Teachers Development

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Teacher Development: An international

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The professional formation of teachers:

a case study in reconceptualising initial

teacher education through an evolvingmodel of partnership in training and

learningM. Totterdell

a& D. Lambert

a

aInstitute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

Version of record first published: 20 Dec 2006.

To cite this article: M. Totterdell & D. Lambert (1998): The professional formation of teachers: a casestudy in reconceptualising initial teacher education through an evolving model of partnership in training

and learning, Teacher Development: An international journal of teachers' professional development, 2:3,

351-371

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The Professional Formation of

Teachers: a case study in

reconceptualising initial teacher

education through an evolving model

of partnership in training and learning

M. TOTTERDELL & D. LAMBERT

Institute of Education, University of London, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT The initial training and education of teachers in England has been subjectto enormous political interest in recent years, resulting in radical change imposed from

the centre. This article offers a case study of how one large postgraduate course inLondon has responded, although the authors also maintain that reform was alreadybeginning to take place from within. External forces have changed structures, but whatis perceived also to be happening is a fundamental change in the ways we (aseducators) think and talk about teacher education. The authors identify six keyproblematics within an evolving partnership model of training which, they argue,mark out a range of complex issues rich in implication both for educational practiceand for future course development. They conclude by arguing that such a long overduereconceptualisation of the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) is an essentialprerequisite of the more effective advocacy of a broad-based teacher education asopposed to a narrower view of training in operational competence.

Introduction

The purpose of this article is to set out a deep description of one largepostgraduate initial teacher education programme, namely the secondaryPostgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at the University of LondonInstitute of Education (ULIE). It is in effect a case study inreconceptualisation of the initial training project in that our main aim is toshow how continuing concerns about how the PGCE course is structured

have now been subsumed by bigger and more difficult questions concerningthe ways in which higher education (HE) tutors, teachers and beginningteachers conceptualise initial teacher education and training. We believe thatteacher education is, perhaps belatedly, beginning to benefit from rigorous

RECONCEPTUALISING INITIAL TEACHER EDUCATION

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challenge and re-examination. This article claims to make a modestcontribution to that process.

Initial Training: a question of structure or of concept?

The ULIE began to move to a new configuration for initial teacher education(ITE) in the early 1990s, following staff conferences and experimental workwhich demonstrated ever more clearly the inadequacies of the then existingarrangements (broadly, a model of learning-to-teach based upon theuniversity providing the knowledge, methods and skills, the schoolsproviding the setting for practice and the beginning teachers supplying theindividual effort to integrate and apply such training). At the same time,internal discussions began to render the then de rigeur principle ofreflective practice problematical, challenging what had become a

dangerously empty slogan, a hostage to fortune in an increasingly aggressiveworld of performativity (Ball, 1994).

The obstacle to root and branch change, and the achievement of a lessconstrained way of thinking about such matters, was considered by many tobe essentially structural. For example, debates encompassed among otherthings:

x the dominance of quasi-autonomous curriculum departments and methodtutors in course design and implementation;

x the poor relation status of professional studies, often taught by part-time

staff bought in on an ad hoc basis and somehow strangely rootless. Theso-called educational issues course component had replaced lecture andseminar courses on the foundation disciplines but despite rhetoricasserting its student-centred and enquiry-based methodology, thecomponent was for many a content-packed, handout-driven seminarcourse of limited applicability;

x teaching practice being seen by ULIE, schools and students alike assomething separate from the rest of the course and by many as the onlycomponent that really mattered.

ULIE deliberations resulted in the so-called Area Based course (Harland,1992), which was an attempt to devise a structure which would permit andencourage certain ways of working. By organising clusters of schoolsworking with groups of beginning teachers, each with a seconded generaltutor supporting beginning teachers both inside the schools and at the ULIEon a professional studies programme (one cluster of 3-4 schools containedone tutor group of 17-23 mixed-subject beginning teachers), a structure wasdesigned which enabled partnership in training the clusters providing thecontext for experience-based learning.

It was soon clear that structural change of this kind cannot, on its own,

bring about a resolution of tensions such as those noted earlier and whichstudent evaluations had consistently revealed to be present. It is possible thatthe reformation of the PGCE had not been radical enough, but the autonomyof the curriculum departments remained (perhaps reinforced by the


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subject-based National Curriculum), student evaluations tending to describethe PGCE course as one consisting of, in at least two senses, separateworlds. Beginning teachers recognised first, the continued discontinuitybetween curriculum and professional studies components of the course andsecondly, the stubborn persistence of the schoolHE divide, characterised bysome as the separation of theory and practice. Crucially, however, the areabased structure provided the basis for imaginative steps to be taken beyonddiscussions over the arrangement of predetermined course components.Increasingly, fundamental questions began to emerge in the area teams.Some tutors, for example, conservatively argued, on entitlement grounds,for beginning teachers to be exposed to (to be given) certain ideas andknowledge, which seemed to others tantamount to handing students acanon of literature a tendentious view of postgraduate training. Suchcritics likened any such move to a literary canon as a step back to discredited

models of delivering the foundation disciplines; what initial trainees needed,they argued, was not a cumulative, informational entitlement but access toways of working and approaches to learning to enable understanding andcompetence to develop. In this way, debates had begun to move fromconsiderations of structure to reconceptualising ITE and training.

