Viv Ellis

Something more to tell you: gay, lesbian or bisexual young people's experiences of secondary schooling

How do young people who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (lgb) experience secondary schooling? How do they feel that questions of sexuality are dealt with in the curriculum and do they find this treatment helpful? This article presents the findings of a project that replicated Trenchard and Warren’s 1984 study, Something to tell you. The findings are analysed and some suggestions are made as to changes in lgb‐identifying people’s experiences of schooling from 1984 to 2001. Finally, the article considers these changes in relation to the question of the ‘effect’ of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988.

Impoverishing experience: the problem of teacher education in England

Pre‐service teacher education in England has been essentially school‐based since 1992. The article offers a critique of this design from the perspective of a practitioner and researcher working in one of its most influential schemes. The fundamental problem described concerns an impoverished understanding of experience that underpins how beginning teachers are intended to learn in schools. The problem is not one of evaluating experience as adequate in terms of exemplary practices, but about the capacity within the teacher education system for critically examining the meaning of experience in order to develop professional knowledge. The article suggests that the ontological and epistemological dimensions of experience need to be brought into a dialogue if the potential of experiential learning for pre‐service teachers is to be realised.

Reenergising Professional Creativity from a CHAT Perspective: Seeing Knowledge and History in Practice.

This article offers a critical examination of aspects of a practice- and theory-developing intervention in the teacher education setting in England designed as a variation of Developmental Work Research. A positive case is argued for the distinctiveness of such cultural-historical activity theory [CHAT-] informed interventions and some points of contrast are drawn with the British tradition of educational action research. In describing the practice-developing intervention, the twin focus on seeing knowledge and history in human activity systems is advanced as two dimensions of CHATs distinctive approach, with the goal of stimulating and studying the emergence of professional creativity. Creativity under this interpretation is defined as the perception and analysis of opportunities for learning within the social situation of development and the production of new conceptual tools and approaches to the social organisation of work. Professional creativity is advanced as a much needed capacity among teachers in industrial workplaces influenced by the techniques of New Public Management. Common ground between CHAT and action research approaches is seen in their optimistic and modernist commitments to progress, and CHAT-framed interventions, like action research approaches, are presented as part of an evolving intellectual project.

A difficult realisation: the proletarianisation of higher education-based teacher educators

Written collaboratively with research participants, this article reports the main findings of the Work of Teacher Education project that studied the labour of 13 higher education-based teacher educators in England and Scotland over the course of a year. The priority of maintaining relationships with schools (and between schools and student teachers) is noted and ‘relationship maintenance’ is advanced as a defining characteristic of teacher educators’ work. Policy changes and their impact on institutional structures and roles, variations in organisational arrangements and research activity are also discussed. The paper concludes by arguing that a new conceptualisation of the work of teacher educators as academic work is essential for the discipline and higher education institutions as a whole.

Connecting Does Not Necessarily Mean Learning: Course Handbooks as Mediating Tools in School-University Partnerships

Partnerships between schools and universities in England use course handbooks to guide student teacher learning during long field experiences. Using data from a yearlong ethnographic study of a postgraduate certificate of education programme in one English university, the function of course handbooks in mediating learning in two high school subject departments (history and modern foreign languages) is analyzed. Informed by Cultural Historical Activity Theory, the analysis focuses on the handbooks as mediating tools in the school-based teacher education activity systems. Qualitative differences in the mediating functions of the handbooks-in-use are examined and this leads to a consideration of the potential of such tools for teacher learning in school–university partnerships. Following Zeichner’s call for rethinking the relationships between schools and universities, the article argues that strong structural connections between different institutional sites do not necessarily enhance student teacher learning.

Sexualities and Schooling in England After Section 28: Measuring and Managing “At-Risk” Identities

ABSTRACT In England, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 came to be seen as a powerful symbol of the oppression of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) young people and their teachers. This article offers a reflective critique of research I undertook just prior to the repeal of Section 28 by Tony Blairs Labour Government in 2003. My research tried to measure changes in young LGB peoples experience of schooling since 1984. I situate this research partly in a tradition of “political arithmetic” and reflect on the relationships between this form of research–that to some extent has sought to quantify young peoples victim status–and government policy and guidance published since Section 28s repeal in which sexualities have either become erased and unspoken or have become what I refer to (after Fuss) as strategically essentialised. Looking to the future and the kind of policy and curriculum development that the young people in my research sample might argue for, I suggest that attention to homophobia must be combined with a pedagogic focus on heteronormativity. This poses a challenge in a difficult policy space where market-oriented, neo-liberal educational reforms seek to define certain disruptive identities as “at risk.”

