Conference Agenda

The worldwide pandemic prompted unprecedented school closures and disruption for children and their teachers. However, this also meant that student teachers (preservice teachers) found themselves confronted by the need for the development of diverse forms of distance learning rather than teaching face to face in classrooms during practicums (Hamilton et. al., under review). This dramatic disruption to standard TE practices across the world created a space for potential innovation or even radical shifts with regard to the nature of school experience and should perhaps encourage us to rethink the nature and form of TE and its practicum components (Darling-Hammond and Hyler, 2020).

Within Scotland, substantial thought had gone into a review of TE in 2011 which reflected both a holistic notion of the teacher and her/his principles and values as well as structured competencies; the latter a common theme in 21^st century TE across the world (Pantic & Wubbels, 2010). Since the 90s, governments and other agencies involved in the education of new teachers have striven to identify measurable markers of quality. A common means of doing this has been with use of specific standards/benchmarks that new teachers could be measured against in order to establish a level of quality which would be acceptable to policy and other stakeholders. These competencies provide drivers which shape student teachers to show the specific behaviours and, to some extent, common values that society believes are important in developing the ‘good’ teacher (Pantic & Wubbels, 2010). However,the moment of opportunity created by the pandemic and lock downs, for a possible rethinking of aspects of TE, has prioritised practical responses and the development and use of technology (Carillo & Flores, 2020). Those involved in Teacher education, preservice teachers, school mentors and university tutors, were struggling to survive heavy workloads and the need for intensive pastoral support. Research carried out within the four countries of the UK and across Europe (Hamilton et. al., under review; Ellis et. al. 2020) highlighted the need for adaptation and flexibility on the part of student teachers during this traumatic period but there does not seem to be evidence yet of transformational thinking about Teacher Education experiences in a more fundamental way.

Along with the technical elements that so many Education systems rely on to help grasp teacher quality through functional competencies, we are in danger of accepting the absence of the more nebulous aspects of teaching; the emotional, relational, epistemological and transformative qualities which help to shape a teacher, and which are unique to each. Having survived the uncertainty and ambiguity of a pandemic, should we return to prioritisation of competency-led approaches to the education of new teachers, or should we embrace a more holistic and humanist engagement with them?

In this symposium, we propose to establish a picture of key challenges caused by numerous lock downs in the four countries of the UK and elsewhere during the recent pandemic and our responses to what we believe is a need for transformative conceptualisations of TE that engage with teaching not as a competency-controlled profession but as an exciting endeavour or as a transformational process steeped in values connected with the artistry of teaching and social justice.

Researchers from many countries have looked at Teacher Education, especially the practicum during the pandemic (Ellis et. al., 2020; Winter et. al., 2021) charting the emotional turmoil experienced by preservice teachers and the strategies to confound lockdowns across the world. Here, I will draw on ideas emerging from a study of four countries (Scotland, England, N. Ireland and Wales) which explored the reflections of Teacher Educators involved with student teacher practicums before during and after the pandemic (Hamilton et.al. under review 2023). Underpinning this work, was our hope that, the pandemic and its impact on schools and student teachers might have encouraged some to revisit and perhaps even reconceptualise approaches to the education of Preservice Teachers (Darling-Hammond & Hyler, 2020). My aim is to initiate discussion around the key narratives driving these Teacher Educators and the questions which are raised when TE is built upon strong technicist views of teaching rather than more holistic conceptions of the ‘good’ teacher. Questions raised by this research cover a wide range of topics: the nature of partnership, the emotional and relational aspects of Preservice Teacher development, the need for adaptable and flexible professionalism, lack of enculturation into the school community and possible communities of practice and, importantly, the limited relationship-building feasible with children during this time. Only one Teacher Educator spoke of the need to revitalise or innovate to ensure that Preservice Teachers in the future were prepared with the necessary skills and resilience in order to meet possible future disruptions such as another pandemic. The digital divide in terms of families and children lacking the hardware necessary to benefit from the technology being embraced by schools or the means to pay for access to the web was not raised explicitly here but this remains a concern for any future developments in the form of hybrid or technology-based forms of teaching and learning. Ethical dilemmas did not appear to be acknowledged by most participants, but lack of fundamental resources is a powerful marker of inequity during this unprecedented period. At this juncture, Teacher Educators internationally may find themselves being recaptured by existing structures and competencies. However, this also presents us with moments and spaces for some radical rethinking if we are prepared to discuss alternative ways forward.

Darling-Hammond, L., & Hyler, M. E. (2020) Preparing educators for the time of COVID ... and beyond, European Journal of Teacher Education, 43:4, 457-465, DOI: 10.1080/02619768.2020.1816961 Ellis, V., Steadman, S., & Mao, Q. (2020) ‘Come to a screeching halt’: Can change in teacher education during the COVID-19 pandemic be seen as innovation? European Journal of Teacher Education, 43:4, 559-572, DOI: 10.1080/02619768.2020.1821186 Gandolfi, H. & Martin Mills (2022): Teachers for social justice: exploring the lives and work of teachers committed to social justice in education, Oxford Review of Education, DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2022.2105314 Hamilton, L., McFlynn, P., Beauchamp, G., Hulme, Moira, Campbell, A. (under review 2023) The practicum during and after the pandemic: exploring the perceptions of Teacher Educators on post-graduate initial teacher education programmes in the UK. Winter, E., Costello, A., O’Brien, M., & Hickey, G. (2021) Teachers’ use of technology and the impact of Covid-19, Irish Educational Studies, 40:2, 235-246, DOI: 10.1080/03323315.2021.1916559

