Organisational self-evaluation and teacher education for community relations in a transforming society?

Abstract

During 2004, the School of Education at the University of Ulster embarked on an innovative three-year project designed to embed community relations objectives within initial teacher education. With the advent of more peaceful times in Northern Ireland, this was a precipitous time for initial teacher educators to review the preparation given to beginner teachers for teaching in an increasingly pluralist society emerging from conflict. The present paper reports on one very specific and time-limited element of the broader project. That is, development work designed to investigate the possibilities of using processes of self-review and evaluation as a lever for improvements in initial teacher education for community relations. Following a brief contextualisation, the background to, and the development of, a set of materials designed to support rigorous and systematic self-review of all aspects of provision in a university-based initial teacher education department is described. The Community Relations Index for Initial Teacher Education (Cr-ITE) was envisaged as being of use to initial teacher education establishments in order to help teacher educators take responsibility for rigorous learning from their practice, whilst placing inclusive values at the centre of organisational development. The final section includes further critical reflection on the role of organisational self-review in transforming teacher education for inclusion in a society emerging from longstanding communal conflict.

Keywords:

• Northern Ireland
• initial teacher education
• Index for Inclusion
• community relations education
• organisational review and self-evaluation
• democratic practice

Notes

1. A Shared Future: The Policy and Strategic Framework for Good Relations in Northern Ireland.

2. Dean Fink, who has an international reputation in the field of organisational development, introduced this group brainstorming exercise to an audience of Education and Library Board (ELB) advisers on the 17 October, 2006. Amongst advisers, it subsequently, and affectionately, became known as doing a ‘Dean Fink’!

3. The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofted) is the non-ministerial Government Department of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools in England (HMCI).

4. Corbett (1999) referred to the deep culture as the hidden curriculum of assumed knowledges, fundamental value systems, rituals and routines that formed the fabric of life within specific institutions. It was out of this mix of fundamental meaning structures, or discourses, arising out of human interchange and linked to issues of power, that people constructed their identities.

5. For a detailed account of the work of the IFI project see McCully (2010) Better Embedding Community Relations Principles in Initial Teacher Education: concluding report to funders, Coleraine, UNESCO Centre, University of Ulster.

6. Brighouse and Woods (1999) cited Fullan (1992) who counterpoint the critical friend with the ‘uncritical lover’ and the hostile witness or ‘unloving critic’, both of whom are dangerous to the health of a school.