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There is overwhelming evidence in this special issue that even the developed world is a long way from delivering the educational improvements that will ‘temper the deleterious effects resulting fro...

This chapter draws together all the many strands and analytical moves made in this complex study. It discusses findings using as a lens the synthesised theoretical framework first introduced in Chap. 3. The framework combines Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT) model and key concepts in Holland et al.’s Figured Worlds theory, such as history-in-person, positionality, artifacts and agency. The chapter begins by considering Bronfenbrenner’ person characteristics and in particular how they can operate to generate or disrupt individuals’ development. It does so by comparing and contrasting the characteristics of some of the students whose pen portraits were presented in Chap. 5. Students’ development as person-in-context is then discussed around the other three components of the PPCT model and the shaping of their identities is considered using terms in the Figured Worlds theory. Further insight into the analysis is drawn from discussion of the literature introduced in Chap. 2. At the end of the chapter we present an overarching conceptual framework, which integrates the synthesised theoretical model and the analytical framework developed earlier from the empirical data.

This chapter presents an analysis of the quantitative and qualitative empirical data from across the three courses, two in China and one in the UK. They were garnered from students’ responses to the questionnaire and their group and one-to-one interviews. The analysis of the quantitative data derived five factors of student engagement. The analysis of the qualitative data identified 28 key indicators that influenced students’ engagement and these were categorised into six themes. A comparison between these analytical categories showed that there were remarkable similarities; of the six themes identified in the qualitative analysis, five matched well with the five factors. The six themes were: history-in-person, effectiveness of teaching practices; personal development; campus environment; learning styles and quality of interactions. ‘History-in-person’ was the category evident only in the qualitative data. Thus the resultant conceptual framework that was generated from the empirical study had six themes and was supported by the analysis of both the quantitative and the qualitative datasets.

This chapter examines the construct of student engagement by reviewing relevant literature, and comparing, contrasting and critiquing the various definitions favoured by a range of researchers, institutions and other stakeholders. It describes the evolution of the concept of student engagement and reviews the dominant paradigm prevalent across North America and Australia, and an alternative paradigm adopted in the UK. It goes on to explore how the various dimensions associated with the current concept and its measurement has been constructed from a range of pre-existing conceptual frameworks. It moves on from these macro-level insights to discuss, at a more detailed level, indicators which have been observed to influence student engagement, and the resulting national, gendered and disciplinary engagement characteristics.

This chapter takes as its starting point a cluster analysis of students on the two courses in China, which identified from the survey data two clusters of students who had responded in the much the same way to items on the questionnaire; they were dubbed ‘studious’ and ‘strategic’. Scrutiny of the narrative accounts of the 25 student interviews (such as those presented in Chap. 5), however, made it clear that in reality a much more nuanced reading of students’ experiences and engagement was called for. As a result a more complex model was devised, which analysed student dispositions along three dimensions: strategic-studious, intrinsic-extrinsic, and introverted-extraverted. Students were positioned with respect to these three dimensions and from this analysis a number of distinct hypothetical types were identified amongst the participants. Importantly, student positioning was not considered static but fluctuating over time and in response to events. The chapter also discusses students’ and tutors’ conceptualisations of the construct of engagement and identifies three key domains of engagement: behaviours, motivations and relationships. The domains are argued to be consistent with the dimensions.

This chapter presents in students’ authentic voices their real-life narrative reflections on their lives and learning. Previous analysis of quantitative and qualitative student data used various indicators and factors, as was reported in Chap. 4. This presented a view of students’ lived experience and engagement that was, at one and the same time, both aggregated and fragmented. Engagement, however, is a very personal and holistic experience, so this chapter attempts to redress the balance. It draws pen portraits of the holistic lived experience of seven students, two Chinese language students and one mathematics student in China and four mathematics students in the UK. Building on these pen portraits, the chapter further offers an analysis of how they exemplify different combinations of the 28 indicators identified in Chap. 4 as affecting students’ engagement and experiences. Finally, at the end of the chapter, the seven pen portrait students are compared and contrasted.

