Joanna McIntyre

Teacher fabrication as an impediment to professional learning and development: the external mentor antidote

This paper reports findings from a study of the work of ‘external mentors’ associated with three programmes of support for the professional learning and development (PLD) of secondary science teachers in England. Focusing on outcomes from analyses of data derived from interviews with 47 mentees and 19 mentors, the paper supports and extends existing research on the construction and maintenance of fabrications in schools, and identifies omissions in the evidence base relating to teacher PLD. It is argued that the kinds of fabrications revealed by the teachers interviewed for this research present a serious impediment to their opportunities for school-based PLD, and that the deployment of external mentors (i.e. those not based in the same schools as the teachers they support) can provide a potentially powerful antidote to this. A number of implications for policy and practice in teacher professional learning and development are discussed. Amongst these, it is argued that more teachers should have the opportunity to access external support for their PLD, and that policy makers and head teachers should seek to reduce the degree to which teachers’ ‘performance’ is observed, inspected and assessed.

Supporting Beginner Teacher Identity Development: External Mentors and the Third Space.

This paper reports findings from a study of support provided by non-school-based mentors of secondary science teachers in England. It focuses on the identity development of beginning teachers of physics, some of the recipients of the mentoring. Drawing on the analysis of interview and case study data, and utilising third space theory, the authors show how external mentors (experienced, subject specialist teachers who were not based in the same schools as the teachers they were supporting) facilitated opportunities for mentees to negotiate and shape their professional identities, and made valuable contributions to three distinct and important aspects of beginning teachers’ identity development. The paper argues that non-judgemental support from external mentors enhances beginner teachers’ professional learning and identity development through the creation of a discursive ‘third’ space in which mentees are able to openly discuss professional learning and development needs, discuss alternatives to performative norms and take risks in classrooms. Opportunities for beginner teachers to engage in such activities are often restricted in and by the current climate of schooling and teacher education within England.

Continuity, support, togetherness and trust: findings from an evaluation of a university‐administered early professional development programme for teachers in England

This article discusses the evaluation of a unique university‐based early professional development (EPD) programme in England that enabled newly and recently qualified teachers to have continued contact with their initial teacher preparation provider. The programme was designed to enhance the induction, EPD and retention of beginning teachers of secondary science, graduating from the university’s Postgraduate Certificate of Education initial teacher preparation course, through the provision of development days and the growth of a support network involving beginning and more experienced teachers. The main findings are that the programme helped to compensate for limitations of existing induction and EPD provision and to provide continuity and coherence between the beginning teachers’ initial teacher preparation and EPD. The new teachers perceived it to be a distinctive and strong programme that fostered reflective practice and addressed the emotional and affective side of teacher development. The findings are discussed within their broader research and policy contexts, and some implications for policy, practice and further research are considered.

Why they sat still: the ideas and values of long‐serving teachers in challenging inner‐city schools in England

Within the UK there are grave concerns about retention and attrition rates within the teaching profession, particularly in challenging schools. These are compounded by worries about the gap that will be left as long‐serving teachers reach retirement age. This article is about the working lives of long‐serving teachers in three high‐poverty urban schools in England. In a climate in which teaching is tightly controlled and suffering from problems of retention and recruitment, the teachers discuss intensely personal and emotional commitments to their work‐place. Qualitative in‐depth interviews with 20 long‐serving teachers, all of whom had management responsibilities, are used to explore their lives and careers. These histories evoke a strong sense of the ideas and values that make up their personal and professional identities. These are then contrasted with the ideas and values in officially mandated views of progression within the profession. Within the stories of their professional lives, the teachers talk about the emotional dimensions of their work and the emotional ties of their ‘work‐place’. The article concludes that recognition of the emotional dimensions within teachers’ work at an official level could go some way to helping with recruitment and retention in schools facing challenging circumstances.