Teaching Other People's Children, Elsewhere, for a While: The Rhetoric of a Travelling Educational Reform.

Abstract Teach for All is a good example of a globally travelling educational reform policy. In this article, we examine the rhetoric of the reform through an analysis of its public discourse, specifically the websites for the umbrella organization, 3 of its 35 constituent projects (Teach for America, Teach First and Teach for China) and one associated project (Teach First Norway). The analysis focuses on the rhetorical production of teaching as something done to other people’s children, in places apart from and outside the communities and schools of dominant populations, and for a while only – as a short-term mission rather than what is usually understood as a professional career. We argue that the principal motive underlying Teach for All’s rhetoric is the cultivation of a cadre of leaders and a form of neoliberal social entrepreneurship that it claims will solve the problem of ‘broken’ societies, public services and, specifically, schools.

Exploring the Contradictions in Learning to Teach: The Potential of Developmental Work Research

This article discusses aspects of a programme intervention (the DETAIL project) in the learning processes of beginning English teachers, teacher mentors and a university-based teacher educator. The research reported here has taken place in the context of the Oxford Internship Scheme (OIS) (Benton 1990; McIntyre 1997), a highly successful pre-service teacher education programme that (along with a similar scheme at Sussex University) is often seen as influential within the ‘national experiment’ of school-based teacher education in England (Furlong et al. 2000). The intervention is being researched within the framework of Developmental Work Research (DWR) (Engeström 1991, 2007), particularly a version elaborated by Edwards and Fox (2005) sometimes known as ‘DWR Lite’. DWR is a form of research that aims to enable participants to move from (in Vygotskyan terms [Vygotsky 1986]) ‘everyday’ to ‘scientific’ understandings of what they are trying to do through identifying, working on and expanding the object of activity with the tools offered by third generation Activity Theory (Engeström, Miettinen, and Punamaki 1999). Third generation Activity Theory is perhaps most often associated with a triangular representation of the activity system. Conceptually, however, it is Engeström’s elaboration of the ‘bottom line’ of the triangle – rules, community and division of labour – and the complex interrelationships with subject, tools and object that has the potential to allow participants in DWR to identify and work on contradictions within the activity systems in which they are participating. My focus in this article is on the concepts of teacher identity and teacher agency that emerged very early on in the research as the beginning English teachers (known as ‘interns’ in the OIS), teacher mentors and the university-based teacher educator (myself) started to negotiate the new terrain of the intervention. Specifically, I examine the knowledge about identity and agency produced by teacher mentors as they engage in DWR-framed research and consider its implications for pre-service teacher education.

Introduction to the special issue on the work of teacher education : policy, practice and institutional conditions

This special issue of the Journal of Education for Teaching focuses on the practical activities and material conditions of higher education-based teacher educators’ work. The articles address questions of concept and practice, discourse and labour and the ways in which teacher education as an activity of higher education is related to the institutional contexts within which the activity is located. The material conditions of academic work have become the focus of much renewed interest in higher education as a series of intellectual, cultural and economic trends (Hartley 2009) have converged so as to question the roles and responsibilities of teacher educators as a category of academic workers. Generally, research suggests that partnership teacher education, in which universities and colleges work with schools to train teachers, is highly successful and there is plentiful evidence in support of this fact (e.g. Iven 1994; Christie et al 2004; Ellis et al. 2011). However, concerns about changes to initial teacher education towards more school-led approaches persist internationally. Much contemporary policy discourse has been framed around the belief that schools are best placed to train teachers and, while there may be an implied consensus of intention to support beginners in their learning during practice, the discussions do little to suggest that the notion of a research-informed teaching profession is an aim worth addressing. Troublingly, as Christie et al. (2012) recognise, the erosion of the role of higher education in teacher education may not only lead to volatility and reductions in funding and employment opportunities in education departments but is likely, by extension, to impact adversely on research capacity in teacher education institutions. Clearly, research which explores the activities and perspectives of teacher educators, their expertise and yet their increasingly difficult positioning within higher education more generally, has the potential to inform the development of the profession from within and, importantly, the strengthening of an academic culture of teacher education.

Living with Ghosts: "Disciplines", Envy and the Future of Teacher Education.

The continuing instability of Education as a discipline is examined against renewed arguments for its ‘disciplinary’ status. Teacher education in particular is seen as Marjorie Garber’s concept of ‘discipline envy’ to propose a more positive relationship between disciplines that might work for the good of teacher education.