Rosaleen Murphy

A rising tide meets a perfect storm: new accountabilities in teaching and teacher education in Ireland

This paper examines the emergence of new accountabilities in teaching and teacher education in Ireland in the 15 years period 1997–2012. Framing accountability in terms of the three main approaches to it globally in education systems, that is, compliance with regulations, adherence to professional norms and attainment of results/outcomes, we identify significant changes, particularly, in compliance- and results-driven accountability. A ‘rising tide’ of accountability, due to the interrelated influences of the European higher education space, education legislation and professional self-regulation policies (i.e. Teaching Council), is evident since the late 1990s. This was punctuated by a ‘perfect storm’ in 2010 comprising ‘bad news’ from PISA 2009, the economic bailout and strategic leadership at a system level. The cumulative impact of the ‘rising tide’ and ‘perfect storm’ is evident in how they reframed both ‘to whom’ and ‘for what’ accountability in teacher education relates. Significantly, the new accountabilities in teaching and teacher education reflect a move towards the dominant global education reform movement (Sahlberg 2007) with its emphasis on standardisation, narrow focus on literacy and numeracy and higher stakes accountability.

Novice teachers as ‘invisible’ learners

The present study focuses on the way novice teachers, who are part of a one-year postgraduate diploma in post-primary teaching, have opted to negotiate their status as school teachers. In particular, it asks why novice teachers prefer to hide as they scramble to learn how to teach. On the basis of three separate interviews spaced out though the teaching year 2009 (January, March, May), a team of university-based tutors probed for student reactions to competence-based issues. Adopting a sociocultural perspective, this study drew upon roughly 10% of the pre-service student cohort (n = 17), each in a different placement location. The study looked, in particular, at their negotiating power, particularly the effect of school supports for their reality as learners. Findings suggest that without quality mentoring support, our pre-service teachers prefer to become ‘invisible’ as learners. Three pre-professional stances are identified: fragile, robust and competitive. The key finding is that none of these pre-professional stances mitigate pre-service students’ lack of negotiating power. On the other hand, informal school-based supports can help students considerably.

Authoring oneself and being authored as a competent teacher

What kind of self is being made available and denied to student teachers as they participate in life in their teaching practice schools? In addressing this question empirically, the article seeks to show the forms of meaning being made and experienced by student teachers and the identities that are authored, authorised and constrained. A sociocultural perspective on professional learning, with its emphasis on participation agency and identity, illuminates aspects of the process of becoming a teacher and highlights the tension that is there for students within available meanings. Having to opt to be a teacher at the expense of a learner identity constrains what is available to be appropriated in professional settings with potential consequences for how beginner teachers frame themselves, their learners and their colleagues.

‘Learningplace’ Practices and Pre-service Teacher Education in Ireland: Knowledge Generation, Partnerships and Pedagogy

Informed by key ideas from the learning sciences (i.e. metaphors, resources and levels of learning), this chapter addresses some challenges in pre-service teacher education in Ireland and identifies a number of potentially generative concepts from workplace learning research that might advance policy and practice. The main point of this chapter is that, more often than not, work rather than learning appears to be the leading activity in schools during initial teacher education, and that reframing the school as a ‘learningplace’ is central to both teacher education reform and widening the scope of workplace learning research. The challenges are: (1) invisibility-visibility of learners and learning; (2) solo and assisted performance; (3) reframing the knowledge-practice relationship; (4) school-university partnership: which model(s)?; and (5) advancing learning at the system level. In light of workplace learning research, ‘generative concepts’ from the research literature are identified that might inform future research, policy and practice.

Looking Like a Teacher: Fashioning an Embodied Identity through "Dressage".

This article makes a case for bringing in the body from the margins of research on teacher education. In doing so, it considers the personal and socio cultural issues reported by seventeen pre-service teachers (PSTs), who are part of a one-year post graduate diploma in post-primary teaching, when learning to embody and fashion teacher identity. The article focuses on embodiment drawing on qualitative interview data from a large-scale government-funded study on initial teacher education. Drawing on Foucault’s general theory of dressage, at the center of which reigns the notion of disciplining and applying the methodology of critical discourse analysis, this article presents three themes tethered to the analysable and manipulable teacher body, namely dressage as compliance, dressage as discipline and dressage as performance. For PSTs, ‘looking like a teacher’ and dressage as a practice of power is a significant part of the fabric of their professional school life.

Knowing how to feel about the Other? Student teachers, and the contingent role of embodiments in educational inequalities

This paper explores affective dimensions to the positioning of teachers within persistent educational inequalities. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’, we argue that inequalities are not maintained through how teachers and student teachers ‘feel about’ ‘different’ students per se. Rather, the very possibility of becoming a particular subject and object of feeling is itself already part of the production of learner differences and inequalities. We examine how affects circulate to shape particular objects (e.g. a teacher’s physical body) and collective attachments to particular signs (e.g. ‘the national teaching body’). We argue that contemporary changes to Irish and European teacher education policy reinforce rather than question educational inequalities. They produce and align ‘shock’ at student underachievement with teachers’ physical and collective bodies, while ‘sympathetically’ responsibilising teachers to professionalise in order to cope with or compensate for persistently ‘different’ and/or underachieving students. To explain how this process is lived and resisted, an analysis of interviews with our own student teachers explores how the affective economy which constitutes teacher education may become contingently directed in socially just or unjust ways.

The emergence of reading literacy in post-primary teacher education: from the background to the foreground

While recognising the fact that historically teacher education and adolescent literacy are two fields that have had limited intellectual contact, the development of reading literacy is increasingly now accepted internationally as a core responsibility of all teachers and teacher educators. Adopting a socio-cultural perspective, this paper, drawn from the Learning to Teach Study, focused on the beliefs, knowledge and experiences regarding reading literacy of Irish post-primary student teachers on one initial teacher education (ITE) programme. The data were collected through three interviews with each of 17 student teachers. Results suggest that the surveyed student teachers had some concerns about their own literacy, had narrow conceptions of literacy, tended not to see it as their responsibility, held a minimal threshold view of literacy and viewed new digital technologies as a resource and motivator for their students’ literacy learning. Results are discussed in terms of how student teachers’ knowledge of literacy in ITE programmes could be reframed, extended and deepened.