Reconceptualising teacher education as part of a strategic approach to broadening and advancing research in the field of widening participation

Abstract

This research field – Widening Participation (WP) – is still studied and contested after nearly twenty years following the Kennedy Report (1997). Scholars in this field especially Kettley (2007) advocated a holistic approach that was grounded in empirical research, which included disadvantaged learners’ progression of their learning and outcomes. This paper offers the following two aims. One is it advocates a broadening concept of WP where learners’ learning (lifelong) and outcomes (work) are crucial in the long-term objective of WP, and two, teaching is an important variable in the pedagogical equation and in particular quality teaching and its related training. This pedagogical emphasis has two strands: the first relates to quality curriculum (in teacher training and learners’ programmes) where relevant content is essential for learners’ (trainee teachers and their students) advancement especially with the recent emphasis on apprenticeships. The second strand relates to a pedagogical solution to offer quality teacher education where pedagogical and disciplinary or occupational know-how are integrated to produce quality teachers on occupational programmes. The conceptual frameworks are drawn from areas of teaching knowledge and teacher training. From teaching knowledge, the sources include: Shulman (1987) and Clandinin (1085) and from teacher training, via a process of recontextualisation, the sources include: Bernstein (1990), Barnet (2006) and Young (2013). The scholars who provide theoretical understandings in terms of the enhancement of teaching quality include Jewitt (2009) and Kress (2010) via ‘multimodality’ and Pollard et al. (2008) via their reflective peer review approaches. This paper is based on a re-evaluation of the empirical data from two projects. The first set of data is from a larger project on occupational pedagogy (Loo, 2015) and the second set of data is from a project on a structured approach to improve teaching via the use of digitally recorded pedagogic sessions (Loo, 2013). The Discussion section uses the re-evaluated data sets to argue for the importance of quality teaching to broadening and advancing the field of WP. It uses curriculum examples to argue for a more critical definition of teaching knowledge in curriculum (both in teacher training and occupation-related courses) and findings to offer a pedagogical solution to improving teaching quality where disciplinary and pedagogical know- how are critically reflected in teacher training. This paper finally indicates the contributions to the field of WP and the implications for learners, deliverers, post-compulsory institutions and policy-makers.