Deliberations such as these began to take shape shortly before radicalchange was instigated from the centre (Department for Education [DfE],1992; see Wilkin & Sankey, 1994), forcing all PGCE courses to negotiatequasi-contractual partnership structures in which student teachers would

spend around two-thirds of their time in schools and instituting a nationalframework for standards of teaching competence which is subject toaccreditation and inspection. As a result, colleagues felt less reactive thanperhaps otherwise they may have done, and more responsive to thepossibilities of courses recontextualised and reinterpreted under the newregulations. However, the course leaders were also acutely aware that thenew, centrally imposed structure of partnership needed to be conceptualised,and the collective thinking that had already been achieved concerningcollaboration with schools not only helped guide the adaptation of the courseto the new conditions (at the time Circular 9/92, now superseded by Circular

4/98), but served to inaugurate a much more fundamentalreconceptualisation than anything previously envisaged. For example, thecourse leadership was prepared to pursue further basic questions concerning:

x the fundamental aims of ITE and the images we hold of what it is to be ateacher;

x the ways in which we wanted beginning teachers to work and engage withschools, practising teachers and children;

x the manner in which we wished to specify the particular contribution ofthe HE side of partnership in training and learning [1]; and

x the manner in which we wanted to recognise the postgraduate status ofour beginning teachers (and the kinds of expectations we couldlegitimately place on them).


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In short, the ULIE team had begun to remodel the PGCE in a way which issummarised rather neatly (though simplistically) by the ITE curriculumcube (Lambert & Totterdell, 1995, reproduced in Figure 1). The idea thatthe PGCE can be reconceptualised as a curriculum certainly has an ironicring to it. But it enables a move away from course components (slots to befilled) and closer to a concept of a dynamic and organic whole. Thisprovides a number of avenues for development and the sense of a course(and a course team) being in charge of its own destiny, taking ownership ofthe quality of the whole course experience of beginning teachers, and beingon a forward-facing trajectory but with an increasingly sophisticatedunderstanding of weaknesses and ambiguities present in the whole project not least in how teacher training matters tend to be articulated (see Wilkin,1996). For example, what does partnership in training and learning claim toachieve? In what ways is the HE side valued and valuable? In what ways are

schools the best places for beginning teachers to learn, and what do theytend to achieve less well in the school setting? What do we expect beginningteachers to learn and how are they best supported? In what ways might thetraining and learning partnershipper se act as a catalyst for raising standardsin schools to the overall benefit of education in London? (see Collarbone &MacGilchrist, 1996).

100mm

Figure 1. The PGCE curriculum cube.


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The PGCE curriculum is contained inside the box. Choose any one of thethree sides as a way into the box and you cut across other concerns. Forexample, choosing the aspect of the Teacher as Reflective Professionalmeans we must engage with curriculum studies, professional studies andpractical teaching. Furthermore, reflective activity will at different times belinked with highly practical and immediate concerns, the wider contextaffecting teaching and learning and future personal and professionaldevelopment (source: Lambert & Totterdell, 1995, p. 19).

Conceptualising Partnership in Training and Learning

Developing an approach to partnership in training and learning, being seenprimarily as a conceptual problem, has provided an opportunity for the

re-examination of some widely held assumptions concerning how ITEshould proceed, and a stimulus for renewed and more sharply focusedresearch activity in the field. Learning, of course, in the professional sphere,like elsewhere, is not some timeless essence. We have chosen to respond tolearning as an ever-changing historical phenomenon by identifying six keyproblematics [2], each of which can be thought of as being contested insome way, or at least as exhibiting tensions which in themselves could beconsidered as an impetus for growth and a source of creative energy fromwhich the evolving partnership in pedagogy can draw. The sixproblematics are identified as:

x the political situatedness of initial teacher education;x a critique of reflective practice;x notions of a scholarship of teaching;x the role of experience in relation to meaning;x the role of research in the learning community; andx theory, practice and models of learning for professional formation.

Each problematic is explored briefly in what follows. We do not claim thatwe have identified them in their entirety, nor that the ULIE PGCE has fullymet the issues described. But where we feel that the ULIE course has afeature which owes its presence to the particular manner in which aproblematic has been conceptualised we have attempted to make thisexplicit.

We do not claim that the list is exhaustive. There are other dimensions,some of which may be derived from the aforementioned list, such as theempowerment of colleagues in schools; issues of consistency andcomparability across the course and across schools; and reconciling (if thatis the correct word) the particular and the general within the wholetraining experience. These constitute important quality issues with which

we assume all initial training partnerships continue to grapple. Ourcontention is that the analysis of such issues will gain considerably from theguiding light arising from an uninhibited reworking of the conceptuallandscape of teacher education. In our view such reconceptualisation is


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imperative if we are to adapt to changes in learning and to equip tomorrowsteachers to anticipate likely changes and challenges in the future.

