The challenge of academic research to School Direct: training apprentice teachers or developing morally and politically engaged professionals? Seminar

Event details

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how, as a teacher educator in a university partnership, I have recently reviewed my published ITE research over seventeen years in the light of the emergence of School Direct (Mead 2016). My particular concern is the impact over this period of positivistic and reductionist professional knowledge on the relationship between trainee teachers’ personal moral and political values. In the light of my previous research based on a conventional university-school partnership, I wish to offer distinctive insights into the potential strengths of school-based training for the flourishing of these values. The paper is one example of how, in a teacher education partnership within which the focus of the main activity is being increasingly transferred to schools, research which embodies the longer view of impact of policy on individuals, must continue to play an important part in troubling the discourse of techne which continues to threaten school-based practice.