Learning-to-Learn and Learning-to-Teach:

Experiencing History in Teacher Education

Dr Graham Rogers

EdgeHillUniversity

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Institute of Education, University of London, 5-8 September 2007

Biography

Dr Graham Rogers is a Reader in Educational Development, Principal Lecturer in History and History Subject Study Co-ordinator in the Faculty of Education at EdgeHillUniversity. He has been a recent national award winner for Teaching History in Higher Education presented by the History Subject Centre (HEA). He has a particular research interest in the ITT curriculum, in the pedagogies of e-learning and has experience of developing a series of on-line courses in the fields of history, primary education and professional support and training.

Keywords

History; Teacher Education; Learning Technology; Critical Thinking; Professional Identity; Pedagogy;

Learning-to-Learn and Learning-to-Teach:

Experiencing History in Teacher Education

Abstract

At a time when academic or disciplinary-based courses are at risk of being squeezed out of many primary initial teacher training programmes it is also a timely moment to inquire into the relevance that these courses hold for the professional development of new teachers; and not simply in terms of transferring a body of knowledge germane to a subject curriculum but more importantly in relation to shaping their academic and professional values.

This paper is concerned with the academic and professional preconceptions of intending primary teachers on entry on to an initial teaching training programme, on the ways in which their epistemological understanding is shaped by a discipline-based experience, on how that informs their perspectives on learning and, ultimately, on their sense of ‘learning to teach’.

More specifically, the paper sets out to investigate the attitudes and learning behaviour of a set of undergraduate students, following a Primary Education with History course, at the outset and completion of their first-year programme. It endeavours to measure changes to students’ conceptions of learning and any subsequent impact on their own developing professional identity as they progressed through a subject-study course in history that was built on a distinctive pedagogic approach which made significant use of learning technologies.

The research itself is an integral part of a broader Escalate-funded ‘Learning-to-Learn’ (‘L2L’) project. One underpinning assumption of the ‘L2L’ project is that it is possible to create contexts and learning conditions in which real epistemological understanding can begin to emerge; students as learners, critical thinkers and intending teachers become more confident and assured about the components and processes of knowledge construction; and they develop an awareness of pedagogic strategies that close the gap between epistemological understanding and emergent conceptions of learning and teaching within the classroom setting.

A further assumption is that we can delve into the vicarious perspectives that young teachers hold on both learning and teaching and, further, that we can track their emergent ‘voices’ or ‘identities’ as knowledge creators and intending teachers, and as a direct response to the pedagogic strategies to which they were exposed in their role as academic ‘apprentices’.The principles that emerge hold important implications for the curriculum of an initial teacher education programme as a whole and the kind of influence which teacher educators can bring to bear on equipping new teachers for the new century.

Background

Professional self-identity among new and intending teachers, and the factors that impact on identity, have been the subject of considerable research interest in recent years (Flores and Day, 2006)

However, professional ‘personality’ or ‘identity’ is the product of many competing influences of both a positive and negative nature – students’ prior learning, their emotional commitment and investment, the requirements of externally imposed teaching standards, and the jarring juxtaposition of pre-service training and the realities of the classroom experience. Many young teachers have negative experiences of the classroom. Arguably, the impact of traditional teacher-education programmes on graduates has also been relatively meagre (Lunenberg and Willemse, 2006). Hence, their survival can be viewed as one of strategic adaptation and compliance to the narrow instrumentalist approaches to learning centred round meeting National Curriculum and Initial Teacher Training Standards. Further, highly prescriptive and narrowly interpreted curricula, including for example the National Literacy Strategy and the ITT (Initial Teacher Training) English National Curriculum, highlight the strategic response of learner-teachers to perceived extraneous drivers. (Twistleton, 2000).

Quality assurance standards have steered teaching in higher education in similar directions but, as McGettrick (2005) has argued in his critique of the recent ‘Framework for Professional Teaching Standards’ (Universities UK/SCOP 2004), quality teaching and learning have to extend beyond compliance and prescription. His advice has wider application. Where ‘standards’ are reduced to a low common denominator of compliance with formulaic outcomes, McGettrick warns, they become ossified as a set of bureaucratic statements that have tenuous links with the real purposes of learning. Learning, it will be argued, is bound up with self-identity; that is making sense of and interpreting one’s learning experience and the values it holds which, in turn, has implications for the act of teaching itself.

Learners at all levels have a wider entitlement which includes the motivation towards curiosity, creativity, integrity, responsibility, collegiality as well as the enhancement of their intellectual skills, all of which are central to the promotion of professional commitment and values among young teachers. In justifying its existence, pre-service training has to exert a positive, formative and lasting influence. Therefore, it is not enough that teacher-education should be concerned with transmitting a set of competencies;it should be principally concerned with building the capacity of student-teachers as critical thinkers though the latter admits qualities that are not immediately and unambiguously measurable. Nevertheless, promoting student-teachers' critical engagement with epistemological and professional knowledge holds implications for the ways in which they might go on to construe teaching itself and, therefore, their own ‘identities’ as teachers.