Student engagement in higher education has attracted worldwide attention in recent years because of its strong correlation with positive outcomes of student learning and also, increasingly, because of its influence on a consumer-oriented global education market. Such issues come into sharp focus in the case of China, currently the largest international market for higher education in Western Europe, Australia, and North America. As a growing number of Chinese universities become global players, they are competing with their Western European, Australian, and North American counter- parts for a burgeoning home market of more discerning and cost conscious consumers. Nevertheless, limited attention has been paid by the higher education sector as to how student engagement is conceptualized by those consumers and what factors inform and influence their perceptions and choices. This case study of undergraduate student engagement at a Chinese university attempts to begin to answer these questions. It analyzed data collected through interviews and focus groups to investigate student and staff conceptualizations of student engagement and the factors that influenced it. The factors were categorized into external factors (contextual and institutional) and internal factors (personal). A sociocultural analysis identified three issues: transition, lack of student–staff interaction, and shock students.

This article focuses on a virtual research environment (VRE) and how it facilitated the networking of teacher educators participating in an Economic and Social Research Council-funded research capacity-building project. Using the theoretical lenses of situated learning and socio-cultural approaches to literacy, participants’ ways of engaging with this technology are described, and the reasons why their existing technical expertise did not unproblematically transfer to the new technology are explored. We argue that three main factors affected the use of the VRE, and in particular its wiki tool: the individual’s motivation to learn and to engage with (more) new technologies; the emerging dynamics of each research group as they developed shared working practices; and the institutional climates, which supported or discouraged the individuals’ engagement with both the technology and a regional Teacher Education Research Network that used this technology. In conclusion, we suggest that successful engagement wit...

Background: The labour market for classroom teachers in England is a mixture of free-market capitalism and state workforce planning, interlaced with ideological and political interventions such as the introduction of new routes into teaching and the capping of class size. Purpose: The article examines the relationship between the teacher labour market and the economy in order to predict how it will be affected by government's attempt to manage the current economic crisis. Sources of evidence: In doing this, it draws upon a data set which tracks teacher supply and demand in England over the last 20 years. Main argument: The lack of articulation between workforce planning and the free market in teacher labour is traced across the two economic cycles from the upswing of the late 1980s through the recession of the early 1990s and the recovery of the late 1990s through the so-called ‘goldilocks’ period up to 2008 when the recession, generated by the banking crisis, engulfed the western world. The variations in...

This paper reports on the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN) initiative, which piloted a model for research capacity building in teacher education in the North West of England with the aim of providing early and mid career researchers from seven regional universities with opportunities for professional learning and development. It explores the intricate dynamics of the learning journeys undertaken by the participants and critically examines the structural, social and cultural factors involved in the navigation of the complex ecologies in which they were embedded as teacher educators and how this impacted on their learning. It concludes that initiatives such as TERN can result in academic learning and professional development, but in view of the internal and external pressures confronting education departments today it also raises pertinent issues with regard to the sustainability of such projects. As such the paper makes a strong contribution to the growing international literature on academic lear...

Des tendances centralisatrices et une culture de la responsabilite se sont developpees et intensifiees sous plusieurs gouvernements conservateurs et travaillistes durant deux decennies. La formation initiale des enseignants revet aujourd’hui une importance strategique car elle est un moyen efficace d’introduire des changements dans le curriculum scolaire et de transformer le professionnalisme enseignant. Un cadre commun d’attentes professionnelles a ete cree, et l’accent a ete mis sur une plus grande coherence dans la qualite des formations dispensees. Cependant, la reglementation actuelle ainsi que la mise en rapport des indicateurs de performance avec l’attribution de financements ont entraine une approche « technique et rationaliste » qui aux yeux de certains remet en cause les fondements traditionnels de l’enseignement.

This article offers an initial account of the Teacher Education Research Network (TERN), a pilot education research capacity building project funded by the ESRC and designed to test a ‘social practices’ model for building an educational research infrastructure across England. The TERN project is still running at the time of writing, so it is not yet possible to offer a full evaluation or a theorised analysis of the project. Setting the initiative within the regional context of teacher education in the North West of England, the article describes elements of the project and begins to explore their significance, drawing on early evaluation data. The article adapts Charles Desforges’ equation of research capacity building as ‘Capacity = expertise × motivation × opportunities’ as a frame for this exploration.

Over the last 15 years, initial teacher education in England has been established as a national system, closely controlled by the government. One of the consequences of this move is that teacher education is now intimately bound up with changing national politics and policy priorities which reach down into the finest of detail of provision. In this paper, we focus on the way in which politics and policy have impacted on one of the defining features of teacher education provision in England - that of 'partnership'. In particular we examine the way in which the concept and practice of partnership has been transformed in line with New Labour's 'Third Way' politics. In order to do this, we reflect on our recent evaluation of the National Partnership Project, an initiative established by the Training and Development Agency for Schools to increase the quality and quantity of schools' involvement in initial teacher education.

