Professor Amanda Berry, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia.

KU Leuven, Feb 1, 2019.

Thinking Through Tensions: Finding a language for teacher educators’ professionalism.

Overview of this talk

• Opening up Teacher Educator (TE) Professionalism

• Capturing TE professionalism through Self-study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (S-STTEP)

• Building a language of TE practice through ‘Tensions’

• Extending TE Professionalism through S-STTEP

(Cohen, D. 2011, p.15)

“Human improvement professions are impossible.”

Predicaments of human improvement professions

1. Special expertise is needed, but it is essentially insufficient.

2. Practitioners depend on clients, yet there is much their clients do not know.

3. Practitioners are pulled in contrary directions as they try to manage their client’s dependence.

(Cohen, D. 2011)

“These professions require the management of deep difficulties that have no entirely satisfactory or lasting solutions, and the solutions that practitioners patch together regularly become unglued.” (Cohen, D. 2005, p.279)

A ‘way of seeing’ Teacher Educator professionalism

• Complex

• Contradictory

• Situated

• Relational

• Moral

Making TE professionalism visible

If this way of seeing TE professionalism as complex practice enacted under conditions of uncertainty represents the real, enacted version of what is happening in practice, then how can we make it visible in ways that might be helpful to the professional learning of its members and to the profession of TEs?

Self-study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STTEP)

• A research methodology for studying professional practice settings.

• Promotes the creation of knowledge from the vantage point of the directly involved ‘insider’.

• Uses primarily qualitative methods.

• Forms of inquiry and representations often develop simultaneously and interactively, rather than in a linear fashion.

• Purpose of articulating and refining one’s professional expertise and understanding of teacher education practices (Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2015).

Self-study of Teacher Education Practices

The systematic study of one’s own educational practices, values and beliefs for the purposes of improving practice, and advancing public knowledge of teacher education.

“the aim of self-study research is to provoke, challenge, and illuminate rather than confirm and settle” (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001, p.20)

Challenges of self-study

• Willingness to make oneself vulnerable; experience discomfort

• Becoming overly personal; too self-involved

• Genuinely seeing into practice compared with rationalising practice

• Going beyond story; need to focus on the learning about self and practice

• Accumulating knowledge across self-studies.

Investigating TE practice: a personal perspective

• Longitudinal ‘self-study’ of my own teacher education practices

• Investigated and theorised practice from my insider perspective.

• Came to identify ‘inner turmoil’ as I felt myself pulled in different directions by competing concerns about learning and teaching about teaching.

Tensions of practice

• Telling and Growth

• Confidence and Uncertainty

• Action and Intent

• Safety and Challenge

• Planning and Being Responsive

• Valuing and Reconstructing Experience

Example: Confidence and uncertainty

Sources of tension

• How can I make explicit my doubts and uncertainties about practice in a way that helps student teachers see practice as complex and uncertain, yet maintains their confidence in me and in their ability to progress in their learning about teaching?

• How can I encourage PSTs to make explicit their own doubts and uncertainties?

How this played out in my practice

Explicit Modeling: in-the-moment think aloud, open journal; Interviews.

Even though I identified that articulating my thinking about teaching during the act of teaching is an important goal…I have also found that this is not an easy goal to live…I am not always consciously aware of my actions…or my pedagogical reasoning on the spot…There is a multitude of thoughts running through my head…how do I know which of these is useful to highlight for my students? (Berry, 2007)

Lisa: I think it was important for us to trust that you would be able to teach us well…opening up your vulnerability and uncertainty about things was unsettling for many…It was like ‘whoa! She doesn’t know what she’s doing all the time? …what hope have we got?! (Lisa, interview)

Bill: …it’s difficult for people to think on two levels…I was just starting to think about the task and you’re asking us to think about why you organised it in that way (Bill, interview)

Insights into this tension

A purpose of revealing my inner struggles and uncertainties was to invite reciprocal vulnerability with PSTs, with the intention to build trust and a platform for learning.

Yet, in choosing to make my thinking available, some prospective teachers experienced a loss of confidence in my ability to successfully guide their development. Their views of my role were not compatible with the role I was enacting.

Role of trust

Self-trust: Teacher Educator needs to trust herself, that learners will see her as someone who can genuinely engage them in the learning process.

Learner trust: Learners need to feel safe to express their ideas, to permit challenge to ideas, but preserve self-esteem.

Collective trust: Issues raised in the teaching/learning context are received and dealt with in a genuine manner compared with supplying expert knowledge.

