Teacher Education in Lifelong Learning Developing professionalism as a democratic endeavour ALISON IREDALE Teacher Education in Lifelong Learning Iredale is fearless in conceding that our collective complicity in tolerating perfor- mativity is one dynamic of the contested and complex terrain that is lifelong learning; but challenges sector professionals to refuse practices that restrict by promoting a more moral and humane values based model of teacher profession- alism. This invaluable and original book will give succour to teacher educators and their students in attacking the looking glass absurdities and managerial, neoliberal distortions of our sector; whilst promoting an expansive and transfor- mative democratic professionalism. —Joel Petrie, City of Liverpool College, UK ‘I very much enjoyed reading This book which offers a refreshing, empirically based, alternative to standard critiques of Initial Teacher Education for the Lifelong Learning Sector. Rooted in the author’s own practice, it clearly articu- lates how teacher educators and their students work together in order to engage with concepts of democracy and social justice from within the confines of a highly performative and managerialist system. It addresses these issues from a critically reflexive, insider perspective, and will make a valuable contribution to the literature in this field, being of interest to practitioners and academics.’ —Liz Atkins, Professor of Education, Northumbria University, UK ‘The education of teachers in the lifelong learning sector suffers from a stifling managerialism and overly routinised practices built on competency standards. Iredale provides a fresh and bold argument that teachers in training need mean- ingful time, space, experience, and theory to build confidence and expertise. Iredale’s argument finds us at a crucial time when lifelong learning has narrowly focused on the economy and development of skills to the neglect of democracy and pedagogies of hope.’ —Benjamin Doxtdator, English Teacher, The International School of Brussels, Belgium Alison Iredale Teacher Education in Lifelong Learning Developing Professionalism as a Democratic Endeavour Alison Iredale School of Education and Childhood Leeds Beckett University Leeds, UK ISBN 978-3-319-65818-6 ISBN 978-3-319-65819-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65819-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017960790 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans- mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Glowimages RM / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword Teacher education in the lifelong learning sector needs advocates and it also needs guides, and few are as convivial or as enthusiastic as Iredale is in this engaging book, which is ‘a patchwork of philosophy, reflexivity and biography’. The book provides a vivid portrait of lifelong learning and Iredale makes a convincing case for the importance of teacher educa- tion in shaping the future practice of teachers in the sector, for better or for worse. While accompanying Iredale through this book, you will encounter Aristotle, Dewey, Bourdieu and Foucault, among others, whose ideas illuminate the sector and those who work and study there. Supported by those philosophers’ ideas, Iredale rails against the restric- tions placed on sector’s practitioners and in particular she disapproves of how teacher education has ‘become increasingly funnelled and routin- ized’. Instead, Iredale argues for new teachers to be granted the time and space to develop their practice and in so doing to develop an informed confidence in their practice. Along the way, Iredale will also introduce you to trainee teachers and you will hear their conversations in often poignant vignettes as these new practitioners describe their own processes of becoming professionals and how they have made meaning out of their initial uncertainty. In a parallel account, Iredale candidly describes her own transformation from teacher to academic through the production of her doctoral thesis, upon which this book is based. There was a moral imperative to her writing, which is v vi Foreword apparent in these pages. Here, however, the personal is also political, because this book is a detailed account of how policy has shaped teacher education as well individuals have experienced that policy. Above all, this intriguing and colourful book reminds us that decent education in the lifelong learning sector can transform lives and that decent education depends on good teachers. November 2017 Kevin Orr Preface In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. (Carroll 1996) I began thinking about writing this book while writing my PhD thesis. I wanted to break out from the constraints of doctoral writing all along, but thanks to the careful counsel of my supervisors, Dr. Helen Jones and Professor Kevin Orr, I found one voice in my thesis writing—that of the scholar, and now, here I am searching for another voice—that of the writer. Throughout this book I want to have a conversation with you about professionalism. This involves taking you on a journey into the world that I have inhabited for most of my career—being a teacher in further and higher education. For many years this entailed teaching a range of courses from pre-entry level, programmes of study intended to foster independence for young people with learning difficulties and disabilities, to postgraduate level. I want to share with you my ideal of a democratic relationship between learning to be a teacher and becoming a teacher. I want to provide a space here for another voice to counter the spurious yet dominant notions of managerialism, performance management and sim- ilarly doubtful neo-liberal discourse that pervades the lifelong learning sector (LLS). If you are reading this book you probably already have a good understanding of the range of education and training that vii viii Preface differentiates lifelong learning from schools. However, to be clear this sector comprises any form of formally (usually publicly) funded educa- tion and training activity that is outside compulsory education. I hope that you will find in this book a patchwork of philosophy, reflexivity and biography in an attempt to place them in a ‘meaningful frame’ (Geertz 1973: 323). By a meaningful frame I mean encounters that are embedded in the context of being a teacher educator in the LLS. Alongside this narrative a running theme is my journey as a practi- tioner researcher. I chart my own personal and professional journey together with the prevailing historical, economic and regulatory contexts. I provide a foretaste of the dissonances in the book, where the