This article reviews the processes, issues and dilemmas involved in evaluation research undertaken in the context of changing and evolving government policy in education. The article is grounded in an evaluation of the National Partnership Project (NPP), the team conducted on behalf of England's Teacher Training Agency (TTA) in 2004-2005. It will not present a critique of partnership in England, but will draw on perspectives of partnership to provide some background information to the project. It will also discuss the processes of evaluation research in the context of frameworks from recent and relevant research and will raise issues for future commissioned evaluation research to address.

This article examines the professional learning accruing from school-based initial teacher education (ITE) within the wider policy debate on school performance. It contrasts the very positive perceptions reported by teachers on the contribution of involvement in ITE to their professional learning with the less than fulsome attitude of school inspectors. Evidence is drawn from questionnaire responses from primary school ITE coordinators and mentor-teachers in the north-west of England, text searches of primary school inspection reports and quantitative data collected by Ofsted. It concludes that a more explicit emphasis on initial teacher education in school inspections would give due recognition to the important role played by ITE and make it easier to promote the professional learning and school improvement outcomes which derive from school-based initial teacher education.

In this paper we examine the discourses of Primary school numeracy coordinators responsible for auditing, monitoring and supporting their colleagues in relation to the introduction and embedding of the National Numeracy Strategy (NNS) in the UK. Cultural–Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) focuses our analysis on the contradictory coupling of school, NNS and audit systems with our R&D project through boundary objects and crossers. We achieve this through an analysis of the registers and genres adopted in teachers’ reflective discourses, and their relation to contradictory activities. Their often conflicted narratives indicate contradictions between these systems. We find inquiry hybridised with audit and inflected by its collegial negotiation. We also find dialogical inquiry mediated by the collegial discourse of practice, and our R&D group mediated by a critical discourse of reflexivity. The theoretical articulation of the CHAT approach to discourse through Halliday and Hasan's conceptions of register and genre is discussed.

This paper draws on findings from a national evaluation of the Teacher Training Agency’s National Partnership Programme (NPP) (2001–2005) to analyse the current practice of partnership in initial teacher education in England. The paper begins by drawing on the MOTE studies (Furlong, et al., 2000) undertaken in the 1990s to describe the practice of partnership during that decade. It goes on to describe the changing policy context of teacher education in England since new Labour came to power in 1997, including the Government’s concern substantially to increase the numbers of new teachers entering the profession; it was this commitment, the authors argue, that was in part behind the development of the NPP which was intended to increase both the quality and capacity of schools to take part in initial teacher education. The authors go on to describe the NPP as it was put into practice in nine Government regions across England and their evaluation of it, which included 127 interviews with a range of stakeholders within each of the government regions. They suggest that, although the programme did probably contribute to increasing the numbers of partnership places in schools during its lifetime, the NPP did not alter the underlying model of partnership; indeed, they suggest that in many cases the practice of partnership in England had changed little since the mid 1990s. However, they conclude that the NPP did have an important impact on provision in that it further undermined the pedagogical and epistemological dimensions of partnership that many teacher educators in the 1990s saw as central to collaborative work between schools and higher education institutions (HEIs). The NPP, they suggest, further encouraged the development of a ‘technical rationalist’ approach to teacher education, an approach that fits well with new Labour’s broader vision for the management of the teaching profession in England.

The use of video evidence as a vehicle for promoting discussion and critical reflection is well established in educational literature in the field of professional development and is gradually becoming more accepted as a research method. There is general agreement also that in relation to image‐based research the combination of video evidence of practice and professional dialogue promote critical reflection and can be instrumental in bringing about changes to that practice. Our aim in this paper is firstly to explore briefly our use of video images as a catalyst for promoting rich dialogue that supports multiple perspectives, meanings and interpretations of classroom events. We describe from a very practical perspective the trials and tribulations of developing a methodology for collecting and analyzing video recordings of classroom practice. Secondly, we describe our attempts to capture and narrate the experience as a multimodal account (Kress & Leeuwen, 2001) for dissemination purposes. The experience of...

