Lori Beckett

‘Trust the teachers, Mother!’: The Leading Learning project in Leeds:

This article is concerned to respond to recent UK governments’ attitudes to teachers, who are predominantly women, and who are denied a voice and sense of professionalism. It looks to the role of teacher research in school decision-making, including school improvement, historically in England, which set a pioneering example in years before the Thatcher government, and in Australia, where it became a central logistical feature in generations of ‘poverty programs’, as well as the current conjuncture. It documents recent efforts to build school–university partnerships for school improvement geared to support teachers’ knowledge-building about working with disadvantaged pupils who are disengaged and under-achieving. It maps the educational political context, framed by the global neo-liberal policy agenda, and charts efforts to support school staff develop a research perspective on the complexities of schools’ work in a system geared to a relentless focus on attainment targets, performance, and school league tables. It develops a responsive theoretical-strategic framework for a local north of England knowledge-building programme of continuing professional development (CPD) with optional accreditation, intended to counter the system’s lack of a broad and creative pedagogical ‘imaginary’. The resultant project is inspired by a democratic impulse and progressive social justice goals to facilitate learning about what this Leeds network of schools needs to be doing itself to address issues of concern about pupils marked by poverty and deprivation.

Analysing the present: drawing on the legacy of Vere Foster in public policy debate on futures of schools

This paper sets out a framing analysis for a public policy debate on the future of schools that resonates with practitioners in teaching and teacher education on the island of Ireland, north and south, but also in other countries. This is informed by a democratic impulse to facilitate public policy debates, particularly on the ways schools and higher education institutions are directed and constrained by budget cuts and the shrinking of public funding in this age of austerity and gross inequalities. This is also informed by a need for policy learning about global neoliberal agendas, free-market capitalism and its push towards profit-making schools in systems that are deregulated but experience tighter centralized control, which can result in the domination and control of teachers’ work by politicians, corporate-funded think-tanks, entrepreneurs and business managers. Even though Ireland boasts checks and balances in the form of current structures and education legislation in both jurisdictions, the global financial crisis and the collapse of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ together with the ‘troika’ bail-out and Ireland’s exit from the troika in tandem with the unravelling of the common economic model built up over the last three decades have troubled the constituent social and political settlements with regard to teaching and teacher education. The authors also take inspiration from Vere Foster (1819–1900), an Anglo-Irish gentleman, philanthropist and ‘social worker’ with the poor in post-famine Ireland, as well as a significant social campaigner renowned for his contribution to emigration and education. His ideas, generated at a time of great social upheaval, can be reworked to be appropriate in the Ireland of today to address the neoliberal agenda that has brought the Republic of Ireland economy to the brink of disaster. It is argued that imaginative responses about future possibilities for teaching and teacher education, their form, regulation and accountability are but a few of the terms needed for public policy debate that engages the profession on the type of schooling that would best meet the needs of Irish society now and into the future.

Learning the Price of Poverty across the UK.

In 2016, the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Commission on Poverty and Policy Advocacy brought together several academics from across the four jurisdictions of the UK already engaged in work on poverty, education and schooling. The aim of this BERA Commission was to build a network of research-active practitioners across the UK and, internationally, to engage in knowledge building about poverty and multiple factors of deprivation as these find expression in education and schooling. The Commission also aimed to facilitate counter discourses to be voiced and articulated in contrast to the dominant pathologising discourses of poor people and their education. The Commission therefore addressed the question: what can research tell us about the ways that different devolved policy contexts impact on the learning and well-being of young people living in poverty? This article describes the methodology used by the Commission to bring together researchers, policymakers, practitioners and children and young people to learn about the price of poverty in education and to reflect on the implications for policy. In so doing, the article addresses some challenges, opportunities and outcomes in terms of knowledge production, as well as implications for critical scholarship, with a focus on poverty and education.

Teachers and Teacher Unions in a Globalised World : History, theory and policy in Ireland

Teachers and Teacher Unions in a Globalised World asks a series of pressing questions of teacher educators, teachers and teacher unions worldwide in this era of global capitalism. As governments around the world support austerity politics in the face of financial meltdowns, social inequalities, terrorist threats, climate catastrophe, wars and mass migrations, the book questions whether practitioners in teaching and teacher education are succumbing to pressures to dismantle their nation-state systems of education. The authors present a clearly argued case in Ireland for teachers and teacher educators organising to realise their moral and social responsibilities of free and fair schooling for all when it is most needed, as well as insisting on policy debates about a free publicly funded school system. At a time when teachers are feeling overwhelmed with workload and frustrated by the visible turning of events away from the historical record, the book emphasises the importance of practitioner research in informing decisions about a strategic and democratic way forward for education around the globe. Teachers and Teacher Unions in a Globalised World will be of great interest to academics and researchers in the field of education, as well as teacher educators, practitioners and policymakers.

A ‘usable past’ of teacher education in England: history in JET’s anniversary issue

Abstract The recent JET Anniversary Virtual Special Issue, abbreviated here to JET@40, reproduced its very first editorial with selected articles from Britain and abroad published in subsequent decades. The journal first came into being as a response to damning criticism of the profession via government-sponsored reports and reviews but also to encourage informed debate with particular focus on notions of ‘good teaching’ and the ‘good teacher’. In this paper, we engage with selected contributions in JET@40 to tease out an historical map for teacher education. The task is to glean a sense of the past which resonates with our co-developed, research-informed teacher education programme, and gives insight to a lack of institutional and political support to encourage teacher research activity that interrogates the effects of poverty and cumulative multiple deprivation on disadvantaged students’ lives, learning and urban schooling experiences. Our argument is that JET@40 not only provides us with an indication of the best of what is known and practised but also a ‘usable past’ or history of specific professional insights to inform debate about possibilities and predicaments in our own teacher education programme.

Overcoming stereotypes, discovering hidden capitals

This article presents a model of teacher research supported by academic partners to develop a better understanding of the barriers to education faced by young people growing up in poverty. It critiques politicians’ demands for teachers to ‘close the gap’ for ignoring the cumulative intergenerational effects of deprivation. The authors explain how a simplistic ‘craft’ version of teaching has tended to reduce initial teacher education in England to training in the pragmatics of curriculum ‘delivery’ and policy implementation, leaving teachers theoretically and practically ill-prepared to deal with extremes of inequality. Finally, it presents a pilot research project designed to see beyond statistical labels and into the particularities of students’ lives out of school, in order to reveal not only the realities of deprivation but also potential sources of cultural and social capital in their extended families and neighbourhoods.