way that I developed my professional knowledge and practice was very different from that of my trainee teachers. Finally I felt a moral imperative to write this book because of my grad- ual realisation of the impact of the initial teacher education (ITE) cur- riculum on the developing teacher. My complicity in the inculcation of the products and processes of performativity led me to question the pur- pose of competency-based curricula as it appeared to me to squeeze out broad, value-based notions of teacher professionalism. The sets of assump- tions that I held about what constitutes an educationally desirable ITE in the LLS experience for my trainee teachers became disrupted by my increasing propositional knowledge about teaching, education, participa- tion, WBL and educational theory. I make uncomfortable points about teacher development, one of which is that teachers perform funnelled and routinised practices. This is because ITE curricula have become increasingly funnelled and routin- ised, and that workplace learning is restrictive and bounded by spurious notions of competency-based practices and workplace regulation (Fuller and Unwin 2012). The time and space necessary for transformative learn- ing are missing at worst, and at best operate despite the system architec- tures. I suggest moreover that the heavily regulated nature of the LLS appears to problematise the student, and increasingly limits trainee teach- ers (Ellis 2010), resulting in the adoption of these routinised or safe prac- tices. I propose, among other things that doubt and uncertainty, time and space are part and parcel of the development of ‘professionals who it Prefac e ix could be argued have a wider, critical understanding of the context in which they are working’ (Bathmaker 1999: 190). Finally I acknowledge that much has been written, particularly recently, about the pervasive and pernicious impact of competency-based curri- cula, neo-liberalism and marketisation in the LLS (e.g. Daley et al. 2015, 2017). The originality of this book forms out of a similar purpose—to challenge the prevailing discourse, but this book offers a fresh perspec- tive, that of one teacher educator seeking to develop and sustain the prin- ciples of education as a democratic endeavour. I have had a continuing interest in participation and its relationship with teacher agency, democratic education and transformative learning cultures. Some of my interest has been long held, arising from an early introduction to the works of John Dewey during my own ITE in 1984. As a teacher educator from 2000 onwards I also became aware of the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education research project, a four-year longitudinal study into FE practice. I invited Professor Phil Hodkinson to speak at a conference and was delighted to hear first hand about his passion for the importance of culture and transformation in FE in England. I was particularly taken by Professor Helen Colley’s work into vocational habitus (Colley et al. 2003), and I used Denis Gleeson’s article ‘On the Making and Taking of Professionalism’ (Gleeson et al. 2005) in my teaching to develop my students’ understanding of professionalism. As a consequence of these experiences, and a deep immersion into my professional knowledge during my teaching, I have been drawn to reflect upon the experiences of my trainee teachers over the years, and how their experiences prepare them to become teachers. My examination of the participation of trainee teachers takes place through their lived experi- ences and mine, as their teacher educator. In both respects this reflexive approach promotes a discussion of the nature of WBL, drawing upon the works of John Dewey, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. It illumi- nates pertinent discussions around teacher agency, democracy and trans- formation through a reflexive consideration of three concepts, those of teacher confidence, teacher excellence and routinised practices. Specifically the monograph reveals the tensions within the ITE cur- riculum as it prepares trainee teachers for a ready-made world whilst at x Preface the same time attempting to encourage principles of social justice, inclu- sive practice and democratic education. In this respect I place ITE in the LLS firmly within the policy and ideological context of regulation, audit and control. Conflicting agents, discourses and vested interests not only operate and sometimes dominate the workplace but also mediate ITE in the LLS. One example of this derives from Hayes’ (2003) discussion where he charts the history of professionalism as a topic in the ITE in the LLS curricula. From a time of no reference to professionalism at all in set texts in the early 1990s, minimal and confused references begin to appear from 2000 onwards, yet from his standpoint these generally neglect the ‘contemporary political context’ (Hayes 2003: 31). Another example is the structural discourse surrounding regulatory frameworks and policy documents which appear to act as sets of parameters around teacher edu- cation curricula. These agents and agencies are discussed throughout the book, along with my personal biography, as a means of observing and exploring the extent to which ITE in the LLS prepares teachers as profes- sional practitioners. At a macro level ITE in the LLS workplace faces interest and scrutiny by policy makers, inspection regimes and a range of professional bodies. At a more local level the role of ITE in the LLS and the workplace in the development of teachers’ professional knowledge and practice is central to this book. The book is divided into six chapters that develop from a range of perspectives, leading to a conclusion that connects theoretical and con- ceptual themes with the lived experiences of trainee teachers as they par- ticipate in WBL. It is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the current state of ITE in the LLS, more that my observations, suppositions, premises and arguments, flowing from my PhD, provide a unique situ- ated encounter between the period 2008 and 2015. Implications can be drawn sufficient to inform the current policy landscape surrounding the sector. I expect that readers of this book will include fellow teacher educa- tors and practitioner researchers working in the LLS, many of whom will be engaged by these reflexive debates as they consider how to embed their own journeys and experiences into the transformative process of research into and for education. It is also important to state that this monograph, flowing as it does from my PhD thesis, also includes content from two published articles during the period. The first one—Down the r abbit- hole: