A manifesto for teacher education

I am not quite in the league of Wendell Berry’s ‘Manifesto’ from his Mad Farmer Liberation Front but the idea of a manifesto for the work we are doing as teacher educators is very appealing. I read the following out to our new group of beginning teachers yesterday morning as a statement of intent of what we could be and do at UEL. A manifesto is longer than a vision statement but short enough to inspire. I would love comments from readers! This is unofficial, as far as the department is concerned, but for us PGCE Primary educators, we are going to give ourselves to it this year.

A Curricular Purpose for Teacher Education Reimagined

When considering the purpose of our primary ITE curriculum, we will discover many ways of articulating it, but all have to be rooted in the kind of teacher we want to see. At UEL we have defined the identity of that teacher in the following way:

Knowledgeable, empowered, reflective and actively responsive student teachers.

The high expectations we have of you lie not only in the knowledge you acquire (through research, teaching, experience, observation and scholarship), and the extent to which you reflect and respond to that learning, but also the way that, through paying attention to the contours of your particular identity, we empower you to be transformational of your classes and communities. Anything less and we are not fulfilling the vision we have set for ourselves.

The way that we teach you, and the distinct pedagogies we employ, therefore, have to be characterised by an inclusivity towards each of you as student teachers that is fully respectful of your experience. You are not just ‘trainees’ and MUST not be. Yes, you undergo some training – the repeated, intentional practice towards mastery – but you are first and foremost co-learners with us in a mutual submission of modelled learning, scholarship, experience and affection. You learn from us, but you also impact and inspire us as your teachers.

Thus, the way we teach has to be relational – and hence affectionate, honest and kind; democratic – and thus listening to your perspectives and shifting our own where necessary; socially just – so that the marginalised are privileged and an honest and serious critique emerges of the systems in which we – and you – teach; fiercely anti-racist – so that a richly diverse and mutually-respectful community of teachers grows up in our midst; and in our teaching, paying attention to your and our wellbeing. In the middle of these pedagogical values we have included ‘child-centred’ – an indication of the humility and affection we want to demonstrate in all we do, coupled with an awareness that we exist – our whole enterprise exists – to serve children in their learning world.

Imagine then….. a cohort of accomplished novice teachers emerging from the Primary PGCE course at UEL whose principal motivation is affection: a love for learning and of knowledge, a rich kindness towards children and their families, and a longing for the success of the communities that gave them their identity and which they seek to serve as teachers.

Along with affection, for you as emerging teachers, arises joy: a delight in the practice and mastery of both the fundamental and the more subtle arts of teaching, a joy and deep satisfaction in the hard work that enables that practice and mastery, a joy taken in the successes and victories of those you teach, and a joy in finding new pedagogies and new understandings of the world to bring to your children and incorporate into their practice.

And upon this affectionate joy, grows a faithful trust: a trust and confidence in your growing ability to teach well, to bring into play all that you have been taught; a faithfulness to yourselves and your own identity and to the best of the profession that enables critique and care to flow in equal measure; a rich respect for the faithful tradition of teaching that feeds you and in which you stand, and a trust, birthed in hope, that you can, if you work hard, be the transformational leader of young lives that you long to be.

This is a political vision – a vision of how we as university tutors want the world to be for the teachers we train. It is not a vision for maintenance: we have the Teachers Standards and the Early Career Framework for that. Instead, it is a deliberate articulation of the kind of world we want you as teachers to inhabit and to which you can contribute. As Wendell Berry has noted, professional standards are a low common denominator – there for when love fails: the world we seek allows for love, joy and trust, and not simply professional standards.

This vision is not for the faint-hearted: it will require extraordinary willingness to change, resilience and courage, both on your part and on ours. It will mean that our teaching and lecturing must be motivated by exactly that which we seek to unearth in you, modelling not just the best and most socially-just of pedagogies but also the attitudes, affections and desires that are latent in those co-learners – you! – whom we seek to instruct.