Track D - Interrogating opportunities to promote student teachers’ professionalism

Interrogating opportunities to promote student teachers’ professionalism through their engagement in critical enquiry on a postgraduate teacher training programme Shirley Allen and colleagues, Middlesex University School of Health and Education.

This session was facilitated by a group of staff members in the form of a workshop. Facilitators reported on their activities as a community of practice engaged in negotiating practice, meaning and identity to make their voices and that of their students heard. In this session the facilitators explained how certain events such as the re-accreditation of teacher training programmes and the move to e-assessment prompted them to interrogate opportunities for student engagement in critical enquiry. We experienced such opportunities in the form of activities which included group-based lateral thinking puzzles that emphasised the socio-constructivist approach to teaching and learning that the team had adopted.

The importance of ‘talk’ emerged as a central theme whereby students could explore critically their learning at University and the challenges of school placements. In fact, at the end of the session we had an opportunity to digitally record some of our talk using “talking tins”. This was in part a demonstration of how students might capture ‘talk’ to meet the requirements of e-assessment and to include as evidence in the new two part assessment alternative to the dissertation: Part 1 requires students to compile a portfolio of children’s learning experiences they have observed or taught in school and critically analyse and reflect on these experiences. In Part 2, students will discuss current theoretical and methodological approaches to learning, with a particular focus on socio-constructivist theory.

Report by Tarek Zoubir