Currently in the UK there is much pressure to increase the recruitment and retention of ethnic minority teachers, not only to respond to the continuing shortage, but to develop a teaching force that reflects the diversity in the UK population and provides role models for ethnic minority students. There is, however, little research on how ethnic minority teachers cope with the demands of the profession, especially in their first year. The introduction by the Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) of an induction period for Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) in 1999 was an attempt to create a programme of individual support and monitoring to provide NQTs with a bridge from Initial Teacher Training (ITT) to becoming established in their chosen profession. We believe it is now timely and important to examine how ethnic minority beginning teachers experience these new arrangements. In this paper we, therefore, explore the induction experiences of British teachers of Asian and African Caribbean origin in t...

This paper draws on a study of numeracy coordinators in primary schools in the UK in the second year of the implementation of the National Numeracy Strategy (NNS). It identifies them as working between three main tasks: embedding the Strategy, sustaining teacher collegiality and auditing accountability. We identify tensions in ‘being a coordinator’ in relation to these tasks, especially for discourse and identity. We assess the usefulness of the metaphor of ‘brokering’ in ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) to theorise such tensions. We conclude with some reservations about the metaphor, especially in the way the tensions are discursively performed in relation to the rate of change, complexity of notions of professional identity, and the problematic ‘community’ status of audit in the educational context.

'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 paper is about the nature of contemporary professional identity. It looks at the ways in which 'discursive dynamics' come to re-write the professional teacher and nurse as split, plural and conflictual selves, as they seek to come to terms with a political impetus written through what the authors term an 'economy of performance' in uncertain conflict with various 'ecologies of practice'. The teacher and nurse are thus located in a complicated nexus between policy, ideology and practice. Epistemologically, the paper offers a deconstruction of professional identities, and criticizes the reductive typologies and characterizations of current professionalism. Politically, it reaches towards a more nuanced account of professional identities, stressing the local, situated and indeterminable nature of professional practice, and the inescapable dimensions of trust, diversity and creativity.

This paper explores the notion of the ‘evidence-based practitioner’ in relation to the National Numeracy Strategy (NNS). The exploration is dealt with in the context of a pilot study of the implementation of the NNS one year before its national launch in September 1999. We begin by describing some of the milestones encountered in the relatively short life history of evidence-based practice (EBP) and exploring some of its various articulations. Challenging the appropriateness of current externally derived formulations of ‘evidence’ we develop the notion of ‘warranting’ in order to examine alternative ways in which teachers legitimate their professional practice in relation to the NNS. We conclude that what we observe is a series of shifting and multiple meanings and justifications, carrying different constraints and possibilities for practice.

In this chapter we present a case study of workplace learning in pre-service teacher education in England. We begin with a brief historical review of the structural reforms to the pre-service teacher education sector over the last 30 turbulent years, in order to create a picture of the highly regulated space within which workplace learning currently occurs. The cohesive vision underpinning reforms has been to relocate the control and the locus of teacher professional learning, and pre-service training in particular, from the academy into the classroom, and to a predominantly practically based experience. We identify what have been the key drivers of change to this end over the recent past, and look particularly at the evolution of partnership and the impact of School Direct, the latest development in the pre-service teacher education sector. We then pose questions about what possibilities are afforded to the teacher educators and pre-service teachers of disrupting or subverting the striated territory within which they operate in order to open up spaces where the latter can learn to be and become teachers.

This chapter sets the scene of teacher professional learning in England and its shifting context. It reflects on the politicisation of education and the increasingly radical agenda to pursue a more extensively workplace-based model of teacher pre-service and continuing professional learning, including a brief dalliance with the notion of teaching as a master’s level profession. The chapter then explains the genesis and structure of the book, reflecting upon its four themes: the social policy context and related tensions in England; policy and practice relating to teacher learning in UK home nations and internationally; learning theory and socio-cultural perspectives on learning; and, learning across the professions including medicine and educational psychology. Before exploring these themes the chapter presents three different analytical frames for considering workplace learning. First it disaggregates it into its constituent parts: work and place and learning. In doing this it highlights contemporary struggles around binary ways of thinking about knowledge and learning, and about the theory/practice dichotomy. This leads to a discussion of the possibilities offered by ‘third space’ thinking, which draws on hybridity theory, and situates binaries in productive dialogue. A third and final analytical move from third spaces to nomadic spaces is guided by the theoretical lens of Deleuze and Guattari.

