Conceptions of teaching and educational knowledge requirements

This paper scrutinises the educational knowledge requirements of craft, technical, and reflective professional conceptions of teaching, as recently outlined by Winch, Oancea, and Orchard. Drawing on Bernsteinian sociology of knowledge we identify the different requirements each conception makes of educational knowledge, and how it is envisaged that this knowledge will be used in educational practice. While craft conceptions dismiss the value of educational knowledge per se, they nevertheless value other forms of disciplined knowledge. Arguing that technical conceptions of teaching may be either narrowly instrumental or autonomous, we suggest that an advanced technical knowledge base requires a disciplinary aspect, while knowledge for purely instrumental purposes offers a reductive view of educational practice. Moreover, the varying notions of reflection suggested by reflective professional conceptions require certain forms of engagement with educational knowledge, which are challenged by contemporary reforms in teacher education globally. It is suggested that there are often interdependencies between forms of educational knowledge and conceptions of teaching, with potential implications for the trajectories of educational reforms. The argument is briefly illustrated with reference to the national contexts of Germany, England, and Finland

Understanding continuing professional development:The need for theory to impact on policy and practice

This article reflects on my 2005 article in this journal, entitled ‘Models of Continuing Professional Development: a framework for analysis’. Having been invited to reflect on the original article as part of Professional Development in Education’s 40th anniversary celebrations, I have taken the opportunity not only to reflect on the structure and content of the original framework, but also to position it within the current state of literature in the area of teacher professional learning. In so doing, this article proposes an updated framework for analysis, focusing more explicitly on the purpose of particular models than the categorisations of the models themselves. It then goes on to expand on this by considering how various aspects of continuing professional development policies might be analysed according to what they reveal about underlying perspectives on professionalism. The article concludes with some thoughts on how theory about teacher professional learning might better help us to understand policy and impact positively on practice

The configuration of teacher education as a professional field of practice: a comparative study of mathematics education

Using a comparative approach, the authors analyse the role of educational studies in the secondary teacher education curriculum in Germany, Poland, Singapore and the USA. The data come from an analysis of syllabi from cross-national representative samples of pre-service programmes. The analysis focused on the emphasis given by programmes to five domains typically considered as essential elements of teacher education: the knowledge of the discipline, the knowledge of the school curriculum for the discipline, the pedagogy of the discipline, the general pedagogy (or education studies), and the practicum. The discipline of interest in this case is mathematics because it has a relatively 'uniform' grammar across nations. Using Bernstein's sociology of knowledge, the authors discuss the differential emphases given to these domains within and across countries as an expression of the re-contextualisation of knowledge from singulars to regions - for instance how the educational foundation disciplines and elements of mathematical knowledge are recontextualised to address a particular problem of practice: how to prepare knowledgeable secondary teachers of mathematics. These results are considered in the light of national and global accountability discourses that prioritise some 'knowledges' over others and the implications for the future of 'education(al' studies