Looking forward: rethinking professional learning through partnership arrangements in Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

We draw on evidence gathered from teachers who had responsibility for initial teacher education in their schools as part of training partnership arrangements with universities, in order to examine how they are working within their schools and with their higher education partners. Evidence consisted of questionnaire returns from 60 teachers, interviews with six of these and analyses of partnership documentation. Analyses revealed that many of the schools were working with more than one higher education institution and that some schools were increasingly seeing teacher training as a set of practices which were school‐led and which therefore reduced the disruption to schools that may arise in school‐based training. With this as a background we then use the lenses of activity theory and findings from two recent studies which have examined boundary crossing in other aspects of schools’ work to interrogate the dataset and to consider the implications of multiple partnership arrangements for future developments in the professional learning of both student teachers and teacher‐mentors; and links between schools and universities.

Introduction

Teaching is often seen as an orchestration of learners, curricula, space and time, which is negotiated on a moment by moment basis (Doyle, 1986; Tochon, 2000, inter alia). In these negotiations the rhythm, pace and sequence of classroom life may be fruitfully disrupted to enable teachers and learners to expand understandings or it may simply break down. Teaching is therefore a relatively high risk activity. We know that student teachers, through fear of a breakdown in their orchestrations of classrooms, frequently avoid the pedagogic potential of disruptions in order to preserve their fragile identities as teachers (Desforges, 1995; Edwards, 1997a, 1998).

The professional identities of more experienced teachers are usually less fragile than those of student teachers (see Day and Gu in this issue) and more overtly sustained by the categorisations of schooling. These categorisations, as well as sorting pupils by age, ability and behaviour, inscribe the position of teacher with authority and status. These categories form a meaning system which is self‐sustaining, renders breakdown less likely and enables teachers to work pedagogically with disruptions should they wish to. It is a meaning system which is also self‐contained. The categories of schooling rarely travel beyond school boundaries into their local communities, for to do so may call them into question and raise complications. For example, troublesome pupils may be seen by practitioners outside school as simply one part of a troubled family. It is therefore often in the interests of schools to maintain their local boundaries and to ensure that those who cross them to enter the school system do so on the school’s terms.

This analysis draws on work over the last fifteen years on partnerships in initial teacher education (ITE) undertaken by both authors (e.g. Edwards, 1995; Edwards & Collison, 1996; Mutton et al., 2006; Mutton & Butcher, in press); on home–school community links (Edwards & Warin, 1999); on the involvement of schools in multi‐agency collaborations to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people (Edwards et al., 2006) and in an on‐going study of inter‐professional work (Daniels et al., this issue).

These studies share a common focus on partnerships and boundary crossing and their impact on learners. The work we have done on ITE has, however, paid scant attention to what happens at the boundaries of school and higher education. Instead we, along with others, have focused on what goes on in schools, often in order to understand better the experiences that HEI students are having when not in university. Consequently, we know relatively little about, for example, how ways of categorising learners and learning that are used in ITE and schools are negotiated; how identities are enacted; and systems sustained or adjusted as people work at the boundaries of schools and departments of education in universities.

In the present paper we draw primarily on a study of the work of teachers with responsibility for co‐ordinating ITE within their schools in order to gain some purchase on what kind of boundary work occurs and whether it is regarded as important for the professional learning of co‐ordinators and the student teachers who are learning to teach in their schools. We then consider the implications of the answers to these questions for ITE partnerships and the professional learning that may occur within them. The research questions explored here have particularly been informed by two recent studies, which have been focusing on collaborations between schools and other organisations for the prevention of the social exclusion of children and young people (Daniels et al. in this issue; Edwards et al., 2006). Concepts developed in these studies are used in order to interrogate the development of partnerships in ITE.

The Context

Government circulars 9/92 (DfE, 1992) and 14/93 (DfE, 1993) in England required higher education institutions (HEI) to enter into formal partnership arrangements with schools for the initial training of teachers. There was an expectation that these partnerships would ‘exercise a joint responsibility for the planning and management of courses and the selection, training and assessment of students’ (DfE, 1992, para. 14). This model of partnership has been described as ‘complementary partnership’ (Furlong et al., 2000), reflecting the view that an HEI would take responsibility for the organisation of the overall programme and assume a separate but complementary role to that of the school. Trainee teachers would spend a significant length of time in schools gaining practical experience of classroom teaching with the support of school‐based teacher‐mentors. The idea of partnership being proposed seemed premised on organisational arrangements where there was a shared commitment to producing good teachers and on understandings of professional learning which were based on those interactionist accounts of learning which valued the kinds of dyadic relationships that characterise apprenticeship.

