Introduction: how have we ended up here?
Teacher educators in England are currently caught up in what James Noble Rogers called the āperfect stormā which surrounds the future direction and position of university education departmentsā involvement in teacher education in England (Maddern, 2012). (It is important to emphasise the English context as the situation is different for university teacher educators in the rest of the UK.) England has become increasingly a significant outlier (Beauchamp et al., 2015), partly as a predictable outcome of political devolution facilitating greater divergence in education policy across the UK nations, but largely as a result of the political desire of the recent Coalition government to frame teacher education as craft-based training). The underlying conditions for the perfect storm in English teacher education are determined by this significant political and ideological push towards a privileging of practice in the form of a school-led model of teacher training combined with new allocation methodologies linked, in turn, to a new Ofsted inspection framework with associated increased demands (2015). The result is a greater uncertainty as to the viability of existing PGCE and mainstream provision offered by universities. As Ellis et al. in their research into the Work of Teacher Educators (WoTE) comment, āthe general direction of travel is clear: higher educationās role in teacher education is under threat and, if not entirely extinguished, is in the process of minimalisationā (2013, p.278).
As an experienced teacher educator and manager in an English university, I am interested in the implications and consequences, both physical and philosophical, of this deliberate and unduly hasty repositioning of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) into a school-based setting. Why is it that our professional jurisdiction is singled out, over all other professions, for such attack? Although the positioning of teacher education has certainly been the constant subject of political debate and desire for reform over the last thirty years, the pace and drive of the current repositioning and the challenge to our professional authority are unprecedented.
The reality of this recent and radical repositioning forces a series of linked questions which university teacher educators must deliberate and address. Firstly, who has, and who should have, the right and professional jurisdiction to educate and work with beginning teachers ā to what extent should it be university teacher educators? Secondly, how much of the power to decide what, where and how best to educate beginning teachers should rest within the profession and how much with politicians? Lastly, does the teaching profession include the teacher educators? This final question raises a series of related questions about the nature of university teacher educators as boundary spanners. By nature working at the interface between school and university, are they accepted as part of the teaching profession or seen as part of a wider university academia?
The features of a teacher educator
These questions may indicate a slight degree of schizophrenia but reflect the common experience of many university teacher educators, who can feel uncertain where they are positioned and may to some extent feel undervalued by both university and school colleagues. As Reynolds et al. (2013, p.307) comment:
[The teacher educatorsā role], with its multiple facets of practitioner interaction, has the potential to collide with universitiesā traditional role of research and research exposition, which tends to ignore teaching and service, and also the schoolās role as the advocate of practice, which tends to ignore research.
Murray and Male (2005) collected data from a range of new teacher educators across their first years in universities and discovered that most struggled to establish their new professional identities and align what Southworth (1995) refers to as the āsituational selfā, formed through interactions with others, and the āsubstantial selfā which consists of a core of self-defining beliefs resistant to change. Indeed, Murray and Male concluded that the development of a new professional identity as a teacher educator often took at least three years. They noted that the move from what they defined as āfirst-orderā to āsecond-orderā practitioners caused the teacher educators to move from experts to novices as they shifted from the first-order setting of the school to the second-order setting of the university. Most teacher educators came with considerable expertise and a successful career in school behind them, but they entered the world of the university with little research experience and knowledge of how to work with adult learners or within the structures of the university. Their task was to come āup to speedā quickly and develop pedagogies for working with adult beginning teachers whilst simultaneously becoming research active. Both of these new aspects of the role of teacher educator bring challenges and require significant adaptations from any previous roles held in school. Thus, the role of the university teacher educator is an interesting one with inbuilt tensions resulting from this shift to second-order activity. As Taylor (1983, p.41) summarises:
Teacher education is of its very nature Janus-faced. In the one direction it faces classroom and school, with their demands for relevance, practicality, competence, techniques. In the other it faces the university and the world of research, with their stress on scholarship, theoretical fruitfulness and disciplinary rigour.
It is interesting to speculate that perhaps this requirement to face in both directions and develop the aptitudes needed to successfully take on the mantle of boundary spanner may cause a degree of insecurity in teacher educators. Perhaps this is part of the reason why university teacher educators have not always been as robust as they could have been in their defence of why they should maintain a professional jurisdiction and the authority to play an intrinsic role in the education of future teachers.