The Political Situatedness of ITE

An Outline of the Field and Key Questions

Teacher education is particularly susceptible to economic, demographic andpolitical pressures. It is clear that these pressures are increasingly global intheir configuration and will not go away (cf. Wideen, 1997). Moreover, inEngland, the assumptions underlying the democratic socialist welfare statehave been questioned by recent governments; attempts to reconstruct teacherprofessionalism and make the teaching force more responsive to thedemands of the evaluative state and the market are particularly evident in

the attempts to reform teacher education. It is already clear that significantcontinuities in policy will remain even with the recent change of government(see Department for Education and Employment [DfEE], 1998).

How are teacher educators to respond? One response has been for theteacher education community to become defensive, reactionary and reluctantto engage in internally-generated reform, perhaps for fear of being burdenedwith an ideological guilt by association syndrome, or possibly, as somecritics suggest, because the culture of ITE is peculiarly resistant to change.With regard to the latter, it is said that initial training, in both content andstructure, has developed a linguistic and cultural affluence which results in

those involved being prone to live lives of their own; the originaleducational purpose is lost to view and a failure to define programme focusfollows (Padgham, 1983).

Yet, we do well to remind ourselves that as long ago as 1972, theJames committee warned that teacher education was in danger of becomingtoo academic and of losing its roots in professionalism and the improvementof practice in schools (see Porter, 1997). Ever since, polemics havecontinued to centre on a fundamental disagreement about the priorityrespectively of operational competence and academic competence

(Barnett, 1994), of instrumental action as against cognitive interaction. Forus, this raises the question of whether it is possible to find common groundin ITE. Can there be a substantive centrist position between, on the onehand, the rearguard of academics lamenting the loss of a process model ofpre-service education linked to constructivist theories of knowledge and anidealisation of the trainee teacher as transformative intellectual, and on theother hand, the vanguard of managerial educators advocating an outcomesmodel of competence-based professionalism, focusing on skills best learnedat the chalkface? If so, it must be a pragmatic middle way movementcapable of bearing the responsibility of developing an acceptable, broad andbalanced approach. The challenge would be to recover common purpose andso join thought and action as to ensure that competency can fully reside in anindependent professionalism capable of sustaining itself under pressure to


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raise standards while at the same time assisting to stabilise education arounda recuperated sense of positivity.

The world of ITE is fast becoming functionally fragmented. To theextent that we still subscribe to Deweys dictum that there can be nointellectual growth without some reconstruction, some reworking, arguablyit is time to look seriously at crafting a vigorous centrist position.[3] Thiswould include a reappraisal of government initiatives which would set asidethe rhetoric and seek to appropriate the value-added potential for traineeteachers latent within their existing form. Furthermore, it would seek toengender creative professional activity and participatory competencieswhich reflect a broader conception of educational citizenship particularlyin terms of teachers assuming responsibility for continuously enriching andextending their craft both conceptually and practically within educationalcommunities that foster the common good.

Relocating the Debate on the Political Positioning of ITE

The development of a culture in ITE that will promote collaborationbetween all stakeholders is imperative. The challenge is to advance anattitudinal context of trust rather than one of suspicion: to avoid polarisingnational agencies and educationists into communities of educationalcorrection and resistance. We need to synthesise a complex of ideas,assumptions and principles into a more open kind of communicative

exercise, responsive to the imperative to forge greater consensus aroundpressing questions of:

x who should teach given that teaching involves the dispensation ofknowledge, the cultivation of intelligence and imagination, and also that itincorporates a moral gesture?

x what are the best (or better?) ways of preparing those who wish to teach given its inherent complexity derived from the need to hold togetherunderstandings of education, instruction, learning and curriculum ininteraction with students?

x how can their professional preparation better enable them to continue tolearn and to adapt in a change rich environment to have the capacityto navigate, survive, not to be surprised, and to cope with the entirelynew? (Holland, 1995, p. 2); and

x how can they be imbued with a sense of vocation and with broadersensibilities a wider frame of reference and perspective drawn from theinterior meanings of education with a sense of its transcendent ends?

Relevant Course Framework

According to Wilkin (1996), there are professional advantages to be derivedfrom our policy-driven context. Given the current restructuring of ITE, theULIE has worked with its school partners on so converting the curriculum asto extrude professional and pedagogic benefits from within the new


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framework. Revised course documentation and a series of occasional papershave reinvigorated the course and channelled the impetus of external reformfor internal purposes. Critically, through this process of repositioning andrefocusing there is an increased capacity to develop, reshape and sustaininitiatives without capitulating to external pressure. For example, while wecannot mirror National Curriculum notions of entitlement to a contentcurriculum, one which is neatly parcelled up between the ULIE and itspartner schools for delivery according to predetermined criteria, we canprovide an entitlement to certain course principles (which govern the designof the programme, the nature of the partnership and the image of what itmeans to be a teacher) and to curriculum experiences (ways of working)which act as benchmarks of designed-in-quality. This simply confirms thatcurriculum planning is best seen not as a technical exercise, but as an artisticand political process (cf. Huebner, 1975).

