'The Work of Teacher Education' : Final Research Report

Partnership teacher education – in which schools work with universities and colleges to train teachers – works and there is abundant existing evidence in support of this fact. But our small-scale study across England and Scotland shows that it is the higher education tutor who seems to make it work, often at the cost of research-informed teaching and research. The most time-intensive activity for the higher education tutors in our sample was maintaining relationships with schools and between schools and individual trainee teachers. The need to maintain relationships to such a degree is caused in part by the creation of a marketplace of ‘providers’ of teacher education who compete for funding on the basis of inspection and quality assurance data and also by the very early school placements that characterise the English model of initial teacher education in comparison to other European models such as that of Finland

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The CTA Sensitivity to Lorentz-Violating Effects on the Gamma-Ray Horizon

The arrival of TeV-energy photons from distant galaxies is expected to be affected by their QED interaction with intergalactic radiation fields through electron-positron pair production. In theories where high-energy photons violate Lorentz symmetry, the kinematics of the process $\gamma + \gamma\rightarrow e^+ + e^-$ is altered and the cross-section suppressed. Consequently, one would expect more of the highest-energy photons to arrive if QED is modified by Lorentz violation than if it is not. We estimate the sensitivity of Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) to changes in the $\gamma$-ray horizon of the Universe due to Lorentz violation, and find that it should be competitive with other leading constraints.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, typos corrected + references added, results unchanged. Matches version accepted by JCA

Academic work and proletarianisation : a study of higher education-based teacher educators

This article reports on a one year, mixed methods study of 13 teacher educators at work in English and Scottish higher education institutions. Framed by cultural-historical activity theory, itself a development of a Marxian analysis of political economy, the research shows how, under conditions of academic capitalism, these teacher educators were denied opportunities to accumulate capital (e.g. research publications, grants) and were proletarianised. The reasons for this stratification were complex but two factors were significant: first, the importance of maintaining relationships with schools in the name of ‘partnership’ teacher education; and, second, the historical cultures of teacher education in HE