The features of the professional
Pam Grossman (2008) has explored this threat to teacher educators in an interesting and challenging article entitled āResponding to our critics: from crisis to opportunity in research on teacher educationā. It is hard hitting in its findings, which are a clarion call to the profession:
University-based teacher educators, and the profession of education more broadly, are facing a sharp attack on their ability and their right to control the preparation of teachersā¦ . University-based teacher educators are dangerously close to losing their responsibility for overseeing the preparation of new teachers.
(Grossman, 2008, p.10)
Grossman (2008) acknowledges that the challenges are not new but argues that what is new is the intensity of the challenge to our professional jurisdiction during the past two decades. Her article was written in 2008 and was based on her experiences in the field in the United States, but they are equally applicable and indeed more acutely relevant to the English context, where the pace of change and challenge since 2008 have exponentially intensified. Her analysis of professional jurisdiction is based on the work of Andrew Abbott (1988), who identified certain areas of effectiveness which a profession must demonstrate in order to retain its authority to train the next generation. There are three aspects Abbott identifies as key for professions, which he views as dynamic, interacting systems. Firstly is the requirement of effectiveness in the field, secondly the quality of the academic knowledge produced that supports the profession, and thirdly the responsibility for induction of newcomers to the profession. For the university teacher educator, this can be translated into a further set of key questions which must be attended to.
Key questions for the university teacher educator
A fundamental question for university teacher educators to address concerns the difference we make in preparing beginning professionals. What is the additionality of the university experience? What added value do we offer? If students are secure in their subject knowledge and enthusiastic to learn to teach, is this not sufficient? It is in the eyes of the former Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove and his schoolsā minister Nick Gibb, still in post in 2016. Nick Gibb was quoted in The Guardian within three days of taking up his post in 2010 as saying: āI would rather have a physics graduate from Oxbridge without a PGCE teaching in a school than a physics graduate from one of the rubbish universities with a PGCEā (Gibb, cited in Furlong, 2013). It is difficult to be certain who the insult is aimed at ā is it the rubbish university degree or the subsequent PGCE from a rubbish university? ā but on both fronts it is insulting and should be vigorously rebutted.
With the emergence of the School Direct route, universities have been involved in many conversations with schools that reflect a new power dynamic created and encouraged by the government. The discourse is that of the marketplace, schools are the customers and universities competing service providers. There is an increased requirement for universities to justify what they do that schools canāt do ā and canāt do better. Even where schools recognise the advantage of the Mastersā credits associated with a PGCE provided by the university, many appear to want this delivered in a minimalist way ā in how few days can it be covered? Are written assignments a necessary requirement? The university accreditation of a PGCE is seen in terms of currency rather than perhaps its true value. Some of this is inevitable as schools are also forced into a business model and encouraged by the government to shop around for their provider. Value for money, with an emphasis on reducing costs, is the critical factor in decision-making for many teaching schools, who are tasked over time to become more sustainable with decreasing direct government funding. This creates a darker side for any university director involved with School Direct, where conversations can be focused on costs rather than on the value of the work. Fortunately, this is not the case with all schools; many teachers and school leaders do see the value in the contribution and greater involvement of a university working in partnership. But it still begs the question of where teacher educators have gone wrong as we cannot escape the reality that many schools do feel confident that they are better placed to deliver the professional training for the next generation of teachers. They do not appear to appreciate the significance of what universities can offer in educating beginning professionals and the potential of their work on the profession as a whole.
However, perhaps more disturbingly, there are some teachers and schools in the School Direct model who have taken on the new role of teacher educator not because of their confidence or belief that they can do the training better but rather because of the overt political pressures. Some school leaders have admitted that a school-dominated training route is not necessarily the best route, and certainly not in its early state of inception as School Direct, but have simply succumbed to the political directives and the DfE drive to develop a school-led model of initial teacher training. The pressures on teaching schools with the introduction of School Direct have been considerable, with both the NCTL and DfE representatives initially indicating to schools that there would be no university-based routes in a few years ā only School Direct. This is coupled with a requirement for any school with teaching school status to focus on leading āthe development of school-led initial teacher training through School Direct or by gaining accreditation as an Initial Teacher Training providerā (and note it is ITT Initial Teacher Training rather than ITE Initial Teacher Education); this is the first of the six core areas of responsibility for teaching schools (National College for Teaching and Leadership, 2014).
The political thrust for school-led initial teacher training cannot be viewed as anything other than a direct challenge to the authority and expertise of university-based routes and one which teacher educators must address by articulating more clearly what additionality they bring in developing critical, resilient professionals. As university teacher educator...