Critique of the Reflective Practitioner

Problematising Reflective Practice

We have found the reflective practitioner motif (after Schn, 1987)increasingly perplexing. It is not just that beginning teachers soon tire ofrepeated exhortations involving the R word, seeing it as a rather esotericdiversion from mastering the skills and content of teaching. It is rather thatin trying to explicate what we mean by this shorthand, a growing number of

questions have been corroding our confidence in its efficacy. For example:x can we say what this thing called reflective practice is (can it be

described or its impact felt)?x can we specify when it happens (and under what conditions and within

what timeframe)?x can we be certain whether it can be taught/learned (and by whom) and

what research evidence is there that it is effective?x do we really know what it is for (is it, inter alia, a necessary condition for

becoming a teacher or a criterion for distinguishing professional from

non-professional practice)?x do we claim (or imply) (or sound like we claim) that reflective practice

provides a theoretical underpinning for ITE? or, that reflective practiceprovides an epistemology of everyday professional practice?

Work with beginning teachers demonstrates the difficulty in specifyingreflection in relation to practice. If reflection only results from certainstrategic forms of thinking (framing/reframing), then how does reflection inaction take place (i.e. under extreme time pressure or in relation to theroutine?) What distinguishes reflection in action from good intuition, good

common sense or sound judgement based on constructive self-criticism? If itis cued primarily by the unpredictable, can we really accept it as a modelfor learning how can learners be prepared to deploy it? Does not thetraffic it exhorts between action on the one hand and analysis,interpretation and so on, on the other, betoken a rather one-sided emphasis


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on cognition over action and being? Can reflective practice really functionas some sort of master metaphor for ITE as set againstcraft-apprenticeship? Is this not to perpetuate a disparaging view ofpractical activity as intrinsically an inferior sort of thing; to continue todowngrade local knowledge both inherited and contextualized normsand actual lived experiences, as opposed to ... abstract knowledge andreinforce a culture of critical rationality disembedded from theimmediacies of context? (Scott, 1997, p. 21).

A Response: the reflective professional

Relevant research does suggest that working effectively at a challenging taskrequires significant amounts of reflection and the development ofthoughtfulness (Diamond, 1995); there is also evidence to indicate that the

intending professional should be encouraged to develop reflectiveapproaches to demanding situations (Hatton & Smith, 1995). As a functionof the wider professional role, beginning teachers learn that they havemethods at their disposal which can help them deliberate on their actions, inparticular by reflecting inwardly on the basis for their actions (their thinkingand decision-making in relation to aims and methodology) and outwardly onthe consequences of their actions (the interactions between pedagogy andsocial context). Such deliberation is likely to be stimulated and sustained bycollegial relationships and peer support; indeed, rather than individualistic

approaches to reflection premised entirely on notions of self-dialogue, theneed for a communal (collaborative-partnership) context for thoughtfuldiscourse is paramount. It can be said to include forms of reflection wherebyboth critical and creative relationships are discerned between concepts, ofthinking about your own thinking, or metacognition (or theorising),involving both strategies that can be learned and sensibilities that can bedeveloped:

x how to think strategically about broader issues and aims as well as, butdistinct from, thinking about tomorrows lesson;

x how to grasp emergent ideas and secure their progressive amplification

into patterns of coherence;x how to step back as a specialist and consider to honestly re-evaluate

what you are doing from a general perspective and bring personalexperience, knowledge and routine under critical scrutiny;

x how to identify and describe problems in open and useful ways and incontext here the excavation of the hidden is as important as theexplication of the given (Abbs, 1994, p. 29);

x how to give voice to ones own ideas and also to listen to and understandwhat others are really saying;

x how to talk with children, parents and other teachers with precision andin an effective diagnostic frame; andx a disposition to relate educational values to real life and to develop an

ethical stance intellectual honesty, vocational integrity and a widereducational citizenship.


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Relevant Course Features

These are designed not just to develop knowledge, understanding and

skills, but also to cultivate a thinking that actually works through and onbeginning teachers lived experience their existence asteachers-in-the-making and therefore develops their character asprofessionals. Examples include the following.

x Profile Tasks, e.g. The kind of teacher I want to be. Such overtlyreflective forms of writing contribute to the beginning teachers portfolio.Their purpose is to catch the minds activity in emergent phases (Abbs,1994, p. 30) and to use beginning teachers metaphors of teaching toreflect upon their underlying assumptions and to inform their subsequentresponse to teaching dilemmas.

x Structured curriculum planning-implementation-evaluation tasks; basedon a context-sensitive needs analysis, beginning teachers work in pairs toproduce a trial-run package, which is then publicly evaluated involvingdescriptive and dialogic reflection on action.

x Provision of thinking frameworks introduced and subsequently guidedby the beginning teachers tutor and co-tutor (mentor) in school; forexample:(a) the challenging review of lessons in which the beginning teacher isshown how to follow a sequence of dialogue with co-tutors, such as:

Describe (what happened?)Inform (what were the lessons intentions?)Challenge (why was it done in that way?)Reconstruct (what alternatives are there? When are these moreappropriate?)(b) aids to deliberation: practical judgements are:Informed (knowledge/theory/assumptions)Contingent (context/insight/perspective)Developing (can change/be refined)

Notions of a Scholarship of Teaching

Some Issues

Eraut (1994, pp. 102ff.) offers a perceptive observation concerning theprimitive state of our methodology for describing and prescribing aprofessions knowledge base. Many areas of professional knowledge andjudgement have not been codified; and it is increasingly recognised thatexperts often cannot explain the nature of their own expertise ... The field is

underconceptualised. On the other hand, it can also be argued that the fieldsuffers from a form of conceptual inflation, claims being made for thescientific underpinnings afforded by curriculum and pedagogic theorywhich quite outstrip the actual power of various frameworks and viewpoints(see Carr, 1995).