In 2021 the Dutch government launched a national covid recovery plan for education (www.nponderwijs.nl). The plan offered schools and colleges significant amounts of money, but only if they were to select one or more ‘interventions’ from a prescribed ‘menu.’ This menu, so the government claimed, only contained interventions that had scientifically be proven to be effective. While the pandemic may have had an impact on the educational careers of children and young people and while, from this angle, it is laudable that the government provided extra resources, the key problem with the chosen approach is that it framed education entirely in terms of interventions that are supposed to produce measurable effects. Such a technical or, as I prefer, technicist depiction of education and the work of teachers has become near-hegemonic in many countries and settings (for a recent analysis of this in England see Hordern & Brooks 2023; see also Thomas 2021). This is not just amongst policy makers and politicians, but also amongst researchers who are keen to provide education with ‘useful knowledge,’ and even amongst teachers who believe that with more research, including their own, they can make their teaching more effective. While this may sound attractive, there is a growing consensus that such a quasi-causal depiction of education actually amounts to a misrepresentation of education and the work of teachers. Perhaps this ongoing misrepresentation is partly due to the lack of a robust alternative; an alternative that at the very least is able to expose the assumptions entailed in educational technicism and open them up for critical scrutiny. In my presentation I will argue that the idea of the artistry of teaching provides such an alternative understanding of the dynamics of education and the work of the teacher. This is not a new idea (see particularly Stenhouse 19988; Eisner 2022), but it is worth reconsidering in light of the ongoing (re)turn to technicist conceptions of education. To talk about artistry in the context of teaching is not to suggest that teaching is an artistic endeavour, but rather to highlight the importance of seeing teaching as a craft and understanding that the efficacy of teaching is aesthetic, not mechanical. In my presentation I will outline how the idea of the artistry of teaching can be helpful in overcoming the mistaken attractiveness of educational technicism.

Eisner, E. (2002). From episteme to phronesis to artistry in the study and improvement of teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education 18, 375—385. Hordern, J. & Brooks, C. (2023): The core content framework and the ‘new science’ of educational research, Oxford Review of Education, DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2023.2182768 Stenhouse, L. (1988). Artistry and teaching: The teacher as a focus of research and development. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 4, 43—51. Thomas, G. (2021). Experiment’s persistent failure in education inquiry, and why it keeps failing. British Educational Research Journal 47, 501—519.

At the end of 2019, I returned to Scotland and to an academic role leading one of the new and ‘innovative’ teacher education programmes (Scottish Government, 2016). The MSc Transformative Learning and Teaching, is a two-year, initial teacher education programme designed from a social justice perspective and working to produce graduates who position themselves as activist teachers (Sachs, 2003). Activist teachers are those for whom teaching is a critical and political endeavour (Apple, 2014; hooks, 1994), who seek to make education transparent and accessible and who engage productively and respectfully with the communities in which their learners live, acting as educators and advocates for their pupils (Kennedy, 2018). The programme is unique in Scotland, being the first programme to enable beginning teachers to qualify with a Masters award and the only programme to prepare teacher for the primary/secondary transition qualifying graduates to teach as either generalist teachers in Nursery to Secondary 3, or as subject specialists in Primary 5 – Secondary 6. Since its inception there has been some resistance to a teacher education programme that qualifies graduates to teach across the transition, a boundary of disadvantage and a site of injustice where children from more affluent background fair better (Scottish Children’s Reporter: Statistical Analysis, 2021) and the programme was first described as an alternative route into teaching (Scottish Government, 2020). In Scotland all ITE programmes are required to undergo re-accreditation by the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) and as we prepare for this, reflecting on five cohorts of graduates and the experience of teacher education during the Covid pandemic I share our experience of transformative teaching and learning and consider my practices as a teacher educator. Drawing on Barad’s (2003) concept of ‘re-turning’ a construct grounded in feminism, I take a temporal view of shifts in perspective to allow for new ways of looking at familiar questions: What should we as teacher educators know and how should we teach in order to prepare teachers for a world characterized by increasing diversity, economic disparity and inequality, and as is commonplace throughout the world increasing intolerance? Like hooks (1994, 12) I believe that ‘the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy’ and in this paper I will consider how such practices are enacted and finally share how the pedagogy is experienced – by everyone involved - beginner teachers, teacher educators and our school partners.

Apple, M. (2014). Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (3rd edition). Abingdon, Routledge. Barad, Karen. (2003). “Posthumanist Performativity. Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28, 3: 801-831. Hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY: Routledge. Kennedy, A. (2018) Developing a new ITE programme: a story of compliant and disruptive narratives across different cultural spaces, European Journal of Teacher Education, 41:5, 638-653. Sachs, J. (2003). The activist teaching profession. Buckingham: Open University Press. Scottish Government (2016) Delivering Excellence and Equity in Scottish Education: A Delivery Plan for Scotland. Edinburgh: Scottish Government. Scottish Children's Reporter. Statistical analysis 2020/21: ensuring positive futures for children & young people in Scotland; 2021. Available at: www.scra.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/SCRA-Full-Statistical- Analysis-2020-21.pdf (accessed 17 November 2022) Scottish Government Press Release. (2020, February). Advice and guidance: Alternative routes into teaching. Edinburgh: Scottish Government.