Paul O'Hara

Collaborative partnerships in community education

This paper reports on a study into collaborative partnerships between community educators and the variety of partners with whom they work. It suggests that, despite a policy imperative promoting partnership working, collaboration is only one of many solutions to the problem of delivering effective services and argues that there are a number of circumstances when it is best avoided. It contends that partnerships need to build a meta-strategy that is designed to allow all relevant interests to explore possible ways forward whilst, at the same time (a) advancing their own mission, and (b) building up the capacity (trust, understanding, synergy) to engage in effective and sustained collaborative working. Finally, it is concluded that the power relations in collaborative partnerships are critical and partners must take account of the exclusionary and inclusionary practices often built on deficit ideologies that these generate.

Student Perceptions of the Way that they are Supervised during Work Experience: an instrument and some findings

ABSTRACT This paper is intended as a contribution to the debate and evaluation activity which in the UK is following Dearings recommendation that more work experience should be provided for more higher education students. The paper gives an instrument for researching students’ perceptions of the roles their workplace supervisors play. Two surveys using the instrument and involving a total of 669 students on different courses in the field of teacher education are reported. In the surveys, the responses of many students suggested that they had received ‘good’ (i.e. theoretically desirable) supervision in the workplace but this was not the case for all students. There were for example clear differences across courses and, in addition, the course whose students appeared to have experienced the least desirable kind of supervision subsequently suffered the highest rate of student drop‐out. In contrast, students who had apparently received the ‘best’ kind of workplace supervision tended to be happier with their...

Perceived and actual levels of knowledge about language amongst primary and secondary student teachers: do they know what they think they know?

Previous research into student teachers’ knowledge about language concluded that overall the picture was fairly bleak. Such research focused on the knowledge about language that the student teachers possessed when they moved from secondary school education into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. However, few studies have investigated the impact of the increasing demands on teachers, made in curricular documents throughout the last 20 years, to improve students’ abilities in language and whether student teachers’ knowledge about language had improved as a result of these curricular imperatives. This article reports on research into perceived and actual levels of knowledge about language conducted in a university in Scotland with students training to be primary teachers and secondary English and modern language teachers. Findings reveal that student teachers’ levels of linguistic knowledge, as measured by the instrument employed in this study, are generally low contrasting with their own more positive perceptions of their competence.

Making Placement More Successful

In the professions, well-known examples of placement are those which occur in connection with legal, medical, engineering, teaching, pharmacy and business training. The growing interest in placements of all kinds in the 1980s was reflected not only in numerous reports about it from the professions which had traditionally used placements as a training method, but also in a growing number of publications which helped employers to organise placements for completely new groups of learners. These new groups of learners included school children (DES, 1988) and their teachers (DTI, 1988). In this period, for example, the DTI Teacher Placement Programme was launched as a major government initiative in the field of placement. Its aim was to have school

Placement as part of higher education

Many students in Britain, especially those training for the professions, do parts of their courses in the form of placements in the field. Most such placements are compulsory. During placements students are the joint concern of their tutors on the campus and their mentors in the field. The placements on the different courses seem dramatically different. For example, some placements are in primary schools, some in hospital wards, some in factory pharmacies and some in electrical power stations. This study shows, however, that despite such obvious differences in the placement settings, student feelings about placement can be remarkably similar. For staff whose courses include placement there are issues which they could usefully discuss in common.