relationship between one of the largest and most important professions in society and a group of academics in the increasingly specialised and competitive environment of universities.