In summary, this research project will shed light on students’ learning experiences within the disciplinary domain of history and draw attention to innovative course features that have the potential to influence students’ learning behaviour and their professional outlook on the practice of teaching.

More specifically, this paper will:

  • Identify and measure changes to students’ epistemological concepts and values in relation to learning and teaching as the product of their academic experience of history subject study.
  • Evaluate the specific benefits of an e-learning design of an introductory module: ‘Foundations to History Education’ in modifying students’ conceptualisations of knowledge.
  • Analyse the synergies or dissonance between the disciplinaryspecific component of academic study within an ITT programme and its subsequent impact on students’ professional values and practice as intending teachers.

Epistemological Considerations

The concept of knowledge construction is fundamental to any debate about the relationship between student-teachers’ knowledge base and effective classroom practice (Alexander, 2004). Paradoxically, subject knowledge as a central pillar in the Primary ITT curriculum is currently under threat among teacher-education providers largely because of political rather than educational imperatives (Brehony, 2005; Menter, 2006). Yet, as Poulson (2001:52) crucially reminds us, “there is still much to learn about the knowledge which successful teachers do possess (and) about the relationship between knowledge, values and practice”.

Becoming an effective teacher demands a deeper understanding of the intellectual processes involved in knowledge construction and its translation into effective pedagogic practice. What Shulman (1987) describes as pedagogic content knowledge may be vital to such practice, but its bedrock has to be students’ security in their own epistemological beliefs and understanding. Further, enhancing students’ own metacognition within a disciplinary field increases the degree to which they are able to transpose their own beliefs and approaches to learning into new settings (Hobson, 2003).

The imperatives of giving students a firm epistemological grounding holds implications for the kinds of teaching to which they are exposed across a teacher-education programme – the kind that enables students eventually to take some control over the learning process, develop a sense of metacognitive awareness and to challenge received wisdom about the objectives of teaching (Campbell, 2004; Edwards, 2002). To that extent Whitty (2000) also draws our attention to the linkage between teachers having expert knowledge and values and being able to make their own independent judgements in relation to effective professional practice. But knowledge as understanding, at least in the humanities as well as in teaching, is not a demonstrable, steady state (Haggis, 2003); it is an awareness of conflicting perspectives, building claims out of uncertainty, and the questioning of fundamental values and assumptions.

Edwards (2002) deals in a similar currency in describing the goals of teacher education by drawing attention to the synergies between epistemological development and professional values. Teacher-learners, he argues, who think, question and act as academic craftsmen in their disciplinary fields are more likely to take greater pedagogic risks and interventions in the classroom. This view is echoed in more recent work which sees professional expertise being grounded in persistent and iterative engagement in constructing and reconstructing knowledge claims (Kelly, 2006).

In all of this there is a reminder of Entwistle’s (2000) earlier research. Training programmes, he argued, can positively influence evolving teaching conceptions in several important respects. His research has indicated that, as a first principle, the impetus for changing limited conceptions and approaches to learning, and then to teaching, is promoted by a reconsideration of the nature of knowledge within a discipline. Secondly, he makes the vital point that confidence in disciplinary thinking not only enables teachers to acquire a sharper focus on their own learning development but potentially to equip teachers to capitalise on ‘chance’ events in the classroom which are unplanned and yet so often provide the springboards for significant learning. But, what counts in this transformative stage, are observed and explicit models of disciplinary thinking and practice.

Pedagogic Considerations

Learners’ growth in epistemological understanding – their evolving views of the nature and conceptions of knowledge and its construction – defines deeper approaches to learning (Moon, 2005).Knowledge as understanding is also embedded in the processes of critical thinking that involve working with complex ideas and uncertainties, and making judgements lodged in the use of evidence and framed by specific contexts. Graff (2002:27) uses the language of critical thinking ‘habits’ which are of a kind that do not come readily to many students but are indispensable to intending teachers.

“Habits of thinking that are so familiar to academics that we hardly recognize them often seem counter-intuitive [to students. These habits include the search for hiddenmeanings in texts and experience generally, the inclination to be contentious and tofoment controversy, the tendency to make seemingly obvious assumptions explicit andthe general obsession with searching for problems where often there do not seem to beany. The most productive way for teachers to help students cope with these unfamiliaracademic habits is to identify these habits in class, inviting students to discuss them andeven air their doubts about them”.

Expressed in these terms, promoting critical thinking entails a range of pedagogic practice that is conducive to a nurturing learning environment – challenging learners beyond their ‘comfort zone’; deliberately exposing learners to and interactions with differing and competing perspectives on a problem; promoting collaborative inquiry set within a classroom atmosphere that embraces risk-taking in the exploration of ideas and argument.

These features are consistently represented in current research literature. Further, they are also descriptive of the ‘scaffold’ teacher-educators need to provide in order to help students develop sophisticated beliefs about ‘knowing’ (Brownlee et al, 2001). But, as Brownlee (p.262) further reminds us, ‘although most teacher-educators would recognise the importance of helping students to develop sophisticated beliefs about knowing, often teacher education programmes do not provide the scaffolding to facilitate this development’.