Balancing vulnerability and credibility

“Teachers need to model thinking in order to demonstrates the nuances and complexities of grappling with real-world problems but similarly risk losing credibility – social interactions that frame the teaching encounter mutually construct credibility and in doing so make it harder for expressions of vulnerability with their accompanying risk of loss of face.”

(Molloy & Bearman, 2018 p.4)

Learning through Tensions

Personal/Professional

• Address immediate (problematic) aspects of practice; create a longer term vision.

• A frame for interpreting & organising experience and articulating the development of knowledge of practice.

• Build professional self-understanding.

Professional community

• Conceptualisation of TE knowledge as tensions to be managed

• Potential for other TE’s understanding of their practice.

Tensions can be conceived as “a dynamic construction, different for different people and dependent on the time of day, the parties involved, the nature and stakes of the work in the …setting, the positioning (or labelling) of the learner’s capability at that moment in time and stages within the career trajectory.”

Molloy & Bearman, 2018, p.2

Tensions as a dynamic construction

Embracing tensions as learning

“It is this tightrope [of tension] that gives us a platform, a very narrow one at that, to wobble upon. It is the very risk that makes it thrilling and that makes it an effective mechanism for learning. The balance point of …[a tension] is ever changing and for that reason, learners and experts alike can never claim to have it mastered.”

(Molloy & Bearman, 2018, p.5).

• Assumptions (Brandenburg, 2008)

• Paradoxes (Wilkes, 1998)

• Axioms (Senese, 2002)

• Tensions (Berry, 2007)

Finding a language for TE professionalism

Characteristics of a language of TE professionalism

• Offers a strong reminder about important issues that influence teaching and learning

• Captures and communicates the counterintuitive nature of learning about teaching.

• Generative in helping to guide & inform new ways of responding to practice, but not how to act in practice.

• Helps to question the taken-for-granted in practice.

• Opens up different kinds of meanings so that different learning opportunities emerge.

• Allows the teacher educator to abstract from specific situations to apply to “teaching more generally”.

(Vanassche & Berry, in press)

Representations of TE Professional knowledge

• TE Knowledge as stable: acquired, held and enacted by individual TEs

• TE knowledge as dynamic: manifested in & developed through practice

Informing a Pedagogy of TE

“Teacher educators need to: reposition the attention of students of teaching from the visible performance of teachers’ work to the invisible work that supports it; resist the temptation to give students all the answers so that they learn to think and act in the face of uncertainty; and, create shared spaces for the exploration and resolution of difficult emotions without judgement” (Forgasz, 2013).

Extending Teacher Educator Professionalism through S-STTEP

as a stance, self-study values the contextualised, enacted, and contingent nature of teacher educator professional knowledge

as a methodology, self-study enables teacher educators to discover, develop and refine their personal professional knowledge of practice; and that through impactful public dissemination

as scholarship, self-study can offer a powerful counterpoints to the instrumentalist-technicist discourses about teacher education that dominate current policy and practice.

(Berry & Forgasz, 2018)

(Limentani, A. 1977).

“As psychoanalysts, we are only too aware that our profession is not only impossible but also extremely difficult.”

Thank you!

Amanda Berry

amanda.berry@monash.edu

Extras

TEd Professionalism as ‘Choices and Trade-offs’

“I sometimes found that I was conflicted about which of the multiple possibilities to address, so my problem became “what is the most important issue right now?” What is stopping this activity from progressing the way it is intended, what actions of the pre-service teacher…may be contributing to this, and are the actions of the pre-service teacher leading to high engagement in rich mathematical learning for everyone?”

(Drake 2016: p. 254)

Educator Professionalism

“Does the term relate to what is officially set down as the accepted

shared norms and behaviour code of the profession in relation to

how it delivers its service and/or performs its designated

function(s), or does it refer to the real, enacted version of this?”

Evans, 2008

‘Ways of seeing’ professionalism

• Straightforward

• Technical

• Individual

• Stable

• Context free

‘Enacted’ Professionalism

• Manifests itself in educators’ actions and behaviors in practice

• Enacted in a particular moment in time in a particular context

• Constantly changing in response to the local and always changing needs of a particular practice setting.

Evans, 2008; Kelchtermans 2013; Vanassche et al, 2015.

‘Demanded’ professionalism

• A presumably exhaustive list of knowledge, skills and attitudes deemed critical for professional behaviour

• A quality that individuals acquire, possess and perform

• Something that can be mapped and checked

• Context free

Evans, 2008; Kelchtermans 2013; Vanassche et al, 2015.