ABSTRACT
Whereas we have a vast literature on the philosophical and pedagogical underpinning of initial teacher education, and on the respective contributions of schools and higher education to the professional learning of new teachers (e.g., Furlong et al., 1988, Booth, Furlong and Wilkin, 1990), we have relatively few accounts of the management of change in initial teacher education. This is a curious lacuna, not least since the last decade has engendered a considerable literature on the management of change and the process of change in the schools to which the ‘products’ of teacher education proceed. Wilkin observes that ‘it is a relatively simple matter to devise and justify theoretical schemes. Putting them into operation is altogether different’ (Wilkin, 1991, p. 8); similarly, Fullan argues that ‘educational change is technically simple and socially complex’ (1991, p. 47). This paper is a contribution to understanding the nature and process of change in teacher education. Its central theme is the development of a school-based model of teacher education in the context of the one-year Secondary Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) at the University of East Anglia between 1991 and 1994. In describing the background to, assumptions of, and development of, the change process, I draw upon themes relating to the theory of change, notably meanings of change and the attitudes of participants to the nature of change as well as on historical and contextual factors related to the School of Education at UEA and its relationships with East Anglian schools. It is based largely on an analysis of the change process in a single institution, set in and then related to wider policy and theoretical concerns in teacher education. The change process at the centre of the paper was, and remains, complex for a number of interrelated reasons. The first is the location of change at the intersection of political initiatives, educational research perspectives and a period of multiple, discontinuous change all of which called for a range of reactions and assumptions. The second is to do with the multiplicity of actors, personal and institutional perspectives involved in a teacher-education programme involving a complex University School of Education and something in excess of forty
secondary comprehensive schools in a large rural area where lines of ‘management communication’ were of necessity frequently weak. As we shall see, there were different understandings of the central concepts of ‘school-based’ teacher education and different levels of commitment to, and responsibility for, the process of change. The third complexity derives from the interrelation in the process of change of different financial and educational assumptions in schools, the university and local authorities.
