Exploring the Pedagogy Associated with Transformational Learning in the Initial Teacher Education Context
The highly regulated practice of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in the UK represents an area of learning in higher education that is characterised by traditional pedagogies that are often functionally driven and instrumentally oriented. This is incongruent with the reality of the school environment, which requires teachers to be adaptive learners, self-motivating, and self-determining in respect of their initial, early, and continuing professional development. Here a signature pedagogy of partnership is offered that represents a paradigm shift in thinking about teacher learning, repositioning the focus of learning from content to concepts and towards a vision in which key learning dispositions and capacities are fore grounded. Underpinning this pedagogy is the notion of transformational learning and its epistemological foundations for ways of knowing and understanding the 'classroom'. This vision builds on research investigating the conceptions of trainee teachers, academics and professionals in an ITE partnership concerning the promotion of subject knowledge for teaching. Initial findings have revealed three hierarchically inclusive pedagogies associated with teacher learning: teacher replication in practice, teacher formation and teacher transformation. The affordances and constraints of an ITE pedagogy and architectural design aligned with transformational learning in which a willingness to engage in, persist with and comprehend challenging tasks and concepts in an 'uncomfortable time of uncertainty', is one which is elaborated here. Key partnership practices and learning designs are identified that promote the learning dispositions and capacities characteristic of effective teachers in the 21 st Century.
Principles of Quality Teaching @ UNE: A digitally-enabled platform for contextualising peer review of teaching as targeted professional development
Principles - 1: Sharing subject/discipline concepts effectively and in ways that engage students in deep approaches to learning. 2: Providing engaging and intellectually challenging activities that stimulate students' interest in learning. 3: Actively engaging students in a discipline's research enquiry process. 4: Using digital technologies and technology-mediated practices that create intellectual challenge for students and are appropriate to the discipline's learning outcomes. 5: Creating activities, tasks and assessments that widen opportunities for diverse learners to link subject matter/processes to their own experiences. 6: Encouraging effective teacher-student relationships to facilitate access to disciplinary expertise for diverse learners. 7: Operating from a position of discipline mastery to guide student achievement. 8: Reflecting on teaching practice in context for continuous improvement.
Opening the space of variation and learning during teaching: the importance of research to discipline-based expertise
This article draws on theoretical and research-based analysis to elaborate on the linkage between teaching and research in higher education. By employing the perspective of variation theory and taking a phenomenographic approach to analysis, we describe the qualitatively different ways in which university teachers experience the phenomenon of expertise in their disciplines. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 university teachers from two higher education institutions in the UK. A range of ways of understanding expertise was constituted in the form of three qualitatively different categories of description. These show varying focus on the experience from expertise as the ability to impart facts and transfer knowledge; expertise as experience in a field and knowing how to do something; and expertise as developing holistic understanding and the ability to think in certain ways. Key aspects of variation in focus across the categories emerged through two themes: the role of experts in learning and how experts attend to knowledge. The empirical relations between the ways of experiencing the phenomenon were explored to provide insight into university teachers' beliefs about ways of knowing in their discipline and the implications for the openness of the space of variation and learning created during teaching.
Learning through expeditions: the need for method as well as opportunity - A response to Allison & Von Wald (2010)
Allison and Von Wald (2010) highlight the substantial opportunities presented by expeditions to address the crucial topic of personal and social development. The present paper wishes to address the apparent oversight of transfer within such learning experiences. Issues that need to be addressed if the impact of transfer is to be optimised are exemplified using four categories, relating to both outcome and process considerations. Furthermore, it is argued that transfer should not be assumed, but rather carefully planned for and attended to as part of any curriculum or development activity. Consequently, facilitation of transfer outcomes by a leader may need to involve both transactional and transformational direction, in addition to consideration of environmental factors and the participants themselves.
Mastering teaching and learning through pedagogic partnership: a vision and framework for developing 'collaborative resonance' in England
The design and early implementation of a major national design initiative in England, the Masters in Teaching and Learning (MTL), is described in this paper. This novel hybrid master's degree seeks to span the traditional academic-practitioner divide, reconstitute the theory-practice dynamic as reciprocal and co-construct an authentic signature pedagogy for teacher professionals drawing on contextualised theories of learning and teaching. The historical, theoretical and pedagogic foundations of the programme of professional enhancement are described at the outset of the implementation of this new model of early career development in the South West of England through the formation of university provider consortia, stringent processes of validation and critical milestone reviews including trainer and coach training, recruitment and first inauguration of the programme.
Intercultural sensitivity training toolkit: Augmenting academic engagement patterns
This research paper presents conceptual strategies for developing a web-based toolkit utilising scenario-based learning to enhance students' and academics' intercultural sensitivity (IS) and further explores the feasibility of using IS training during orientation and induction into higher education to promote intercultural engagement. Pre-intervention data relating to participants' study contexts, learning experiences, cultural perspectives, and perceived benefits and obstacles to intercultural engagement are gathered through reflective writing blogs and in-depth interviews. Thematic analysis is applied to identify and unpack culture-specific patterns of learning and intercultural engagement. The results inform the design of an IS toolkit; portraying experience-based and research-informed training scenarios depicting, initially, cultural stereotypes and authentic behaviours, before illustrating integrated and culturally responsive teaching strategies and learning styles. The exposure sequence progressively challenges users' values, beliefs and attitudes about teaching and learning. Post-intervention, participants' perceptions are re-examined through focus groups and in-depth interviews to evaluate the effectiveness of the toolkit. Social network analysis is applied to establish intercultural competence apparent in new patterns of academic engagement, whilst a phenomenographic analysis maps transformation in participants' awareness and understanding of the concept of intercultural engagement.