The findings from the Modes of Teacher Education (MOTE) project revealed that actual partnership working fell short of government expectations. Most schools were unable to take on the ‘joint responsibility’ outlined; and while there were some highly developed ‘collaborative partnerships’ (Furlong et al., 2000), the majority were neither complementary nor collaborative. They were instead ‘HEI‐led’ arrangements in which both the ITE curriculum and its assessment processes were directed by HEI through large amounts of course documentation aimed at ensuring the quality of provision in an accountability‐led teacher education system.

The willingness of schools to accept HEI‐led partnerships which were largely bureaucratic can be explained by a reluctance to disrupt their historically formed and sometimes precariously sustained social practices aimed at promoting pupil achievement. That is, working in a bureaucratic way did not require schools to rethink their basic focus on pupils. Their reluctance to disrupt school systems was often reflected in the ways that HEI negotiated the new arrangements with them. For the most part neither schools nor HEI considered the developmental potential for schools inherent in these partnerships (Goodlad, 1990). Instead, mentoring arrangements were delicately negotiated with minimum disruption to schools. For example, we were able to observe, several years after the reforms, that mentor and student dyads appeared ‘desert‐islanded in the ocean of school life’ (Edwards & Collison, 1996).

Recent changes in training arrangements have raised more questions about the purposes of co‐ordination and the importance of a range of boundaries in different kinds of training partnerships. Partnerships between HEI and schools have evolved as government reforms and demographic factors have increased the demand for newly trained teachers (Mutton & Butcher, under review). Alternative routes into teaching which include School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) schemes, where consortia of schools offer their own initial teacher training programmes; flexible Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) courses; and a Graduate Teacher Programme have all meant that a single HEI may be working with a wider range of partners than originally envisaged. At the same time schools frequently select to work with more than one HEI to ensure that all subject departments in schools which are willing to receive student teachers are able to do so. Some of these developments have the potential to enhance the interest of schools in the pedagogic purposes of ITE while others have increased the likelihood that work at the boundaries of schools and departments of education in HEI is shaped by bureaucratic practices which ensure minimal disruption to schools while at the same time meeting the needs of both schools and university departments of education. These, perhaps contradictory, trends suggest that a discussion of some of the implications of training partnerships for professional learning may be timely.

Professional identity and professional learning

As we have just seen, ITE partnerships were established with the aim of shared responsibility and joint working. The professional development potential of these arrangements were never explicit in government guidance but were recognised by others (McIntyre & Hagger, 1992; Edwards & Collison, 1996). Although professional development schools of the kind developed in the USA (Darling‐Hammond, 1994; Bullough et al., 1997) were not regarded as an option in England, it was felt that strong overlaps between schools and HEI could be for the mutual benefit of both. This view placed particular emphasis on those, like teacher‐mentors and ITE co‐ordinators, who inhabited those overlaps (Edwards, 1997b). However, this aspect of partnership has been underplayed in practice and the development of a strong teacher‐mentor identity is relatively rare (Boag‐Munroe, 2007). Before examining the nature of the partnership boundary, we draw on cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) frameworks to outline what we mean by teacher identity formation.

The systems of schooling, we suggest, are geared at sustaining relatively stable teacher identities. The ‘positional identities’ (Holland et al., 1998) of teachers in schools are consistently referenced by the category systems of the school which position teachers and pupils within intertwined sets of accepted behaviours for both groups. These identities may sometimes constrain teachers’ actions (Nias, 1990); but they also protect. In the dynamics of power and control in schools they are ‘non‐negotiable’ (Holland & Lave, 2001). However, the CHAT line on identity and learning sees identity, potentially at least, as ‘a contingent achievement of situated activity’ (Roth et al., 2004). That is, it is made and remade in ongoing negotiations in settings. The relative stability of teachers’ identities therefore tells us about the settings in which they are achieved. If teachers need to struggle to maintain their teacher identities in school it is often a sign that the school system has broken down.

The boundaries between school and higher education are, however, like all inter‐organisational or inter‐cultural boundaries, likely to be complex, unstable and negotiable (Kerosuo, 2003). They are often sites of struggle and perhaps places where new identities are formed in the practices that arise at those boundaries (Holland & Lave, 2001). Boundaries and the work done there can be threatening for systems which work hard at being stable.