‘Scaffolding learning’, however, is an overworked and elastic term.Primarily, it involves the provision of meaningful contexts in which knowledge construction takes place, that is the interplay between conceptual constructs, evidence and application within a disciplinary setting (Goulding et al, 2002). Macleod and Golby (2003) use the descriptor of ‘situated practice’ but they too are essentially concerned with learning that is built on contexts in which real, legitimate inquiry is conducted. ‘Scaffolding’, as a pedagogic tool conducive to critical thinking, necessarily incorporates learning tasks but not of a kind that invite the rehearsal of rules and routines, typically within a linear sequence, but instead configure the search for meaning through activities that admit uncertainty and competing knowledge claims.

Methodology

The research methodology addressed key questions about the nature of students’ epistemological beliefs, changes and stages in the development of their beliefs and the impact of disciplinary contexts on students’ values in learning and teaching.

The case-study involved a small group of thirteen students but they generated a tantalising body of insights.

The research has been grounded in a rich seam of qualitative and quantitative data and has employed a largely phenomenographic methodology to delve into any discernible shifts in learners’ epistemological and metacognitive perspectives. The phenomenographic focus centred on the structural components of the categories of description relating to students’ conceptualisations of knowledge. It aimed to explore a range of meanings within the sample group rather than the positioning of individual perspectives (Akerlind, 2005). The data itself was drawn from inquiries that were deployed at strategic points in the academic year in order to get closer to students’ conceptions. Close analysis of students’ observations archived within an online discussion board was particularly productive, and especially in relation to their conceptions of knowledge, as were open-ended questionnaires about students’ learning values, and impromptu recordings of student responses to questions and discussions about their learning behaviour.Initial text data,derived from questionnaires and relating to an analysis of learners’ changing conceptions of knowledge, was mapped on to Baxter-Magolda’s (1996) conceptual model.

Comparative perspectives emerged through data generated through the use of an Approaches and Study Skills Inventory (Entwistle, 1999). Recorded and transcribed focus-group conversations served the purpose of extrapolating and expanding on issues that had emerged in response to questionnaires and in more informal, spontaneous comments and observations which surfaced during scheduled teaching sessions.

A starting point: student perspectives on knowledge, learning and teaching

Students’ prior experiences of learning and their preconceptions of learning are seen as the most significant influences on the ways in which students adapt to the demands of a higher education (Prosser and Trigwell, 1999). Meeting this challenge was self-evident in the responses of a set of first-year students, embarking on a Primary Education with History programme, to an audit (Table 1) of how they perceived the purpose of their academic course in history as preparation for their role as intending teachers.

Table 1

Pre-entry preconceptions of subject study and its professional value

Category / No of references
Acquisition of a body of knowledge / 9
Pedagogic skills in teaching history in schools / 9
Methodology and conceptual base to the subject / 4

Most responses adopted two polarised positions in distinguishing between subject study as an academic pursuit and the purposes and practice of teaching in schools:

‘Before coming to college I believed that that the subject area of the course would only influence the knowledge of history I had, and it would do little to prepare me as a teacher’.

‘I had not anticipated that the history course would prepare me to become a teacher, that it was just a matter of learning history facts’.

Alternatively, a professionally focused programme would seem to preclude a deeper intellectual grasp of the discipline:

‘I anticipated the course to be very child driven and reflective on children’s history and how it is that they view the events of the past’.

‘I thought that the learning would just be factual information on the specific topics taught in the National Curriculum rather than studying history at degree level exploring the evidence and interpretations in depth’.

‘I thought it would be just what we would be teaching, what the children would need to learn’.

In short, any recognition of the relationship between ‘learning in the discipline’ and how that might carry over into learning values informative of classroom practice was virtually absent. Where that relationship was loosely recognised it was confined to ‘enhancing personal interest which would transfer into the classroom’. These initial perceptions highlight the primacy of inquiring into students’ prior knowledge and certainly illustrate the danger of assuming that prior knowledge for a specific learning purpose is optimal (Kalyuga, 2006).

In fact, Entwistle (2000) has argued that the influence exerted by a training programme or by academic reading on the shaping of a professional role has been comparatively weak. But he also presents the case that, at a general level, a sophisticated conception of teaching resides with an awareness of the relationship between learning and teaching. At the outset student teachers cannot be expected to demonstrate that relationship in their own thinking in any sophisticated way and yet it is present in an embryonic form. Nevertheless, training programmes can positively influence evolving teaching conceptions in several important respects. His research has indicated that, as a first principle, the impetus for changing limited conceptions and approaches to learning, and then to teaching, is promoted by a reconsideration of the nature of knowledge within a discipline. Secondly, he makes the crucial point that confidence in disciplinary thinking not only enables teachers to acquire a sharper focus on their own learning development but potentially to equip teachers to capitalise on ‘chance’ events in the classroom which are unplanned and yet so often provide the springboards for significant learning. It is this experience that enables the student teacher to distil what is useful and discard what is not in providing a stimulating learning environment in the classroom. The relationship between the ‘knowledge worker’, strategic operator, informed professional and the self-identity of the teacher in possession of a set of learning values is captured in figure 1, and is an adaptation of Entwistle’s model.