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Furthermore, Ron Barnett (1994) has argued forcibly for anunderstanding of the limits of competence; definitions of operationalcompetence on the one hand, and academic competence, on the other, carrya narrow conception of human being which is limiting and inappropriate tothe modern age.

Scholarship and the PGCE Student (beginning teacher)

Postgraduate teacher education and training finds itself caught up in this in aparticularly intense manner: not only is the purpose of training under criticalreview, and who should be responsible for supplying it, but the role of theHE institution is strangely difficult to specify or define. We may say it is tooffer beginning teachers scholarship, and the opportunity to engage in it, butwhat actually do we mean by this and in what way is it relevant to their

preparation as teachers? Is it worth the blood, sweat and tears, or is it animposition, and a disingenuous one at that? There needs to be a fresh look atscholarship that takes us beyond the tired old research versus teaching andtheory versus practice debates. To be sure, we want our teachers to bescholars (dont we?).

The Scholarship of Teaching Reconsidered

Scholarship, it is argued, should consist of:

x discovering knowledge (an essential university function encapsulated inresearch);

x integrating knowledge (recognising the importance of context and largerrepresentational patterns);

x applying knowledge (is knowledge useful ... and in what way? Thisimplies an ethical question: what is knowledge used for?); and

x sharing knowledge (the sacred art of teaching ... engaging others,especially the uninitiated and not simply the peer group, throughpresentation and publication).

Thus, Discovery without integration is pedantry, and discovery andintegration without application is irrelevance. Scholarship without sharing isdiscontinuity (Boyer, 1995, p. 19). A concern for truth, wisdom and life,problematic as it continues to be, must remain the animating concern ofscholarship in the HE institution if beginners are to understand whateducative teaching is for and how that relates to their sense of where theyare themselves going in their lives (Smith, 1996, p. 208).

This analysis is complemented and given greater conceptual specificityby Rice (1992), who has identified three distinct elements of the scholarshipof teaching:

x the synoptic capacity ability to draw together strands of a field of studyin a way that provides both coherence and meaning, to place what isknown in context and open the way for connection to be made betweenthe knower and what is known;


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x pedagogical content knowledge the capacity to represent a subject inways that transcend the split between intellectual substance (subjectmatter) and teaching process (application to the teaching context), usuallyhaving to do with metaphors, analogies and (thought) experiments that arethe particular province of teachers (Shulman, 1986); and

x what we know about learning scholarly inquiry into how pupils makemeaning and sense out of what teachers say and do.


At course level, the ULIE has addressed these questions and sought toexhibit the kinds of thinking summarised above in the following ways.

1. By valuing enquiry-based forms of working. In so doing it encouragesbeginning teachers to pursue both their own questions and those identifiedby the school through a fusion of interests.2. Through beginning teachers integrating classroom concerns with widerschool needs and considerations, with their own wider knowledge base (aspartners, former career holders, etc.) and with other scholarly perspectives(including the educational and subject literature).3. Through beginning teachers having to demonstrate that they can applyknowledge appropriately to the particular context in which they work,enabling them to make concrete judgements about ends and means.4. Through beginning teachers sharing effectively: for example, their

research and development project (undertaken in the second and thirdterms) is presented initially to school staff and peers, then (in a more formalformat) to tutors.

In short, beginning teachers should be able to question, enquire andintegrate: question to create better and clearer understanding; enquire formore in-depth knowledge and experience; integrate what is being learned(across the course) with practice and actualisation. They are trained tobecome critical users of knowledge; to distinguish information fromknowledge, to recognise (with John Dewey) that ideas are usually plans ofaction and (with William James) that they too have to be judged by theircash value in effect, that they must buy purchase in reality.

The Role of Experience in Relation to Meaning

Questions and Complexities

Experience is sometimes presented as a panacea but the fact thatwe learnfrom experience andwhatwe learn from experience are different things. Canwe characterise what we mean by experience how does it relate to

teaching, in what sense is it central to learning, and how does experiencecorrelate with meaning?There are difficulties in identifying and clarifying experience as a

concept; it denotes different things in different contexts and has come tocarry considerable connotative baggage. In particular, its association in our


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culture with intemperate individualism (in which personal experience isself-validating and unquestionable) is problematic in relation to the notion ofa learning community; furthermore, the assumption that unmediatedexperience contributes the raw material out of which we construct or createmeaning, is philosophically naive.

