Pedagogical Subject Knowledge Development For Student Teachers of English

Author(s):

Christopher Hanley(presenting / submitting)Tony Brown(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 02 A,

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

15:15-16:45

Room:

VII. Előadó [C]

Chair:

Halvor Hoveid

Contribution

English graduates face a steep learning curve in becoming teachers of English in secondary schools in the UK. This paper tracks a group of prospective teachers in making the transition from being an undergraduate to being a school teacher by way of a one year school-based postgraduate course in teacher education. The research took place against an educational backdrop where teacher education has increasingly been subject to market competition and substantially relocated from universities to schools (Brown et al., 2014). This shift is reflected in a model of teacher knowledge comprising pre-defined and measurable technical skills to match the immediacy of classroom demands, with university experience increasingly marginalised. This policy backdrop differs significantly from the way in which teacher development is conceptualised and enacted in many European countries (Cartaut et al., 2009; Cosenefroy et al., 2013; Hodson, et al., 2012; Luttenberg et al., 2013; Pillen et al., 2013; Smith et al., 2013).

The paper is specifically focused on the ways in which student teachers understand English subject knowledge and how this maps onto a wider picture of the professional spaces they inhabit. The analysis makes a distinction between the pedagogic praxis of the individual teacher, which concretises their personally and culturally located subject pedagogic competence, and the regime of signs that sets parameters for that practice. The objective is to contribute to an alternative model of pedagogic knowledge that is relevant across subject domains (c.f., Atkinson, 2011) and guided by how students define and relate to their experiences. According to the alternative model student teachers progressively develop identifications with notions of pedagogic subject knowledge as they make the transition from being a student to being a teacher. This paper focuses on the process by which students build reflective and analytical accounts of their experiences, linked to their evolving ability to recognise the shifting discursive parameters that shaped their practice and their reflection on it. Developing pedagogic knowledge is referenced to a persistently updated story of ‘who I am becoming’, guided by a principle of personal growth comprising progressively nuanced appreciation of how personal and collective identities are negotiated across shifting discursive spaces.

The theoretical ambitions of this study aim at building an understanding of how teacher development works through an evolving process of subjective identifications. Student teacher motives align variously with aspects of school and university discourses, often deeply rooted in a desire to make a difference. Some students asserted a life-long passion for English and others a desire to challenge societal injustice. Meanwhile, the training course content was tightly regulated and geared towards compliance (Douglas and Ellis, 2011). The work of Lacan (1977, 1989) provides a basis for analysis where there is a gap between subjective performances and how these performances are articulated. The gap results from movement between different identificatory modes, reflecting the realignment of subjective desires in relation changing demands and how these are differently understood. Specifically, the subject wavers between ‘master’ discourses that variously capture dimensions of her desire but a gap always remains (Zizek, 2014). Through presenting how narrative accounts are disrupted and reconfigured in response to fresh demands, the study implies a model of personal growth that is never completed and cannot be captured in language, but is premised on a conception of the developing subject negotiating these discursive limits in modes of systematic inquiry across a diversity of linguistic registers.

Method

The study examines how student teachers identify various aspects of their learning and how they relate to these identifications. The particular focus is the possibilities teachers perceive in tightly regulated and restricted circumstances, and how these can be harnessed to generate potential for personal growth. The research data was gathered over three years, with PGCE English and Schools Direct English students. The research took place at an HEI in the north of England. Students were asked to collate written and spoken accounts capturing a sense of themselves as beginner teachers of English. These included but were not restricted to newspaper articles, journal entries, classroom observations and responses to film clips and texts. Data gathering focused upon six points in the year, when students shared responses through blogs and collective writing. The university sessions served as a critical platform where students were able individually and collectively to discuss and analyse the written material. The initial focus upon pedagogic subject knowledge was progressively mapped onto wider questions of personal and professional development. Students began to recognise how their practices were framed locally by external demands and to acknowledge some of the more involved debates implied by this recognition. The recorded data enabled students to begin to recognise strategies of ‘making sense’ they employed in relation to that data. Current material was analysed alongside earlier journal entries and recorded reflections, marking trajectories of progression staged at data collection points. It was possible to see how strategies for making meaning worked across these contrasts, referenced to ongoing assessments of data that supported particular identifications. Guided by Lacan’s conception of the mirror stage student identifications were understood as provisional and open to further change. Particular assertions of ‘who I am’ were updated with subsequent experience, involving shifting relations between self, its objects and the language available for characterising these relationships. Conversely the research process enabled students to mark where identity positions were adopted fleetingly for pragmatic reasons. The researchers challenged student teachers to assert and define themselves as agents of their own development where tolerance of ‘not knowing’ is seen as a catalyst for future development (Britzman 2011). Generating new understandings from the data required students to become conscious of both living and consciously forming professional identities, in critical engagement with earlier accounts of their developing selves with a view to future development and renewal.