One outcome of an ongoing negotiation of who you are and how you see the world is that you may take up new or different positions in the social practices you inhabit and therefore behave differently. In CHAT terms this repositioning is often seen as a change in the division of labour within a work system as a result of people interpreting their work in fresh ways and then approaching what they do differently (see Daniels et al. in this issue). These shifts may result in systemic changes, as new ways of interpreting and responding to the primary task of an organisation will reverberate across the system, demanding adjustments to its social practices. That is, changes in individuals are likely to be accompanied in the systems in which they work.

Arguably, people who work at organisational boundaries are able to engage with the categorisations in use in other systems. For example, teachers working at the boundaries of their schools with children and family workers may become increasingly likely to see the roots of troublesome behaviour in school in the long term problems of a child’s family network. That is, by becoming familiar with the categorisations used by other practitioners they may expand their own sense of who they are and where they are going as professionals (Edwards et al., 2006). However, for teachers, whose professional well‐being depends on sustaining school categories and systems, engaging with the categories used by others could be troubling when they work in schools. Their ‘structures of wanting’, inviting the development of their professional identities, (Jensen, this issue; Knorr‐Cetina, 1998) are their school systems and not the links that are in place with family workers.

We are suggesting that HEI‐led models of partnership do nothing to change this rather restricted pattern of identity formation; and indeed in their current form with emphases on documentation and procedures do much to sustain the situation (Boag‐Munroe, 2007). However, new possibilities for identity formation and associated learning are arising through the development of new and more fluid forms of multiple partnership. Our concern is that these too may provide restricted opportunities for expanding the roles of teacher‐mentors and teachers responsible for ITE within and on the boundaries of schools and their ITE partners, and may limit the mutual learning that may occur for all who work on the professional development of beginning teachers. Let us therefore look in more detail at boundaries and what may happen there.

Ways of looking at organisational boundaries

There has been a considerable amount of CHAT research on boundaries and boundary crossing (Tuomi‐Gröhn & Engeström, 2003, inter alia). Most of it originates in the Engeström version of activity theory (Engeström, 1999) and its analyses of activity systems, i.e., systems which are focused on a shared object of activity or problem space. To illustrate: if we examine a school as an activity system we would usually find that the object of the activity is pupil progression through a curriculum. That is, the social practices of the school are geared towards working on and promoting pupil learning of agreed knowledge. Activity theory analyses have increasingly recognised that more than one system may be working on the same object of activity, but in doing so they will emphasise different aspects of the problem they are working on. For example, the school psychology service or a local community group may also be working with the same pupils as learners, but will employ the social practices of their systems and highlight different aspects of children’s trajectories as learners, which may not include curricula.

A recognition that different activity systems interact in their work on shared objects of activity has given rise to two more analytic concepts which help us to examine these interactions: boundary objects and boundary zones. We shall look at each of them in turn.

In a recent study of boundary work in ITE in Norway, Jahreie and Ludvigsen (under review) have traced the development of a portfolio assessment scheme as a boundary object that was worked on by both schools and HEI. It was jointly fashioned by both partners to ‘cut across institutionalised boundaries’ and its development and subsequent use required both types of organisation to ‘configure themselves in relation to each other and to the students’. Tellingly, given what we have said so far about the relatively superficial nature of English ITE partnerships, Jahreie and Ludvigsen note that the problem of educational reform ‘is not resistance to change … but the direction and depth of the actual change’. They observe, therefore, that joint work on the assessment scheme and the changes in social practices it required in both types of system meant that the scheme was central to the development of new relationships in ITE. This observation is very different from the one‐way flow of HEI‐created documentation to be found in HEI‐led partnerships.

The Norwegian study was part of a research‐informed programme of innovation in ITE which drew on CHAT principles to emphasise the need to create the conditions for learning at both individual and systemic levels. That is, in order to develop ITE it was necessary to recognise that organisations which aim to promote learning need to focus on the conditions for learning embedded within their structures and processes. The priorities of the Norwegian programme are reflected in this recent concerned comment from a group of English teacher educators.