A Response: experience as medium but not sole mediator of learning

Nicholas Maxwell suggests that experience is best understood in the widestpossible sense as human experience, what we acquire as we attempt to dothings, partly succeeding and partly failing (Maxwell, 1992, p. 60). Assuch, it is both a process (necessarily) and an achievement (contingently). Interms of teaching:

experience is in general what is [being] learned about how to dorelevant and appropriate things of value as a result of actions, policies,

principles and programmes being implemented, and in terms of which

those same actions, and the policies and aims that they embody, are to

be judged. (Maxwell, 1992, p. 58)

As educators committed to lifelong learning, we take the view that genuinelearning occurs when people reflect on their experience and test theirunderstanding. This reflection involves drawing upon previous experience,including possibly an already established role and expertise in life

(Finnegan, 1992, p. 19), as well as listening and attending to what we aretold by those in a position to help us interpret experience. In new contextswe may need support from experts or to consult established authorities inorder to know what to make of things and how to learn from them. Thus,though experience is a necessary condition of learning, it is not necessarily asufficient one.

In acquiring professional capacities:

Experience needs to be seen as an antecedent to the two concepts

theory and practice and, as such, experiencing plays a key role in our

attempts to get to grips with the problem of merging theory and practice.Experience makes practice and practising gives us experience to think

about, to reflect on and to begin to either theorise for ourselves or match

our experience and practice with the theories of another. (Slater & Rask,

1983, p. 183)

Experience is central to learning, it seems to us, in the sense that it providesthe crucible through which theoretical frameworks and repertoires ofpractice are tested, and then appropriated or discarded. However, theprevalent tendency to couch professional (public) views purely in terms of

individual experience arises from a confusion between feeling things andexpressing them. We may be meaning-making creatures, but thatmeaning-creating must go on in a manner appropriate to the sphere in whichit is occurring (cf. Sennett, 1986). Of fundamental importance for teachereducation is something like Eisners concept of representation: the


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process of transforming the contents of consciousness into a public form sothat they can be stabilised, inspected, edited, and shared with others(Eisner, 1993, p. 6). Thus, beginning teachers need a language with whichthey can share their personal experience and learn from others publicexperiences (Tann, 1993, p. 68). Moreover, experience is contingent andderivative in the sense that no meaning is entirely immediate to humanconsciousness, but is always mediated to us symbolically, if only throughhuman language. Especially noteworthy in this respect is the way thedeveloping partnership in training and learning with schools has served tomediate the concept of professional experience and to relocate itsemantically in a broader milieu.


Experience is granted through the careful identification for the beginningteacher of particular ways of working; it is expected that personal experiencewill provide one horizon of interpretation and understanding and that thetraditions of schools and teachers will provide another which are thenbrought together in an intepretative zone. For example, the assignment basedon research and development projects encompasses beginning teachersprior learning and experience, is grounded in a context (Area Based Study),is framed by a getting-in-touch agenda (School Focused Enquiry) and issanctioned with reference to the learning community and the ethics of

research. As such it is refined through being progressively placed in thepublic arena: deliberation and reflection are fostered through stagedproposals and presentations in which experience is stretched in pursuit ofinter-subjective confirmation from mentors and peers; finally it isre-presented formally to meet externally validated whole course criteria.

The Role of Research in the Learning Community

Questions and Qualifications

Research is very much in the limelight. While educationists acknowledgethat there has been much critical debate about the quality, credibility andimpact of educational research (Bassey, 1994, p. 18), HE institutes continueto regard themselves as being research led and as contributing toprofessional improvement. In a parallel development, under the auspices ofthe Teacher Training Agency, teaching is currently being postulated as aresearch-based profession. But what is educational research? What can it tellus? What is it good for? Who are its primary users? We need convincingresponses to such questions, ones in which the wider community parents,governors and teachers, as well as beginning teachers can believe.

According to Eisner (1993), We do research to understand. Meaning or understanding is constructed on the basis (the bedrock) ofexperience, ... and that experience in significant degree depends on ourability to get in touch with the qualitative world we inhabit (p. 5). For


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Eisner, getting in touch is a conscious activity and a cognitive event. Itconcerns construal, not (simply) discovery. It requires mental applicationand engagement. Of relevance is the fact that, although we may expect tolearn from research conducted by others, we may expect to learn a lot morethrough research undertaken by ourselves or those fairly close to us whoshare the same or similar qualitative world.

Teacher as Researcher

As Eisner puts it, We try to understand in order to make our schools betterplaces for both the children and the adults who share their lives there(1993, p. 10). It can be argued that we do this as reflective professionals, forexample in our search for more effective ways to teach X. But there areoccasions when the careful identification of a deeper or more nuanced

question or issue, which may yield to systematic study, is an appropriateaction: the teacher becomes researcher and requires the knowledge,dispositions and skills to make good judgements and wise decisions basedon evidence.