Expected Outcomes

Our findings indicate that notions of subject pedagogy significantly influence student teacher experiences across school and university settings. Yet this influence is variously and unevenly articulated. In some settings subject knowledge is aligned with compliance to external ‘performance’ agendas differently inflected in local situations. In others, notions of subject ‘belief’ are more significant, relating to questions such as ‘how do I know what I know?’ (Green 2006). Initially student teacher narratives centred on rapid acquisition of classroom ‘know-how’, in contrast to the theoretical uncertainties of university experience. The research process helped students to develop critical and analytical capability to read these early achievements somewhat differently, with increasingly nuanced appreciation of the external demands regulating their practices, how these influenced the discursive framing of current practices, and how these might be further analysed. Our findings indicate that participation in the research process helped student teachers to become more attuned to potential for growth in restricted circumstances, and to be able to analyse these possibilities with a surer sense of themselves as researchers of their own practice. The purpose of the study is to build analytic capability across diverse pedagogic situations. Such capability is crucial for student teachers whose university-based experience is increasingly compressed. It might be the distinctive contribution of university study to enable students to frame differently a sense of the professional realities they encounter and the available means to affect them, to work in a “newly defined subjective space” (Hodson et al., 2012). Specifically, teachers working in increasingly marketized and regulated circumstances might be able to re-assert ‘who I am’ in relation to a progressively nuanced conception of ‘who I am becoming’, and to read these changes against a critically differentiated educational landscape.

References

Atkinson, D., (2011) Art, Equality and Learning: Pedagogies against the State (Rotterdam: Sense) Britzman, D., (2011) Freud and Education (London: Routledge) Brown, T., Rowley, H., and Smith, K., (2014) Sliding subject positions: knowledge and teacher educators. British Education Research Journal (Under review). Cartaut, S, Bertone, S., (2009) Co-analysis of work in the triadic supervision of pre-service teachers based on neo-Vygotskian activity theory: Case study from a French university institute of teacher training. Teacher and Teacher Education. 25 (8): 1086-1094 Cosnefroy, L., Buhot, E., (2013) Workplace learning impact: an analysis of French-secondary trainee teachers’ perception of their professional development. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice. 19 (6): 679-694 Douglas, AS., and Ellis, V., (2011) Connecting does not necessarily mean learning: Course handbooks as mediating tools in school-university partnerships, Journal of Teacher Education 62 (5) : 465- 476 Hodson, E., Smith, K. & Brown, T. (2012) Reasserting theory in professionally-based initial teacher education. Teachers and Teaching, 18(2): 181-195 Green, A., (2006) University to school: challenging assumptions in subject knowledge development, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 13:1, 111-123 Lacan, J., (1989) Ecrits (London: Routledge) (1977) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac) Luttenberg, J. Imants, L, Van Veen, K., (2013) Reform as ongoing positioning process: the positioning of a teacher in the context of reform. Teachers and Teaching: theory and Practice. 19 (3): 293-310 Pillen, M, Beijaard, D, Den Brok, P., (2013) Professional identity tensions of beginning teachers. Teachers and teaching: theory and practice. 19 (6): 660-678 Smith, K., Hodson, E. & Brown, T., (2013) Teacher educator changing perceptions of theory. Educational Action Research Journal. 21(2): 237-252 Zizek, S., (2014) Absolute Recoil (London: Verso)

Author Information

Christopher Hanley (presenting / submitting)

Manchester Metropolitan University

Faculty of Education

Whitchurch

Tony Brown (presenting)

Manchester Metropolitan University

Manchester

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.