PGCE EPD 610

1
PGCE EPD 610

• 3 April 2007
• 1400 1530
• Room 67

2
Teacher identity (official)

• A major concern of education reform is to change
  the bias and focus of official knowledge and to
  construct new pedagogic identities in teachers
  and learners. The new pedagogic identities emerge
  as reflections of differing discursive bids to
  construct in teachers and students a particular
  moral disposition, motivation and aspiration,
  embedded in particular performances and
  practices (Bernstein, 200065)

3
Teacher identity (local)

• Teacher identity emerges from the dynamic
  interface between individual careers and the
  social or collective base Identity arises out
  of a particular social order, through relations
  which the identity enters into with other
  identities of reciprocal recognition, support,
  mutual legitimisation and finally through
  negotiated collective purpose. (Bernstein, 1996
  73)

4
Identity develops throughout a Teachers career

• The career of a teacher is a knowledge career,
  a moral career and a locational career
  (Bernstein, 200066).

5
Pedagogic Identity (O / L?)
Conscience Orientation to regulation/ moral
and social - disposition, motivation, aspiration
How we are our morals and social behaviours
how we act/ why we act ways of being in the
world

• Consciousness
• Orientation to knowledge
• What we know and how we know it

6
Policy-practice gap

• Teacher roles (policy)
• Curriculum (policy)
• Schools and institutions on the ground
• Playing the blame game
• Reality feeds back to practice a responsive
  system? (or how democratic are we?)

7
What changes are expected?

• Official Teacher identity old and new

8
Teacher Identity in the policy/practice gap

• Teachers in well resourced advantaged schools?
• What about at the margins of society?
• Key Reading
• Mattson and Harley (2003) Teacher Identity and
  Strategic Mimicry in the Policy Practice Gap

9
Reading

• Activity Scan the document
• Policy as Social Meliorism
• The policy/practice disjuncture in traditional,
  rural school contexts
• Tradition and modernity/ organic and mechanical
  solidarity
• Interactionist concept of teacher strategy
• Mimicry as a response to policys forked tongue
• Teacher education and the myth of transfer

10
Reading and discussing

• Identify key words and sentences
• Identify important concepts
• Discuss the meaning of these
• What are the main strands of the argument that is
  put forward in the paper?
• After reading and discussing what advice would
  you give the DoE in relation to training
  teachers for implementing the new curriculum?

11
Some points to think about

• The danger inherent in policy making is that it
  can effortlessly reconcile on paper what cannot
  be reconciled in practice
• The trap of social meliorism where commitment to
  what should be clouds the ability to consider
  what is
• If OBE represents a script of modernity, what
  happens when it is implemented in all schools
  from modern urban institutions to the poorest
  farm school?