To emphasise the significance of the previous passage: we are notinterested solely in a persons capacity to find out something, but also intheir ability to organise and exploit it. Furthermore, as Barnett (1994, p. 75)has noted, genuine learning is a sharing and collective activity, in which wetest out what we believe we have learnt in the company of others. Teachers

who share such an understanding are sceptical of those who offer them acanon of research to be assimilated. They are more in tune with theircontext, capable of observing and describing it and (to use Eisners term)representing it in ways that make it comprehensible to prospective users.If we believe in the efficacy of this approach and want to enhance the statusof research among aspiring teachers, then the place to begin to encourage theattitudes, skills and knowledge which this requires is during their initialeducation and training.

Relevant Course FeaturesBeginning teachers are encouraged, through various means including coursedocumentation and dialogue with tutors, to understand the significance ofthe term education both generally and in the specific context of thePGCE. To use Eisners words again, Education itself is a mind-makingprocess (1993, p. 5). The course strives to remain anchored in theuniversity setting, but closely tied to the realities and practical problems ofschools (Grimmett, 1995, p. 205). The structure of the partnership intraining and learning seeks to help beginning teachers understand their own

responsibility in acquiring entitlement knowledge: humans do not simplyhave experience; they have a hand in its creation, and the quality of theircreation depends upon the ways they employ their minds (Eisner, 1993, p.5).


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All beginning teachers undertake a sequence of shared enquiries:Area Based Study; School Focused Enquiry; and Research and DevelopmentProject (R & D). The R & D project is often based on a question aboutorganisation, method, motivation, ethos, purpose or achievement suggestedby the school. Its outcomes are reported back to the school and in a moreelaborate form to tutors. That is, it is both user-directed and user-responsive;while through being systematically stabilised, critically inspected, edited andshared in different public forums with others, it has the potential tochallenge (and in our experience) also to change the status quo.

Theory, Practice and Models of Learning

for Professional Formation. Some (Ongoing) Issues

Margaret Wilkin (1996) has recently presented an analysis reiterating theclaim that maintaining a proper balance between theory and practice iscentral to the culture of initial teacher training. Indeed, it is at least arguablethat this cultural tenet is the defining preoccupation of teacher trainers. Yet,as David Carr observes, the relevance of theoretical studies to professionalpractice is by no means as clear as teacher trainers have sometimessupposed (Carr, 1995, p. 311); defences of the professional value of theoryin teacher education have inclined to a conceptually inflationary estimate ofits involvement in professional practice (Carr, 1995, p. 312).

Moreover, if we are appropriately self-critical, we have to acknowledge

that teacher educators, under the influence of university culture, tend tohave an excessive faith in the power of ideas. Furthermore, this leads them[teacher educators] to under-estimate the enormous problems novices havein integrating theory with practice (Tom, 1995, p. 128). As Kemmis (1995,p. 13) notes, even the reflective practitioner model often seems topresuppose a one-sided, rather rationalistic view of theorising, emphasisingthe power of ideas to guide or even direct action, rather than the way actionand the circumstances of action also shape our ideas.

Notwithstanding this, some have argued that effective teaching requiresa knowledge of concepts, or variables, and their interrelationships in the

form of strong or weak laws, generalisations, or trends; also, the findingsof educational research are no longer portrayed as solutions to problemsbut rather as findings and concepts that teachers must apply flexibly toparticular contexts (quoted in Tom, 1995, p. 121). The worry is that anemphasis on practice without the accompanying theory and reflection maynot be the reform impetus that will prepare teachers for continuous learningor help schools become learning communities (so, for example, Edwards,1992).

How should the tensions and dichotomies inherent in the

theory-practice continuum be reconciled? In theory? In practice? Can wesolve the dilemmas with sophistication and subtlety, without dissolvingthem? Can we find a way of inhabiting theory-practice dualism, by notleaving it as mere abstraction, but revealing it as an inchoate human creationinscribing our relations to gaps, absences and ambiguities in our


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understanding as we endeavour to make our situational appreciation of thecomplex business of education.

Theory and Practice as Mutual Reciprocators in ITE

The first thing to say is that perplexities of theory and practice have attractedno shortage of thoughtful contributions from eminent educationists andothers we make no claim to boldly go where none have gone before!Effecting a powerful integration of theory and practice has always been aneducational ideal. It seems unhelpful to attempt an account of professionalformation by reducing theory to practice, or vice versa: both theory andpractical experience are needful.

But theory and practice should not be thought of as inhabiting separateworlds; many years ago, James Welton (1906, p. 17) postulated that

educational theory is practice become conscious of itself, and practice isrealised theory. The formulation may be questionable, but the interface herecognised is crucial. Theory and practice are not oppositional orhierarchical; they are better conceived as reciprocal. As Walsh (1993, p. 43)puts it, deliberated, thoughtful (reflective and common-sense) practice isnot just the target, but is itself a major source of educational theory. Or, asRyle (1966, p. 27) observed, Intelligent practice is not a step-child oftheory. On the contrary, theorising is one practice amongst others and isitself intelligently or stupidly conducted.