… (w)hen partnership is reduced to finding more places or setting up common procedures and paperwork, without paying attention to the epistemological and pedagogical issues underpinning any one teacher education programme, it undermines the nature of the professional education that is offered. Once again, it flattens the complexity and reduces teacher education to technical rationalist tasks. (Furlong et al., 2006, p. 43)

Of course Jahreie and Ludvigsen may be over‐optimistic in their expectations of systemic change through the joint construction and subsequent use of a new resource. While its construction remains a joint object of activity for the various systems it is likely that the practices will configure to aid that process. However, once the student teacher assessment scheme has been worked on and it enters each system as a tool to be used within the system rather than a joint object to be worked on, its potential to reconfigure practices may diminish. The category systems of the school may begin to shape how the tool is used; as was the case in the mentor feedback sessions we analysed in the late 1990s (Edwards & Protheroe, 2004). There a feedback tool for working on developing student teachers as beginning professionals was appropriated by teacher‐mentors to work on the schools’ objects of activity, i.e., pupil progress through the curriculum. If the tool is to maintain its function as an artefact which brings the two systems together it would seem that it needs to retain, at least on occasions, its position as a boundary object which is jointly worked on at the boundaries of the systems. That is, jointly produced tools, such as assessment instruments, need to be revisited to keep the collaboration alive.

The boundary spaces where this joint work occurs may be seen as sites for expanding mutual understanding of shared tasks and problems; and the development of expertise in negotiating meanings and the responses to those meanings. The term ‘boundary zone’ to describe these spaces originated in the work of Konkola on training partnerships with a polytechnic (Konkola, 2001). She describes boundary zones as neutral spaces outside established systems, where the priorities of home organisations are respected and new ways of thinking can emerge in discussions. We have recently used the idea of boundary zones to examine, inter alia, how practitioners have learnt to collaborate to prevent the social exclusion of children presenting a complex array of difficulties (Edwards et al., 2006; Edwards, in press). There we found that meetings of practitioners from different agencies, which first focused on sharing experiences to build trust in each others’ expertise and then began to focus on specific children, operated as springboards for fluid inter‐professional relationships which were able to respond to the changing needs of children in whom they shared a common professional interest. The children’s trajectories became the boundary objects and the focus for joint action.

These boundary zones were the origin of new trails, or what Knorr‐Cetina refers to as confidence pathways (Knorr‐Cetina, 1998), which practitioners created across different organisational boundaries to ensure that appropriate support was available for specific children and families. These trails were marked by their fluidity, responsiveness and their disregard for structures and boundaries. They offer a counter picture to that presented by Warmington et al. (2004), who observed in their review of literature on interagency working that all too often boundaries are seen as barriers to collaboration, rather than ‘terrains in which expansive learning might proliferate’ (p. 8).

The trails that we found also highlighted some of the challenges for practitioners when working across organisational boundaries outside what Sennett (1999) has described as the safety of their ‘institutional shelters’. Elsewhere one of us has argued that this kind of work calls for an enhanced form of ‘relational agency’ which involves a capacity to align one’s interpretations and responses with others (Edwards, 2005). Here we simply suggest that as relationships between schools and HEI are becoming more fluid, changing and overlapping arrangements encompassing a broad range of partners, we perhaps now need to think less about rigid systems of bureaucratic accountability. Rather we should perhaps think more about self‐organising networks of mutual co‐operation which are geared pedagogically at producing rounded professionals. Though this may currently be a leap too far, it may be a model to be kept in mind in the longer term.

Indeed this suggestion may be reflected in recent Teacher Development Agency (TDA) initiatives in England. These include the short‐lived National Partnership Project (NPP) to develop regional collaboration amongst those with an interest in ITE such as schools and HEI, which led to, inter alia, the development of commonly agreed assessment materials, course documentation, and common mentor training programmes. However, as Furlong and his colleagues have noted in relation to the NPP, there is a danger that these arrangements may simply increase the ‘procedures and paperwork’ (Furlong et al., 2006) rather than be based on pedagogic principles.

It is already clear that schools working in partnership with only one provider can not be assumed to be the dominant model in ITE. Some schools are now willing to embrace the difficulties of working in multiple partnerships (Mutton & Butcher, under review); while a few enterprising schools, particularly those designated by the government as Training Schools (DfEE, 1999a, b), are beginning to think about how they will set the training agenda. These developments call into question quite simple notions of boundaries between a school and an HEI and raise questions about whether it is worthwhile to talk about boundaries at all. Indeed, where schools take the lead in setting the ITE agenda through, for example, provision of particular core courses for student teachers, we should perhaps be thinking more about local networks of linked providers rather than partnerships, whether HEI‐led or not. The multiplicity of players and routes have disrupted patterns of communication based on paperwork and trust, making it perhaps timely to take seriously the criticism of Furlong et al. (2006) and to consider how revised approaches to professional learning for teachers and student teachers in schools might focus more on a pedagogy of teacher education than has been the case so far.

