Common knowledge, however, does not arise spontaneously; attention needs to
be paid to the conditions in which it is built. My analyses of inter-professional
collaborations suggest that it is created over time in interactions, which overtly
emphasise the following:
- recognising similar long-term general goals, such as children’s wellbeing, as
some kind of affective or value-laden glue that holds all motives together; - revealing values and motives in discussions, by legitimising asking for and
giving reasons for interpretations and suggestions; and - listening to, recognising and engaging with the values and motives of others, i.e.
what matters to them.
I shallfirst consider the implications of the three relational concepts I have just
outlined for ITE, while pointing to their potential for addressing some frequently
found difficulties. One common difficulty is the difference in messages given by
university and placement schools so that student teachers feel confused and torn
between differing demands. For example, evidence from a doctoral study currently
underway showed that while the university department in question saw thefinal
school placement as the opportunity for student teachers to stretch themselves as
learners, the placement schools tended, for a variety of reasons, to make relatively
low demands on them over that period (Tan, work in progress). At a more detailed
level Tan’s study of how student teachers learn to use Assessment for Learning
(AfL) while on placement in school, showed the difficulties arising for students when
schools interpreted AfL in terms of summative assessment, while the university
emphasised its formative aspects.
The gap between universities and school in ITE programmes has been long
documented, with reflection on practice frequently being offered as a way of
bridging that gap (Edwards et al. 2002 ). All these studies, implicitly at least,
indicate the efforts that student teachers need to make to connect what they meet in
university-based courses, with what they experience when working in classrooms.
It is little wonder that each new cohort of student teachers, year on year,finds it
difficult to make the connections. This failure provides a rationale for promoting
school-based programmes and the risk of creating local dialects of professional
practice which are not tested against publicly validated knowledge about teaching.
A cultural-historical approach to teacher education offers a way out of this
impasse because it is premised in the view that: (i) informed actions arise in societal
conditions and therefore students will learn to become occupational professionals in
schools where national or state policy is mediated in ways that allow teachers’
actions to be informed by powerful professional knowledge; and (ii) learning is
evidenced and judged by how demands are interpreted as well as how they are
addressed, i.e., assessment of performance is not enough. This analysis means that
attention needs to be paid to the conditions in which student teachers’actions as
beginning teachers arise, to ensure that they are informed by the best ideas and
evidence available and that the demands presented to student teachers allow them to
move forward as learners with the expert guidance and challenge of their mentors.
560 A. Edwards