There is a growing recognition that theory should be conceived notprimarily in terms of underpinning, informing or fashioning practice, butrather more as educating supporting, enriching, and stimulating peopleengaged in the process of making sense of their professional life-world(Furlong & Smith, 1996, p. 7; and cf. Carr, 1995). The rubric of partnershipprovides new opportunity for merging theory and practice into the kind ofcontinuum for which Grundy has coined the termpractique an interactiveand reflexive pedagogical process of authentic professional actionpresupposing that the relationship between knowledge and action is notdirect; rather it is dependent upon deliberation, shared understanding and

intention (Grundy, 1987, p. 181). It is then within the province ofpractitioners to link theory and practice integrally from the outset: toexercise practical judgement, to take initiatives and to control their ownpractice.


The ULIE course takes this forward and seeks to promote an understandingwhich posits greater congeniality, not necessarily congruity, between theory

and practice. It recognises that theory, or at least theorising, is a distinctiveactivity which calls for a certain acuteness of apprehension and conceptualfinesse, in turn requiring of the beginning teacher particular skills, attitudesand dispositions. These are cultivated through:


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x ensuring that practical teaching experience is the essential point ofintegration between educational principles, values and theory and thepractice of teaching[4];

x R & D projects, which can increasingly be seen as educational enquiriesinto a complex of personal puzzles, institutional dark matter and otherproblems. They require beginning teachers to theorise and to think thingsthrough rigorously and in some depth and with imagination for differentpossibilities, and to examine ... presuppositions (Smith, 1996, p. 197);and

x key note lectures, from leaders in the field, which seek to bringresearch-led state of the art perspectives into contact with state of thepractice norms and conventions so as to stimulate a professionalconversation between tutors, teachers and beginning teachers.

Conclusions

As we mentioned in the introduction, the kind of thinking represented undereach of our six headings (what we have called problematics) has been thesource of a considerable injection of energy and animus into the process ofmoving to and consolidating a partnership course. Perhaps our overridingconcern has been to provide a realistic prospect of productive partnershipand hence to fashion the foundations of a course with inner strength, onewhich we feel is strong enough to withstand the impact of vicarious external

pressures, and yet to respond openly and effectively to change. The goal, ofcourse, is to produce new teachers whose capacities to engage intellectuallyand practically with pupils and colleagues have been maximally expandedand refined. We want to be as ambitious with out student teachers as wewish them to be ambitious with their pupils.

However, just as important in our view, is a second goal which has todo with the whole project of initial training in the UK (see, DfEE, 1998) andthe context of the extraordinary attacks it has received in recent years. Suchattacks have yet to attract a concerted and persuasive counter-argument fromthe profession at large to the effect that ITE is a necessary precondition to

becoming a teacher. In fact rather than argue that the HE component of ITEis indispensable in a way that, for example, Eraut (1985, p. 117) claims, itencompasses enhancing the knowledge creation capacities of individualsand professional communities, there has been a rather noticeable silence onthis matter from teachers. We suspect that for there to be more positive andeffective advocacy of ITE, the teacher educators need to deploy betterarguments.

Most importantly, the client group, the beginning teachers, need tounderstand and to appreciate the value-added effect from their PGCE

experience; similarly, the natural laboratory or studio of teachereducation, the schools, need to understand and appreciate the professionalbenefits that accrue from being centrally involved. It is now generallyrecognised that the teacher is a key figure in the development of a learningsociety. Such a society, if it is to be motivated by a vision of thoughtfulness


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and human flourishing, will need intelligent schools among aspiringteachers, the capacity for professional independent and innovative practice islikely to be valued ever more highly in tomorrows educational climate. It isin consciously orchestrating a vision of teaching as practically based butintellectually grounded that HE can furnish a context in which it makes goodsense to acknowledge that its relationship to teacher education is crucial tothe quality and independence of the teaching profession. Perhaps, iffar-sighted enough, HE can replenish the academy for those skills anddispositions cultivated by the intellectual virtues that produce the ability tocooperate in ways aimed at knowledge-building and continuous growthwithin professional communities. This article has case studied one PGCEcourse as a basis for moving at least part way towards achieving such a goalin a more convincing manner.

Correspondence

Michael Totterdell, ITE Office, Institute of Education, University ofLondon, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, United Kingdom.

Notes

[1] Partnership in training and learning is a formulation which we have adopted to signify acourse orientation in which all course participants are seen as both learners and teachers,with skills, insights and knowledge to share and acquire. For detailed accounts, seeHeilbronn & Jones (1997).

[2] We use the term problematic in its technical sense, as a sensitising concept whichprovides a rudimentary organisation of a field of study that yields clues as to what isimportant and what peripheral (Abrams, 1982, p. vx). As such it is like anarchaeologists flag, indicating an important site worthy of careful investigation. It leadsus to ask some appropriate questions, but cannot in and of itself give the answers.

[3] Elsewhere we have argued that a centrist position should help to recover a moreperspicacious understanding of the business we are in (Totterdell & Lambert, 1997,p. 181ff).

[4] The designation of Practical Teaching Experience is a deliberate move away fromTeaching Practice; it reflects the fact that we have chosen the school, rather than theindividual classroom, as the venue for training, believing beginning teachers needexposure to the wider culture of the institution in which they are working so that theymight better understand the impact of that larger environment on what they do throughforms of action research. See Heilbronn & Jones (1997).

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