Teacher educators, othering and the outsider

JET has published many papers on the continued professional development (CPD) of teachers much, although by no means all, of such work being carried out by teacher educators in universities. But bearing in mind Juvenal’s question, ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ (Juvenal, Satire VI, O29-34) one has to ask similar questions regarding teacher educators themselves. This is an issue addressed by Gerry Czerniawski, Donald Grey, Ann MacPhail, Yvonne Bain, Paul Conway and Ainat Guberman in their report on a survey of teacher educators in England, the Republic of Ireland and Scotland. One of the important points made in their paper is that understanding the nature of school teachers’ CPD does not in itself lead to an understanding of university-based teacher educators’ CPD, in particular what CPD teacher educators might value and how these can be achieved. A worrying aspect of their paper is the possibility that under pressure from policy makers who claim that teaching, and thus the teaching of teaching, is a mere craft, the CPD of both teachers and teacher educators will become little more than low level training in tips and tricks.

These issues are not confined to the school and university sector. Octavia Springbett focuses on teacher educators working in the Cinderella sector of Further Education colleges. Using a variety of data she argues that their identity as teacher educators is confused by the fact that they operate in what she terms ‘an unusual space’, in that they teach higher education programmes whilst operating in a further education context, so are uneasily poised between two professional identities. It is this question of identity that perhaps best captures the tensions inherent in their situation, especially the concept of the outsider or the misunderstood ‘other’.

‘Othering’ is one of the many aspects of the paper by Linda Dunne, Virginia Kay, Rachel Boyle, Felix Obadan and Vini Lander that structures the language used by the student teachers in their research as they discussed race and ethnicity. As the authors point out, it is easier to deal with the awkwardness, if not unease, that these topics can create by not addressing them explicitly, and it is the silence that can surround them which this paper speaks to so clearly.

There has been a considerable amount of research examining the so-called ‘five personality traits’ and whether or not they can be used to show why a teacher is (or is not) successful in their classroom (see e.g. Smidt 2015). Roisin Corcoran and Joanne O’Flaherty make use of a large data-set of 400 pre-service student teachers to argue that there is no obvious relationship between a student’s personality and the quality of their teaching during their final school placement. It may well be the case that attempting to identify some sort of causal, and thus predictive, relationship between teaching ability and an aspect of a student’s character and background is an example of oversimplifying a very complex phenomenon. Alternatively it might well be no more than the fallacy of confusing correlation with causation. Whatever the impetus behind such attempts at prediction it is obvious from this paper that identifying what makes a teacher successful is as complex and variable as the teaching context itself.

Your editor has previously experienced the problems inherent in attempting to introduce one pedagogical model into a context that is comfortable with a quite different model, even when the new model is mandated by central government diktat. This is an aspect of curriculum reform that Claire Dickerson, Kit Thomas, Joy Jarvis and Roger Levym describe in setting out their response to a Malaysian government initiative to introduce active learning to primary school mathematics teachers. JET has previously published research which suggests that it is not always easy to implement change in the classroom with the result that over a period of time the traditional pedagogy eventually engulfs the new (e.g. Wong 2013; Teng 2016; Palos and Gunaru 2017). Indeed the very next paper also identifies the power of traditional pedagogic styles. It would be interesting to see whether or not the teachers involved with this study were able to maintain the active learning pedagogy described here.

Another approach to CPD is offered by Ignatius Harjanto, Anita Lie, Diah Wihardini, Laura Pryor and Mark Wilson. They explain the problems faced by the Indonesian government as they attempt to offer CPD to teachers in their remote provinces. One approach has been to make use of a privately funded non-profit body such as the Tanoto Foundation programmes. This sets out to introduce CPD which supports and develops active learning within a cultural context that is not necessarily supportive of such an approach. What is of interest here is that some of the teachers were evidently resistant to a pedagogy that was attempting to move away from a lecturing, teacher-centred, style. The authors are careful not to apportion blame to the teachers when discussing why this should be so, suggesting that the problem could well lie with the researchers’ limited grasp of the context that the teachers were operating within.

Two research in progress pieces presented here examine mentoring and school counselling teachers. The first, by Jihea Maddamsetti, drills down from a larger data-set to see how two teachers from East Asia understand the role of mentors in a USA setting. One of the two discovered the problems of being the other in the eyes of her mentor, an experience which links well with the two papers in this issue discussing othering explicitly.

The second piece, by Wei Liu, Rui Yuanb and Hong Zhang, focuses on a transfer programme in China which encouraged teachers to retrain as school counsellors. One of these teachers joined the programme for intrinsic, rather than extrinsic reasons. In effect this can be interpreted as a form of resistance to the traditional rote-learning, exam centred, pedagogy, with their research identifying the complexities inherent in the developing identities and motivations of those involved with all levels of education.

China figures again in the paper reporting on innovative practice by Benjamin Moorhouse. He explains how as a novice teacher educator he worked with his pre-service Hong Kong students during their two-week practicum in mainland China. In a sense the students, as well as their supervisor, were ‘others’ in this project with the benefit that they seemed able to stand back and reflect more critically on their practice.

This editorial began with Juvenal’s question, ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’ Given the particular thrust of the papers in this issue of JET then it is clear that the common question being addressed is one that echoes Juvenal’s question, ‘Who will teach the teachers and teacher educators themselves?’. We would welcome responses to the various answers to the question presented in this issue of JET.

Peter Gilroy
[email protected]