��ɫ����

Online registration for this event has now closed, please email events@bera.ac.uk to register.

#��ɫ����_TED

Teacher education in UK higher education (HE) exists in a contested and ambiguous space. England, perhaps, has experienced the strongest pull away from university-led Initial Teacher Education (ITE), and pre-service education has been largely school-based here since 1992 (Ellis, 2010), with an evolving inspection framework which prioritises statistical data over other indicators of quality. Universities themselves have come under significant scrutiny in terms of neo-liberal accountability measures, formalised in the 2016 White Paper, Higher Education: Success as a Knowledge Economy. Recent policy changes in England (DfE 2021) leave HE Teacher Education (TE) under sustained threat while continued attempts to commercialise ITE in other parts of the UK reflect challenges to the combined university and school-based model more generally.

Research was initiated by members of Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET) to develop a stronger understanding of the ways in which TE (as a sub‐discipline of Education) could claim a vital internal contribution to HE institutions in the UK. For example, as well as generating revenue, Teacher Education is vital in community engagement and partnerships, and could facilitate widening participation, access and employability, offers contemporary expertise in improving teaching, learning and assessment and might usefully contribute to university educators’ professional development and leadership capacity. Teacher educators are experts in supporting professional and practitioner learning, reflection and development, in developing conducive learning environments and cultures and in pedagogy, curriculum development and assessment. This raises the question: how is this expertise taken up within the wider HE institution? Where many education departments have been subsumed into larger units through restructuring, is this in danger of masking knowledge, skills and expertise that could be valuably deployed within the sector?

This discussion paper reports on the initial stage of data gathering involving a qualitative survey of selected teacher educators, which explored the contribution that is made by education departments to the strategic aims of their institutions. It is located in the domains of a) research into teacher education where Ellis et al (2020) have noted the innovations of teacher educators prompted by the urgency of the pandemic, and b) higher education scholarship (for example Johannes and Menter (2021) has explored the impact of HE teaching as a lever for social change). The presentation will allow time to invite participants to contribute their own experiences and views, posing critical questions and challenges for discussion arising from the initial research data in the chat.