Editorial

Every now and again your Editor’s task in ordering the papers to be published in the journal is made easier by the way in which certain topics naturally cluster together. Such is the case with this issue of JET. Here four themes identify themselves: namely, the way in which teacher education has to face issues concerning recruitment, inclusion, professional identity and second language concerns.

An unusual approach to recruiting to the teaching profession can be found in a number of countries, including the USA and Israel, where they have implemented a novel way of adding to the teaching force by creating ‘Troops to Teaching’ programmes. The current UK government has intimated it would consider introducing something similar, but quite how such a programme might connect to existing forms of teacher education has yet to be explained. Paul Smith’s paper suggests that one possible approach might be through adopting something akin to the programme currently offered to teaching assistants who wish to qualify as school teachers. He offers a critical summary of the arguments swirling around this possible innovation, drawing on a wide international research base. As it happens, a similar approach was used in the UK after the Second World War, with demobilised members of the services encouraged to join an accelerated route into the profession, so it will be interesting to see how, if at all, this more recent innovation might be allowed to develop.

Once on course, student teachers then have to face the demands of their teacher education programme. Ali Ibrahim argues that beginning teachers’ needs have been well researched in the West, but in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) they seem to have been ignored, as teachers are left alone to sink or swim as the case might be. His country’s policy makers, as so often seems to be the case worldwide, blame those preparing students for teaching for the problems that beginning teachers face in trying to survive: the schools also accuse teacher education programmes of not producing adequate students who, in the absence of a school-based mentoring programme, are expected to perform as fully-fledged school teachers from day one. His research provides useful data for those attempting to identify the needs of his country’s novice teachers, and one hopes that the issues raised will in fact be addressed by policy makers in the UAE.

Inclusion is the subject of Christopher DeLuca’s paper, which describes research examining the way in which a teacher education programme set out to promote inclusive education in such a way that the student teachers on the programme gained the confidence and expertise to teach in inclusive classrooms. The research identified three ways in which ‘inclusivity’ might be understood, this ambiguity adding to the possibility of a disjointed experience for the students, and there is much here that will prove useful and thought-provoking for others attempting to find ways to build inclusive teaching and learning into their programmes.

Kerryn McCluskey’s paper also deals in a sense with the issue of inclusive education. However, here the focus is on how to support and encourage teacher education students who do not have the benefit of English as their mother tongue or, indeed, as their primary culture. The antonym of the frequently used term schadenfreude (‘happiness in another’s ill fortune’) is the much less frequently seen compersion (‘happiness in another’s good fortune’). Leaving aside the interesting question as to why one of these terms should be more commonly used than the other, your editor was certainly pleased to have the feeling of compersion wash over him as he read that in Australia, at least, universities are encouraged to recruit overseas students. In England the UK’s Border Agency seems not to have noticed the financial, political and cultural damage that their policy of dramatically reducing overseas student recruitment to English universities is having on UK universities: one, for example – London Metropolitan University – has lost its visa licence and so is required to abandon its overseas student body. At least that university will not now need to heed both the warnings and the advice in McCluskey’s paper.

Another aspect of inclusion can be seen in Ninetta Santoro, Marilyn Pietsch, and Tracey Borg’s paper. Here they present the common problem of teacher retention and argue for the importance of the concepts (and experiences) of passion and commitment in teaching as a key element for understanding how to inspire beginning teachers with a desire to remain in their chosen profession. The innovation they propose, as part of the students’ course work, is to make use of what they term the ‘alumni members’ (retired school teachers) of their university to inspire their pre-service student teachers and, potentially, address the issue of retention by providing an alternative and positive perspective on the profession. This form of intergenerational learning allows experienced retired teachers to provide valuable learning experiences regarding the profession and one’s identity within it for the young and inexperienced, rather than finding themselves left in retirement as members of what might otherwise be seen as an excluded and forgotten group of ‘alumni’.

Picking up this theme of identity, but in a different context, what makes up the professional identity of a teacher educator is something that has become the focus of a considerable amount of research – not least in the nine papers published recently in a special issue of JET, which is about to be re-published as a monograph by Routledge. Jean Murray, one of the guest editors of that issue, has developed an approach to understanding teacher educators further through the concept of spatiality. She presents a new theoretical framework of space–time so as to better understand the effect of institutional change on the teacher educators who have to experience it. In so doing, her paper opens up the possibility of an intriguing way to research the lives of teacher educators through the interconnected concepts of time and history.

Saovapa Wichadee’s large-scale study examines the nature of the continued professional development of English language lecturers in Thailand. A significant finding is that different kinds of universities provide different levels of continued professional development, and it would be fascinating to duplicate her study in contexts such as the USA and the UK, where there are either clearly differentiated higher education institutions and/or a number which have recently been awarded university status.

This issue of the journal closes with a contribution to JET’s In Practice section from Renee Gutierrez and Cheryl Hunter. As with Wichadee’s paper, the focus is on English language learning, but here the concern is with the effect of immersion studies on second language acquisition and pre-service teachers’ misunderstandings regarding the nature of language acquisition.