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© 2015 British Educational Research Association. In England, adjustments to policy in teacher education have had implications for how subject knowledge is understood and for how job descriptions are defined. That is, the interface between teacher educator and subject knowledge representation has been changing. This paper reports on a wider study that considers the experience of university teacher educators adjusting to new academic and operational conditions. On the one hand, the teacher educators are confronted with their subject specialism being set according to new learning objectives and to new time and curriculum constraints. On the other hand, their professional identity is reshaped in response to structural changes to teacher education where earlier job definitions had been reconfigured or removed. The paper analyses resultant conceptions of subject knowledge and of teacher education emerging through this changing interface and how these conceptions are variously located across staffing arrangements. A Lacanian model of subjectivity provides a theoretical approach to depicting teacher educator and pre-service teacher identification with subject knowledge. The paper provides a theoretical account of how the teacher educator/trainee interface has been reshaped in line with the market-led terminology that governs current practices. Specifically, the analytical tools enable us to dismantle and restructure the prevalent symbolic order guiding current teacher practice and understanding, particularly our entrapment within specific discourses and identity constructs that shape our interactions with subject knowledge.

'Transition' was identified by cultural anthropologists in the early twentieth century as the liminal stage of a 'rite of passage'. Contemporary anthropology challenges the structural nature of these classic interpretations of ritual and analyses them as 'performance theory': 'social drama' (Turner), 'dramatism' (Burke), 'interaction rituals' (Goffman), and 'ritualisation' (Bell). In applying a contemporary anthropological lens to initial teacher training, we identify the transition not as a linear progression but as a complex process of extended and ambiguous 'in-betweenness' that involves play, performance and ordeal. We depict pre-service teachers enmeshed in the performance of symbolic acts and the undertaking of 'ritual ordeals'; and report how they narrate their passage as a complex 'game' of 'being' and 'becoming', and portray the holistic experience metaphorically in terms of 'play'. We explore, in particular, students' perceptions of the Numeracy Skills Test, the most recently imposed 'ritual ordeal': a 'rite of intensification' characterised by government as a device to police the boundaries of the teaching profession.

This article sets out to examine the nature of time and how it is constructed within reflective teacher research. The article is motivated on the one hand by a belief in evolving identity but on the other acknowledges a world where such identities are collapsing into interweaving discourses where notions of such evolution are not tenable. It draws on a classic debate between Gadamer and Habermas concerned with how we experience our living in the present, either as a 'being in the world', or as an 'endgainer' aspiring to a new structural framework within which life will be unconstrained by reifications of oppressive relations. After questioning the notion of human agency these views presuppose, the article pursues a resolution offered by Ricoeur and his subsequent work on the close relation between time and the stories we tell about it. Some work arising from a course for teachers is described in which attempts are made to reconcile practice with descriptions of it. In particular, issues of the teachers working with their own earlier writings are discussed. It is suggested that such writings can be used to form a reflective/constructive narrative layer that feeds whilst growing alongside the life it seeks to portray.

This article reports on research into primary student teachers' understanding of mathematics and its teaching undertaken at the Manchester Metropolitan University and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The research set out to investigate the ways in which non-specialist student teachers conceptualise mathematics and its teaching and how their views evolve as they progress through an initial training course. The study has shown how the mathematical understanding of such students is, in the first instance, embedded in a strongly affective account of their own mathematical experiences in schools, where mathematics was often seen as difficult and threatening. College training successfully nurtures a more positive attitude to mathematics as a subject, albeit couched in a pedagogically oriented frame. In later stages of training however, their conceptions of mathematics and its teaching are subsumed within the organisational concerns of placement schools and school experience tutors, and shaped by commercial schemes. It is suggested that alternative conceptions of mathematics assumed at different stages of this training appear incommensurable. A theoretical framework is offered as an approach to reconciling this conflict. This demonstrates how three potential dichotomies, phenomenological/official versions of mathematics, discovery/transmission conceptions of mathematics teaching, and perceptual/structural understandings of the mathematics teacher's task can be seen as productive dualities harnessing both qualitative and quantitative perspectives.