What is the point of a faculty of education?

The imperative for discipline-specific educational research within university education departments

One of my publications is:

This was my (somewhat deferred) inaugural lecture as a Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was filmed, and can be viewed as part of the University of Cambridge Video & Audio Collections, available here.

The slideshow of the presentation is provided below, as well as the text of the lecture.

The text of the lecture may be downloaded here

Abstract

This lecture poses the question of what the purpose and value of an education faculty or department might be in the modern university. In particular, it asks what the so-called ‘U.S.P.’ (unique selling point) of such an institution is, and recognises the potential for a large eclectic department to be seen as redundant in the context of a wider university. A faculty which looks too much like the university reproduced in microcosm within one department opens itself up to being seen as potentially redundant and dispersible without losing anything essentially special. This lecture seeks to identify the particular expertise provided by an education faculty, in relation to the proper specification of the content of educational scholarship. An argument can be made that an education faculty that wishes to remain viable at time of severe pressure on university resources should, as an imperative, prioritise core work around those areas of scholarship, teaching, research, and public engagement, that only this particular kind of institution can offer. This should not be considered an argument for building a homogenous silo of education scholars looking to see educational work as somehow encapsulated and disconnected from other disciplines – far from it. Indeed, it is argued that the kind of work which society needs education faculty to undertake is in a very real sense at the borders of educational studies and other disciplinary areas, and relies on expertise that melds educational scholarship with membership of other disciplinary communities.

Presentation

The slides used for the lecture: click the arrows to move through the slides

Text of the lecture

This is my twentieth year working in the Faculty of Education, an institution which deserves that common epithet of being ‘a very broad church’. In my time in the faculty, I have worked alongside, and sometimes with, experts from a very wide range of disciplines. That has been a wonderful privilege. I doubt there is any other faculty in a university with such a diverse spread of specialists, all working together and teaching the same students.

That offers an immense richness, and we could even argue that the Faculty of Education is a microcosm of the University writ large. This has meant that my time here has certainly been an education – at least for me.

Teaching in the academy

I should also note that working here in the faculty, I have been privileged to work alongside a good many skilled and enthusiastic teachers. Surely that would be true in any university department – or at least, surely it should be?

There are many committed and enthusiastic teachers across the university, but the difference in a faculty of education is the presence of those people who committed to being teachers first, before moving to work in higher education; people who trained as teachers as a vocation, rather than as an incidental expectation to meet the requirements of a lectureship.

The faculty includes a large cohort of people who we know wanted to teach, because that is in fact what they chose to do, even when faced with students of widely diverse levels of attainment, motivation, and aspiration. This group of people felt a vocation to undertake the serious work of supporting the development of young minds.

University teaching in the dark ages

Let me, by contrast consider a non-education university department. In fact I will take my own undergraduate experiences as an example. I invite audience members to consider how much of what I say reflects their experiences as an undergraduate student . The lecturers who taught me were all research specialists. The chemistry department was staffed by lecturers who were mostly valued for specialist research expertise.

I remember someone taught us about electrochemistry; and someone else taught us about heterocyclic organic compounds; and another lecturer taught about inorganic complexes, and another about photochemistry, and so forth. If I had been stuck on the electrochemistry, I would not have thought it sensible to go and see the person who taught heterocyclic organic chemistry – and had I done so, I would not have been surprised to have been rebuffed along the lines that that topic was ‘not my area’.

If you will forgive a chemical joke, then if you have a particular question about the actinides, then you should not pose it to someone who does research on the lanthanides: as it is not just historians who can justifiably claim ‘that is not my period’. This is how research intensive universities work – if you will excuse an anachronistic Baconian metaphor – we might say that Universities select disciplinary specialists who are hopefully moving forward the boundaries of their subject by having a focused point of attack, not taking random pot shots across the border.

I am old enough to have attended university before it was widely recognised that it was a good idea to provide lecturers with some systematic input on how to teach. At that time there was an assumption that if you got in to university you should be able to learn from someone coming into a lecture theatre and writing on a board for 50 minutes.

The old adage of a lecture being a means to transfer information from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s notes (perhaps without passing through the mind of either) certainly often applied. The lecturer copied from his notes, say that some quantity or other was approximately not equal to zero, and I copied this down desperately hoping it would make more sense to me later when I reviewed my notes.

