Editorial

A common concern that has found expression in the pages of JET recently has been the fact that many teacher educators, appointed as they are for their expertise in pedagogy, find themselves required to master the dark art of research (see e.g. McNicholl, Ellis, and Blake 2013, passim; Menter and Murray 2009, passim). As your editor discovered many years ago, it is all too easy for newly appointed university education staff comfortable with the demands of being a school teacher to find it less stressful to privilege the busy-ness and comfort of teaching over research. Martijn Willemse and Fer Boei open this issue of JET by examining the phenomenon of teachers-becoming-researchers in the context of the changed remit of the Netherlands’ Universities of Applied Sciences (previously vocational colleges). They draw at first on a large data-set, then drill down to interrogate their data more closely to show that staff who were once not required to carry out research have very clear ideas as to how this new role might be supported and developed.

University lecturers are also the focus of the paper by Mike Calvert and Koi Muchira-Tirim. Here, the lecturers are working in Kenya, struggling to adapt their understanding of what a professional should be with the reality of their practical situation. There is much in their research, especially the voices of the lecturers, which finds worrying echoes in the experience of lecturers in so-called ‘developed’ countries’.

JET is always keen to publish high-quality comparative research in teacher education. Gerry Czerniawski’s paper easily meets this criterion, drawing on a longitudinal study to compare and contrast teachers’ attitudes to continued professional development opportunities in England, Germany and Norway. Given the ever-changing educational policy demands of central government teachers have more than enough ‘innovation’ to cope with. European teachers and teacher educators may well be surprised (if not appalled) to find that the European Commission’s Education Council is proposing to ‘homogenise’ their professional development in what, as the paper makes clear, is a heterogeneous profession.

Linda la Velle, David Reynolds and Jon Nichol also deal with an issue of great concern, namely how to encourage children of what are euphemistically known as ‘disadvantaged communities’ to study at higher education institutions. They present the results of a funded research project aimed at creating a school–university partnership model whose intervention aimed at supporting school teachers, university students and researchers in increasing the educational aspirations of disadvantaged pupils in inner city schools. Amongst the many fascinating insights and recommendations they provide for widening participation in higher education, they conclude that what is critically required is a change in schools’ values, in that if ‘widening participating’ is seen by teachers as a centrally imposed policy diktat, then it will never be part and parcel of a school’s culture.

Issues raised by value differences as expressed through class also underpin the next paper. Recently, we have been told that ‘class is almost totally irrelevant in modern Britain’ (Guardian Editorial 2013), despite the fact that at one and the same time the three-part traditional class divide was being replaced with a seven-part distinction, stretching from the ‘precariat’ to the ‘elite’ (Jones 2013). David Hall and Lisa Jones also deal with visible and invisible social-class divisions in England, arguing that new teachers’ social-class identity plays an important part in shaping, and thus understanding, their initial professional development. They point to the fact that in Australia, England and the USA, there now exist routes into teacher education where significant numbers of middle-class student teachers are placed in inner city schools, and so come face-to-face with strong class distinctions, concluding that addressing these class/culture/value issues are an important element of teachers’ professional development.

Inclusive education (sometimes referred to as special education needs – SEN) has come a very long way since children with SEN were in effect excluded from mainstream education provision. It could be argued that this aspect of education provision, as with concerns with social class, is as much a feature of the drive towards social justice as it is about inclusion per se. William Nketsia and Timo Saloviita present such a case, based on their study of three of Ghana’s teacher education colleges concerning the understanding and confidence that 200 pre-service students have regarding the skills of teaching SEN. JET would be interested to see the study replicated in other countries so as to produce a comparative approach to this important question.

Cynthia Macknish also examines students’ confidence, but in a different subject domain (English language teaching) and a different context (Singapore). Her research focused on beginning teachers’ understanding and responses to classroom incidents, as compared to more experienced teachers’ perceptions of these incidents. Although this is a small-scale study of English language teaching students, it has clear implications for other elements of initial teacher education and, as with Nketsia and Saloviita’s research above, would benefit from being replicated in other social contexts.

The last two papers in JET present research in progress. Greer Johnson, Neil Dempster and Lynanne McKenzie set out their initial findings from the Principals as Literacy Leaders with Indigenous Communities (PALLIC) project to argue that school principals have a critically important part to play in the partnership approach to support literacy development. Although the PALLIC project focused on improving Australia’s indigenous children’s literacy skills, taking this approach into other cultural settings might prove equally enabling. Indeed, elements of their approach can be seen in the Plymouth model reported in this issue.

The Education Futures Collaboration, as represented by Kevin Burden, Sarah Younie and Marilyn Leask, present another exciting research initiative. Here, phase four of their Mapping Educational Specialist know-How project is described, with the project aimed at presenting a ‘wikipedia of professional knowledge for teaching’ similar to that which exists for medical professionals. As with all ‘Research in Progress’ pieces, the authors encourage interested readers to contact them and JET looks forward to publishing a more substantial research paper once this innovative approach to professional development is fully developed.

Peter Gilroy