Impoverishing experience: the problem of teacher education in England

Abstract

Pre‐service teacher education in England has been essentially school‐based since 1992. The article offers a critique of this design from the perspective of a practitioner and researcher working in one of its most influential schemes. The fundamental problem described concerns an impoverished understanding of experience that underpins how beginning teachers are intended to learn in schools. The problem is not one of evaluating experience as adequate in terms of exemplary practices, but about the capacity within the teacher education system for critically examining the meaning of experience in order to develop professional knowledge. The article suggests that the ontological and epistemological dimensions of experience need to be brought into a dialogue if the potential of experiential learning for pre‐service teachers is to be realised.

Keywords:

• experience
• learning
• knowledge
• school‐based teacher education

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank colleagues in the Department of Education at Oxford for their constructively critical feedback over the last three years on the ideas developed in this article. The statements expressed here remain my personal responsibility.

Notes

1. Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) is a non‐executive government agency in England, which grew out of reforms to Her Majesty's Inspectorate of schools (HMI). In addition to inspecting schools, Ofsted also inspects teacher education in the university sector. On the basis of inspection results, the Training and Development Agency for schools (TDA, formerly Teacher Training Agency [TTA]) allocates funding to teacher education programmes. Teacher education is therefore funded differently to the rest of the university sector in England.