The research study

Our analysis draws on data collected in a small‐scale TTA‐funded study (Best et al., 2005). The research involved examining the role of the ITE co‐ordinator in both primary and secondary schools in one region of England where ITE provision is focused predominantly on four HEI, one of which is a distance learning provider. Data collection involved a review of the relevant course documentation produced by the four HEI and a postal questionnaire to ITE co‐ordinators in 62 primary schools and 51 secondary schools involved in partnerships with these HEI. The schools were sampled from the total population of partnership schools using stratified random sampling. The questionnaire focused on the boundary work of the ITE co‐ordinator and the return rate was 53%. In addition two primary school co‐ordinators and four secondary school co‐ordinators who were in schools working with at least two HEI providers agreed to a telephone interview to explore in more detail issues arising from the analysis of the questionnaire.

Initial analysis of the evidence from documents, the questionnaires and the interviews focused on the nature of the role of the co‐ordinators in both school and HEI settings and identified four main areas of work: management, being an educator, quality assurance and assessment, and pastoral (Best et al., 2005). The evidence was then re‐examined using principles drawn from activity theory, and ideas about boundary crossing, which arose in the two recent studies which have been focusing on collaborations between schools and other organisations for the prevention of the social exclusion of children and young people (Daniels et al., in this issue; Edwards et al., 2006). These principles and ideas have informed our examination of the complexity of the relationships between schools and HEI and their implications for the professional learning of the ITE co‐ordinators. It is this analysis which is the focus of the present paper.

The overarching set of research questions which drove the present analysis was:

To what extent are schools operating as separate systems which accommodate ITE through procedures and paperwork rather than drawing on pedagogical principles and what are the implications for teachers’ professional learning?

These broad questions then led to more specific questions which focused primarily on the position of the school‐based ITE co‐ordinator.

1. What are the current challenges of the role of the ITE co‐ordinator?

2. What are the satisfactions of the role?

3. What kinds of boundary work occur and what impact do they have on the co‐ordinator and the school?

4. Are there any signs of new pedagogically driven and flexible ways of working to provide ITE in schools?

5. What are the implications of these signs for professional learning in schools?

Schools as separate systems

Questionnaire responses revealed that the majority of the secondary schools in the survey (84.8%) were working with two or more HEI and 27.3% with four or more. The proportion was lower with primary schools, with just over half the schools working with two or more providers and only one with four or more.

The rationale presented for this trend towards multiple partners was threefold:

• the mutual support that a larger number of trainees could provide for each other;

• ensuring that all curriculum areas could benefit from receiving student teachers; and

• the opportunity to have a critical mass of students so that ITE could be taken seriously as an aspect of school life.

Interestingly these are all school‐centred reasons with student teachers seen as resources for the school, to be managed within a school and on the school’s terms. What concerns there were about involvement in ITE focused on the strain this put on school systems as a result of the time and the administrative resources required; and on the difficulties arising from the different demands of the different HEI. Several schools responded to the latter concerns by developing their own core courses which were designed to meet the needs of ‘their’ students. As we shall see, it was this more pedagogical work that gave a great deal of professional satisfaction to the co‐ordinators.

There was no indication in any of the evidence‐bases interrogated in the study that schools regarded their links with HEI in terms of over‐lapping systems with common interests where boundary zones were important and boundary objects such as assessment schemes were worked on and developed. The schools were all clearly separate systems, working in bureaucratic ‘procedures and paperwork’ ways with each HEI. However, there were some indications that within the schools, and distinct from their relationships with HEI, there was a growing focus on the pedagogies of ITE. These developments, of course, raise the question of consistency of experience for student teachers. Whereas there may be increasing consistency across departments within individual schools, this may be at the price of consistency of experience for students within specific ITE programmes.

With this background picture in mind we now turn to the four more specific research questions in order to tease out the implications of relationships between schools and HEI for the professional learning of teachers and also student teachers.

