EDITORIAL

There are two significant changes to this issue of JET. For 30 years one volume of the journal consisted of three issues, but by 2005 there was such a quantity of high-quality papers being submitted that it was agreed that the journal needed to move to four issues per volume. Five years later the Executive Board of the journal found itself faced with the same concern. Despite priding itself on publishing research as near as possible to the receipt of the original manuscript, JET was again having to inform authors that there was only space for their work to be published in an issue nine or even 12 months distant from their submission. Despite the current economic climate, our publisher has agreed that JET should move to five issues per volume, which should allow researchers to publish in JET much more closely to the research projects and issues concerning education for teaching on which they are reporting.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will also have noticed that our Reviews Editor, Allan Soares, has retired. The role is a difficult one and he will be missed, both by the journal he has served so well and by his university. We wish him a long and happy retirement whilst welcoming Dr Rowena Passy, previously a member of the renowned National Foundation for Educational Research and now Research Fellow at Plymouth University’s School of Education, as our new Reviews Editor.

JET has published a significant amount of research focused on identifying the factors that are relevant in understanding the motivation behind students’ decision to become a teacher (e.g. Flores 2001). Marjon Fokkens-Bruinsma and Esther T. Canrinus have added to this understanding with their quantitative study of a large (n = 136) Dutch cohort of pre-service student teachers. They conclude that their research suggests that there are certain motivations which need to be identified and then used to assist in the difficult process of recruiting and retaining students in the profession, with these motivations providing an important element in constructing a teacher education programme.

Perhaps the key objective of an initial education programme is to introduce and eventually support students’ immersion into the professional culture of teaching. There are a host of ways of entering this community of practice, many of which have been critically analysed in JET (e.g. Abu Rass 2010). Donna Kotsopoulos, Julie Mueller and Dawn Buzza present and critique another approach, whereby student teachers in Canada are encouraged to take an active part in research, producing rather than consuming it. Here we are presented with an element of a community of practice, namely a community of enquiry (or research), warts and all, an element that should inform any beginning teacher’s programme, with the student teacher eventually becoming a teacher researcher.

One way of developing the concept of pre-service teacher as researcher of their own practice is through the concept of peer review. Michael Buchanan and Julian Stern are concerned with identifying the way in which what they identify as ‘dialogic peer review’ contributes to beginning teachers’ understanding of what they argue is ‘the dialogic work of schools’. Although accepting the limitations of their small-scale study, they argue that their approach to peer review has the potential, especially when introduced at the pre-service level, to act as an extended form of teachers’ continued professional development, with teachers researching their own practice through the medium of peer review.

The focus in Kevin Orr’s paper is also on the early experience of teachers, both beginning teachers and those taking part in in-service programmes, but the context is not the school system but rather that provided by further education (FE) colleges. It will come as no surprise to those who have had experience of teaching in such institutions that much of what beginning FE teachers learn is how to manage circumstances that include isolation and alienation, that might otherwise be beyond their control, as opposed to deeper professional knowledge and understanding of their profession. It would be interesting to see whether the same problems apply to those in the university sector concerned with preparing students for life in the school classroom, in particular if students learn how to get by rather than how to teach.

Taehyung Kim and Scot Danforth approach the issue of what beliefs are held by those teachers responsible for supervising student teachers as expressed through the medium of the metaphors they use as supervisors. The paper provides a detailed metaphor analysis that suggests a way of understanding, through the language used by both students and their supervisory teachers, their respective belief systems and how they interact, for good or bad.

Teacher educators are also the focus of the paper by Päivi Hökkä, Anneli Eteläpelto and Helena Rasku-Puttonen, in particular the way in which they operate what is identified here as ‘professional agency’. Again, the concept of teacher as researcher surfaces as a key element in understanding why teacher education programmes are based firmly within the university context. Ironically, the present UK government has insisted that it favours the Finnish model of teacher education described in this paper, whilst at the same time suggesting that a new policy is in the making whereby teacher education in England will be divorced from any meaningful contribution from universities and where ‘teacher educator’ may well be synonymous with ‘school teacher’, whose ‘agency’ is as circumscribed as that of teacher educators in England. Whether such a retrograde policy will in fact be implemented will shortly become clear: it is a pity that England’s teacher education policy makers seem happy to live with the contradiction of both accepting and rejecting the Finnish model of teacher education.

This issue of JET closes with a contribution from Omobolade Delano-Oriaran to the In Practice section of the journal, in which she shares the details of a pre-service programme designed to help pre-service student teachers prepare to teach in increasingly culturally diverse classrooms. JET would be interested in further analysis of this programme, in particular that which identifies the perceptions of the student teachers themselves.