Recent shifts within the popular conception of education as an aspect of the market economy positioning parent as consumer, teacher as producer and educated child as product have reformulated the various stakeholders as 'partners' in the business of educating children. This article, based upon data collected in an action research and development project, attempts to open up an interpretation of the dynamics of home-school relations in terms of a matrix of 'mobilisations' and 'demobilisations' between parents, teachers and children. In interpreting the agency/structure dualism in terms of such an interactive matrix, the article aims to establish some additional bases for practical and theoretical manoeuvres.

This article examines a business-education mentoring programme supported by Roots & Wings, an initiative run by Business in the Community (BitC), in order to identify key factors in its functioning. The programme supports employers in establishing voluntary mentoring schemes in which their employees mentor local school children; we use, as an exemplar, a national project run by BT's Personal Communication Division. The article develops an analysis relevant to the operation of such a business—education mentoring programme by adapting a theoretical framework (Forrest, 1992) for the analysis of strategic alliances between companies in the business community. Using the same stages (pre-alliance matching and negotiation/alliance agreement/alliance implementation) and adapting, or devising, relevant categories the article develops a multilevel (strategic/organisational/individual) analysis of the programme.

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.

The theme selected for this special issue of Education 3–13 is wide-ranging and important, with great relevance for research, policy and practice in primary education today. In this editorial, we t...

We have concluded our account of the 5-year process through which trainees become fully accredited, the 4 years of their training course and their first year as a teacher in school . Yet as we have indicated, we feel uncomfortable about drawing out a dominant story , beyond the sketches that we have drawn, as if a modal experience is more important than individual accounts. However, our attempts to pinpoint transitions for individuals in a graphic way were not very successful. As we have reached this stage of the book perhaps it is pertinent to spend a little time reflecting on our evolution in terms of our own understandings, as the researchers, of how we have sought to theorise our data. In creating an account of transition in the trainees’ understanding of their future professional task we attempted to introduce Ricoeur ’s work on time and narrative, which we felt could provide an interesting and useful theoretical frame.

This chapter outlines some of the theoretical ground that will underpin the arguments to be made after the empirical material has been presented in Chapter 4. The alternative frames to be offered enable an analysis of how mathematics and its teaching manifest themselves differently in individual and social perspectives. Distinctions between the individual and the social bring with them a host of difficulties with regard to teacher agency. The image of the lone teacher reflecting on her practice and building her control is challenged. The teacher cannot easily separate her own aspirations from those that are demanded of her by her employer. The very definition of the individual human

The initial education of teachers is the key focus of this book so let us now turn to consider in more detail how the task of student teachers learning to teach mathematics has been researched within teacher education contexts. We commence with an overview of some of the ways in which the process of teacher education is understood and represented within the research literature. We consider how the constituent elements of the process have been defined, and in particular examine some of the mechanisms through which students have been enabled to articulate their own understandings of the process.

The key objective of this book is to present a theoretically oriented account of the processes through which primary teachers develop their understanding of the task of teaching mathematics. The theoretical framework was created as we faced the task of building a picture of the training process in England, where the regulative apparatus of the central government impacts greatly on teacher practices and on conceptions of mathematics. At one level these are colloquial concerns. Nevertheless, we are seeking to address an international audience as we feel that certain issues might activate a broader interest. Key among these is the formation of primary teacher

It may be difficult to achieve consensus on an ideologically free conception of mathematics teaching. Mathematics itself is susceptible to being portrayed through discursive apparatus and caught between alternative accounts. Mathematics is generally a function of the social agendas relating to the circumstances of its practice. In primary education it will be mediated through the discourses pertaining to this arena.

As this book draws to a close, we shall summarise its empirical basis and theoretical intent before building some further arguments based on our discussion. We commenced with a brief examination of how the teaching of mathematics in primary schools might be better understood. We looked at how some primary school trainees and new teachers conceptualised their professional challenge and how this understanding was a function of the training process and of the curriculum frameworks they encountered. The interviews that we carried out provided a way of accessing this emergent understanding whilst at the same time gaining some sense of the trainees’ personal aspirations with regard to their chosen career in teaching.

This paper presents a critical overview of the way in which higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK have had their research activity subject to review. There have been six such reviews to date, the first two carried out by the Universities Grants Committee and, from 1992, by its replacement, the four UK higher education (HE) funding bodies (HE Funding Council for England, HE Funding Council for Wales, the Scottish HE Funding Council and the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland). The paper provides a broad outline of the key elements of the process, focusing on the two more recent research reviews and their impact on the subject of education, with the references providing specific detail for those interested in the minutiae of the reviews.