What the work of the ITE co‐ordinator reveals about the opportunities for professional learning in ITE partnerships

The challenges and satisfactions in the role

Here we explore the practices and rules that shaped the role of co‐ordinators in schools; we look at the division of labour in ITE within schools; and consider the contradictions that occur as ITE was enacted in schools. Let us start with some obvious contradictions. From an activity theory perspective contradictions are growth points (Engeström, 2001). That is, through facing and exploring the tensions and differences in intention that they reveal, a system like a school can learn, reconfigure and move forward.

In school‐based ITE a ‘primary contradiction’, in Engeström’s terms, is that ITE is historically not the main focus of activity for schools. This was evident in repeated comments from co‐ordinators about lack of sufficient time to work with student teachers and insufficient resources. Alongside this is the contradiction inherent in a focus on student teachers as learners at the same time as working on pupil performance in a context of standards and accountability. A third type of contradiction can occur when student teachers need to work in ways that are not part of a school’s accepted practices or when an HEI suggests a change in a partnership arrangement. Working on and resolving these contradictions necessarily lead to changes in practices in schools and hence teacher learning. It has therefore been useful to look at the evidence from the co‐ordinators and to tease out which types of contradictions they choose to face and work on and which remained irritations. This analysis provides some indication of where the growth points for ITE and teacher learning are to be found, as we would expect change to occur where contradictions are faced.

The different bureaucratic demands of the various HEI partners was a common complaint. However, several of the aspects of their work that co‐ordinators described as ‘least satisfying’ highlighted problems within schools as systems. For example, 24 of the 60 co‐ordinators said that lack of time to carry out their role to their own satisfaction was a serious problem and often the result of lack of flexibility in the school system and their other roles within it. There were also vexations arising from having to persuade colleagues ‘to take on trainees at the last minute’ or not being seen by the mentors, who were working directly with student teachers, as a key point of contact. That is, in their roles as ITE co‐ordinators they seemed to operate outside the main social practices of their schools and instead they had to work hard at either working round or shifting the system so that it could accommodate ITE.

That they made that effort was due to how much they felt they gained from doing the job. For one it was ‘my passion’. Others reported that, ‘It’s had a big impact on my own career development’, ‘It’s been fantastically rewarding. I get a huge kick out of working with new teachers and having enthusiastic teachers around who are in the learning stage’ and ‘it’s been a big source of professional development for me’. These, and similar comments, centred on the pedagogic aspects of ITE: what could be gained from working closely with HEI; how student teachers could be supported in schools; and the pleasure of seeing student teachers learn. In Jensen’s terms their ‘structures of wanting’ were, at least in part, oriented towards the development of student teachers (Jensen, this issue). They were willing to tackle the frustrations that were presented by their schools in order to maintain their focus on ITE and in doing so were increasingly asserting the importance of ITE to their schools.

Several of them were very successful in this endeavour. Co‐ordinators reported having, for example, 47, 38, 30, 20, placements for student teachers from up to six providers each year. Although having large numbers of student teachers helped with problems of teacher recruitment to their schools, the benefits for subject departments and ensuring that all departments were able to benefit was a primary driver for most co‐ordinators. There was also no strong sense of loyalty to specific HEI: ‘We’ll take them from anywhere’. Here we can see quite clearly that the development of departments and colleagues meshed with the pleasures of training keen young teachers and they talked of ‘the very positive way in which colleagues respond to the challenge of having a student’. In activity theory terms, the object motive of the activity of ITE in schools seemed to be the development of the schools. As one co‐ordinator put it:

In the last two years it has changed phenomenally. It’s not just to do with the number of trainees you have in your schools, it’s the way you think about what’s happening, it’s about what they bring to the whole school … you have to think more strategically … how you are going to position them across the whole school … the departments are saying ‘we want to work with trainees’…. That’s really exciting.

This should be cause for considerable celebration; isn’t that what so many university‐based teacher educators in the 1990s saw as a good and inevitable outcome of school‐based ITE? However, HEI are largely absent from the new version of teacher development through involvement in ITE. How have we got here? Let us now turn to the third research question.

What kinds of boundary work occur and what impact do they have on the co‐ordinator and the school?

Although some of the co‐ordinators talked of good and long term relationships with tutors in particular HEI, these were often at a personal level and were valued because of how they made co‐operation easier. There was rarely a strong commitment to one HEI when more than one was involved with a school, and co‐ordinators sometimes did not attend the meetings put on by HEI. ‘In effect I get invited to do three or four professional tutor meetings. I go regularly to one because that’s our largest’.