Possibility in impossibility? Working with beginning teachers of English in times of change

Abstract Beginning teachers of English are entering a profession in which their subject is increasingly framed according to prescriptive models of literacy. This is happening at a time of shift away from university provision towards school‐led training. We offer a spatialised theorisation of the ways in which beginning teachers of English have drawn from the balance of practical and theoretical approaches encountered in their qualifying year to engage with tensions between policy and practice. We suggest that university provides important interstitial spaces in which they can explore some of these tensions and navigate pedagogies, principles and values. In doing so, they are negotiating alternatives, which, we argue, represent powerful potential for their future within the profession.

‘It’s not what it looks like. I’m Santa’: Connecting Community through Film

The lived experiences of young people are becoming increasingly marginalised within the narrowly defined curricula of neoliberal contexts. Many young people are also cast within the media according to deficit discourses of youth, which contributes to the fragmentation of communities and the limitation of interaction between generations. This article describes a film project in which young people living in an ex-mining community in the Midlands of England worked in and with their community to create a representation of where they live. As part of the process, the young filmmakers did more than connect to other people’s memories as repositories of information; both as process and as product, their film can be seen to connect shared narratives of people and place, across time and space. We argue that this project offers a timely opportunity to reflect upon the ways in which we understand learning in and out of English classrooms.

Poverty, Schooling, and Beginning Teachers Who Make a Difference: A Case Study from England

Education policy makers in England have, over the last 30 years, radically changed schooling. The introduction of a national curriculum, national testing regimes, school inspections and school league tables has been at the heart of these changes as they constitute the basis for claims for and concerns about school and system improvement. The pre-service education of teachers has also been transformed during this period. Once dominated by time spent in higher education, teacher ‘training’ as it is known, now consists of diverse routes, all much more school-based. The latest policy shift to ‘teaching schools’ and the ‘school direct’ route intentionally makes universities even more marginal to teacher preparation. At the same time, policymakers, schools and university faculties of education remain concerned about children from low-income families whose life opportunities are not enhanced by educational success. The 30 year policy settlement of marketization and privatization has produced some overall increase in the mass level of education but has not shifted the tenacious correlation between parental income and levels of formal education and educational attainment. Teacher educators in higher education and in schools have little time or space to address this question directly. In this chapter we present a case study of the teacher education programme which is deliberately designed to address questions of poverty and educational disadvantage—Teach First, a ‘leadership development’ scheme which takes ‘high calibre graduates’ into the most disadvantaged schools in the country.

Participatory parity in schooling and moves towards ordinariness: a comparison of refugee education policy and practice in England and Sweden

ABSTRACT Within the current global refugee crisis this paper emphasises the fundamental role of education in facilitating the integration of young new arrivals. It argues that a humanitarian problem of such scale requires a commensurate humanitarian response in the form of socially-just educational policies and practices in resettlement contexts within Europe. Utilising the theoretical concepts, ‘participatory parity’ (Fraser) and ‘resumption of an ordinary life’ (Kohli), we explore educational policy-making in Sweden and England, noting how the framing of these policies indicates how different nation states view their role in the global migration crisis. In England, child refugees are rendered invisible and not a legitimate focus of national educational policy, whereas in Sweden they are foregrounded in policy discourse though not necessarily in policy enactment. The paper concludes that newly arrived future citizens of Europe require socially-just policy and practice to best serve their own and their resettlement context’s best interests.

Silenced voices: the disappearance of the university and the student teacher in teacher education policy discourse in England

Abstract The teacher preparation landscape in England has been subject to radical policy change. Since 2010, the policy agenda has repositioned initial teacher preparation as a craft best learnt through observation and imitation of teachers in school settings. Simultaneously, a market-based approach to the recruitment of pre-service teachers has led to significant changes for prospective entrants to the profession. In the enactment of policy between 2010 and 2015, the roles of universities and voices of prospective teachers were systematically silenced. Using critical discourse analysis, we demonstrate how both actors have been positioned in, and have accommodated and resisted, the current policy discourses. These findings highlight the importance of problematising and understanding these emerging issues at local and international levels.