Paper: New Teachers Need Access to Powerful Educational Knowledge

Published in the British Journal of Educational Studies, 2014

In this paper I try to make the case for powerful educational knowledge within teacher education, using the example of Émile Durkheim’s outstanding sociological work.

For anybody who is new to teaching I would recommend highly the lectures that Durkheim gave to trainee primary teachers. These have been published as Moral Education and you can purchase a copy here.

You will find many wise and deeply humane words in these carefully crafted and insightful lectures. The central question Durkheim is concerned with is how we might morally educate the young in a secular society.

This strikes me as a question that we are yet to adequately answer, but Durkheim suggests some powerful ways in which we might theorise this important question for our own times and for our own society.

It will be interesting to see how teacher education progresses under the new UK Labour administration and I hope that they bring educational theory back in. If we take education seriously, and we should, then we must also take seriously the quality of our collective thinking about education. This is why new teachers must themselves be educated and taught to think for themselves about what they do. Merely training them is just not good enough.

When I speak to young teachers what strikes me is their natural desire to deepen their knowledge and understanding of our important craft. We really should be addressing this legitimate need and should start taking their initial education far more seriously than we have been. Our system, which has many strengths, which we can rightly be proud of, is, in the final analysis, only as good as the thinking and judgements of its teachers. It is teachers that are the true agents and engineers of student learning.

So I hope Labour takes teacher education more seriously than the prior administration did.

I have posted an abstract and a link to a full version of my paper below.

Abstract

The UK Coalition Government has recently introduced a number of education policies that aim to reform initial teacher development in England. It has argued that the training of new teachers will be improved by giving greater priority to the development of 'key teaching skills'. This narrowly practical and overly managerial approach to initial teacher training (ITT) is mistaken as it fails to recognise the developmental value of what might be described as powerful educational knowledge. As such, recent reforms of ITT seem unlikely to raise teaching standards. Standards of ITT might be improved, however, by giving new teachers access to powerful educational knowledge, such as that developed by Emile Durkheim. Powerful educational knowledge supports the development of new teachers by building their commitment, understanding and creativity.

Link to the full article here.

Picture: David Émile Durkheim