It seemed as if the procedures and paperwork had made more pedagogically oriented boundary work with HEI, which might, for example, focus on following the learning trajectories of particular student teachers, a relatively low priority for partnerships. The management aspects of their work dominated their relationships with HEI. ‘The management side is what comes first’. There was very little evidence of boundary zones or of boundary objects, such as assessment systems or ways of promoting learning, being worked on to enable schools and HEI to ‘configure themselves in relation to each other and to the students’ pace Jahreie and Ludvigsen (under review). There was, however, evidence of the boundaries between schools and HEI being places where co‐ordinators could try out new identities and this came through the opportunities for networking with other school‐based practitioners. ‘The benefits are professionals getting together to talk’. It was also clear that training school status amplified that situation: ‘There is a lot of spin‐off liaison with other schools now’.

New linkages in the form of networks of schools and HEI seemed to be emerging. It may therefore be fruitful to think of ITE provision more in terms of ‘networks of distributed expertise’ (Edwards, in press), where ideas are exchanged for the training of teachers, but also with the potential for other activities including research. Co‐ordinators, for example, commented that working with several HEI made a wider range of ideas and approaches open to them.

It is difficult to discern from the evidence we are discussing why boundary work with HEI was so limited. Nonetheless, the background discussed in the earlier sections of the paper make this unsurprising: HEI opted for HEI‐led partnerships; and schools were oriented towards avoiding the contradictions and tensions that arise when external agencies threaten to disrupt their priorities and processes.

If we are to pursue the idea of networks of expertise we need to understand what is happening in schools that might enable them to claim expertise in ITE.

Are there any signs of new pedagogically driven and flexible ways of working to provide ITE in schools?

One way of facing the frustrations of the different requirements of the various HEI was to develop a core programme within a school which more or less met the needs of all the HEI. While this development was not commonplace, it was happening and was seen by co‐ordinators as a fruitful development which gave them a greater degree of control and reduced the need for working round the school system to accommodate the needs of student teachers. Instead, schools set up their own stable ITE systems and absorbed them into the wider school system. ‘We can deliver a core professional studies programme to all the trainees. … The training ethos sort of permeates every pore of the school’. ‘The school drives the training …’.

This was not the only response. Some schools remained convinced that ‘… having more than one (HEI) provider would complicate matters’. Nonetheless, the development of core programmes and the accommodation of school‐run ITE programmes within training partnerships as well as within training schools seemed to suggest the beginnings of a step change in schools’ relationships with HEI. These schools were creating resources that may be used by HEI for the training of students they had recruited. These resources were informed by ideas from a range of HEI and from other schools in training networks. There was therefore a major shift in the power dynamic of school–HEI relationships with the idea of networks of providers offering specific experiences for student teachers. As we mentioned earlier, this could mean that although student teachers in particular schools experience consistent programmes, consistency across student teacher experience in individual HEI may be harder to achieve. There is also the danger that HEI become reduced to being purchasers of school‐based provision. These concerns take us to the final question.

What are the implications of these signs for professional learning in schools?

This is, of course, less a research question than an opportunity to speculate on the basis of the evidence gathered in the study. As we have seen, while co‐ordinators reported that managerial concerns dominated their relationships with HEI, they reported that their pedagogical interests were enhanced by their contact with other schools which were also engaged in ITE and by their work with student teachers.

We propose, therefore, that it is now time to rethink notions of partnership put forward in the early 1990s, in order to build on what the ITE co‐ordinators said about interacting with other schools and their enjoyment of developing the next generation of teachers. We should, we suggest, consider more seriously the pedagogical potential of open networks of ITE providers which include HEI, possibly of the kind suggested by the National Partnership Project. If this rethinking occurs it should perhaps particularly take into account two points. Firstly, it might aim at enabling schools and HEI to collaborate in ways which are flexible and which ensure that knowledge about teacher education does not remain embedded in local practices. Secondly it might recognise the value of focusing on the learning trajectories of students as joint objects of activity. Let us conclude by looking at those two points in a little more detail.

Writing quite generally about the strains of modern life and the pressures it places on individuals, Sennett (1999) observes some of the problems of a focus on ‘the local’, in this case in urban planning. While recognising that ‘place’ offers a site ‘for forming loyalties and responsibilities, a site for shaping life purposes’ (p. 23), he also surfaces concerns with the propensity of places to become closed systems. Describing ‘place‐makers’ as ‘artists of claustrophobia’ he observes that the communities they create ‘promise stability, mutual trust and durability’. They are also often highly exclusionary.

In response, he suggests, that there is a need to plan to avoid claustrophobia and to ensure that people interact easily with others who are different from them. He proposes that planners should create systems which are open and which try to develop ‘mutual engagement’ and ‘mutual obligation’. That is, local systems may develop differently and offer different strengths; but, in this case, the general polity is likely to be enhanced by ensuring that these systems are open, outward‐looking and interacting.

A similar case may be when considering the development of bounded school‐based systems in ITE. There is perhaps some danger that the school provision we have seen developing as practices which were accommodated into stability‐seeking school systems could become similarly isolated. For example, these school‐led practices were rarely being enriched by or contributing to developing broader understandings of ITE. While this situation may have implications for ITE it may also impact on the professional learning of ITE co‐ordinators and the mentors with whom they work.

Local networks of schools which operate as networks of distributed expertise, where schools choose to offer particular experiences and support for student teachers, may be a step forward. However, they too may have their limitations for practitioner learning. In our work on professional learning in the evaluation of the Children’s Fund (Edwards et al., 2006) we observed the considerable power of neighbourhood‐based multi‐professional practitioner networks for professional development and we referred to this phenomenon as ‘horizontal learning’, arguing that it was a necessary precursor to enriching practices and understandings of practices.

We also observed that these networks often found it difficult to move beyond the specific concerns of the cases they were dealing with and, as a result, much of the learning that was occurring remained within the practices of the local networks: good ideas were lost to future practitioners and rarely informed local or national policy developments.

We suggested in our report to the DfES that there was a need for people who could broker knowledge in and out of practice‐oriented networks, to help to distil locally generated knowledge and to inform local practices with knowledge perhaps generated elsewhere. One of us has previously discussed this in activity theory terms as revealing and working with ‘core ideas’ which drive forward practices (Edwards, in press). In teacher education networks, helping to identify and refine core ideas emerging from the practice of ITE in schools might be a role that played to the particular expertise of HEI.

We also found that practitioner networks in the Children’s Fund operated best when working flexibly to support the developmental trajectories of children. That is, when practitioners from different organisations saw these trajectories as shared problems to be worked on in collaboration, with each practitioner contributing some specialist expertise. In the present study, seeing student teachers learn to teach clearly gave the co‐ordinators considerable satisfaction. One area for development might be to ask co‐ordinators to work with mentors to take a long term focus on the development of student teachers. That is, to focus on the individual learning trajectories of student teachers as they experience different kinds of expertise developed in different schools over the course of their training. This is currently the work of HEI tutors. The proposal would involve school‐based staff in sharing that focus on the longer‐term development of student teachers.

CHAT analyses may be useful in this reconceptualisation of ITE. Its attention to object‐oriented activity has recently been developed in order to examine how complex changing objects, such as the learning trajectories of student teachers, may be negotiated with the learners and with practitioners in a range of organisations (Engeström, 2005, 2006). This kind of work calls for the long‐term focus we have just pointed towards and also a capacity to co‐operate in relatively flexible ways with others when working on what Engeström (2005) describes as these ‘runaway objects’ or changing trajectories.

A focus on student teachers as learners in and across co‐operating training organisations may call for schools to be slightly more outward‐looking and oriented towards ‘mutual engagement’ and ‘obligation’ than is currently the case. We suggest, however, that seeing networks of training providers, which include HEI, as sets of distributed expertise with the potential to provide support for the learning of student teachers, teachers and HEI‐based tutors is likely to a preferable alternative to the development of isolated closed systems.

Notes on contributors

Anne Edwards is Professor of Education in the Oxford Department of Education where she also convenes the Oxford Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research (OSAT). Her early work was on the identity of children and young people. However, her research over the last 20 years has centred on professional learning with a particular focus on how teachers learn in the context of school‐university training and research partnerships. Latterly she has directed ESRC and DfES studies which examine how practitioners from different professional backgrounds learn to work together to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people.

Trevor Mutton is a Lecturer in Educational Studies at the University of Oxford, where he coordinates the modern languages PGCE programme. He is currently engaged in doctoral work focusing on the theories that inform the development of newly qualified teachers, as well as carrying out other research in the field of teacher education.