I am aware it may not have been exclusively like this everywhere in the University. One day I sneaked into a seminar on Rousseau where everyone sat around the table with a lecturer who did not feel the need to write anything on a chalkboard, but I was an interloper and such modern techniques had certainly not yet reached ‘science city’, where assessing learning seemed to be based on reproducing lecture notes in exams, and so accordingly there were a lot of lectures.

We chemists were advised it would be a good idea to write at least one essay a year, and that we could even hand them in – although they would not get any degree credit. It was not a strong commitment to creative writing. Of course we did get to write lab reports, and as my tutor said to me at the start of the course, this could help increase our overall marks:

“I’ve never known anyone who’s aggregate marks were not pulled up by the practical component” he reassuringly told me.

A year later we had both learned something. “Well,” he told me

“that’s the first time I’ve ever known anyone who’s aggregate marks were not pulled up by the practical component.”

My main problem was that my lab. reports reported what had happened in my lab sessions, where clearly what was actually required was reproduction of the lab. reports that had got top marks in previous years (which were available in a spirit of generosity without charge from their authors – who following local scholarly tradition had presumably drawn upon similar sources themselves). So whereas I thought we were learning to do science, and were expected to give honest reports, the process was actually more about acquiring something akin to even more lecture notes telling us what should have happened. I had failed to recognise the (actual) creative writing component of the course.

I recall the Monday morning physical chemistry lecture course during my first year where lecture notes were provided as hand-outs before the start of each class, and many course members only stayed long enough to pick up the hand-out, whilst the numbers were made up by people not meant to be in the class, but who had been visiting loved ones over the weekend, or were from other disciplines (perhaps they should have gone to learn about Rousseau?) and who wanted to check out whether the Professor really was as eccentric as was claimed.

He had a disarming habit of copying notes on to the board for a few minutes, and then very slowly moving halfway up the steps towards the back of the tiered lecture theatre, before turning to silently read what he had written from a distance. He would then slowly shake his head for several seconds as though faced with the work of an especially incompetent student, before returning to the front, and the task of copying his notes onto the board. He seldom communicated with the class through other modalities, although I do recall him once suggesting to the room that “you will remember this from your second year” and then carrying on with no apparent concern at the response “we are first years”.

It was noticeable that even if lecturers asked whether the class had followed a point, or had any questions, they usually did not seem to have thought through what they would do in the unexpected scenario that the class had not followed the argument or did have a substantive question. Indeed, I recall a subsidiary maths class where the lecturer regularly stopped to ask the class, or at least rows two and three (that is those students who seemed to fall within her field of vision) whether they were following.

The ‘conversation’ would usually follow the pattern.

[… writing on board]

“Do you see? Do you see?”

[quiet acquiescence]

[continuation of the lecture]

[writing on board…]

Occasionally someone broke ranks, and an alternative pattern of dialogic interaction developed:

“Do you see? Do you see?”

“No, I am sorry, I do not follow.”

[pause]

“Well, it’s on the board. It’s on the board…

[pause]

…do you see?”

This seems to be a variation on the well-know classroom interaction triad: I-R-E, a variation that we could label IRE(R,R)

• Invitation by the teacher to comment
• Response by the student
• Evasion of the response by the teacher
• Return to the previous activity,
• Regardless

Needless to say, this approach only taught us that there was little point in questioning the train of symbols on the board as they were considered to be self-evident.

Something that school teachers discover very early is that while a clear and logical presentation of carefully sequenced and explained material that is designed to build on expected prerequisite knowledge is certainly necessary when teaching most classes, it is by no means sufficient.

The well-prepared, logical, carefully sequenced, well-pitched, and skilfully explained lesson that has been planned is based on an assumed model of what the learners are ready and able to make good sense of: and as models are necessarily imperfect, and classes present diverse sets of learners, it is only ever a starting point for the lesson itself.

Whereas the lecture can be scripted in advance, like a score for a musical composition (a feature I have taken full advantage of today) – teaching a class means treating the prepared material as the basis for improvisation, where the performance has to build on the contributions of others in the ensemble.

In a very real sense, most of the lecturers I sat in front of in my undergraduate education, as they represented their specialist knowledge by inscribing on boards, did not seem to be teachers in any deeper sense. Giving lecture courses to a hundred or so people at a time was enacted as a process of transferring information, not engaging in knowledge development.

The academy and its social contract

My intention here is not to be critical, and perhaps such a thing could not happen today, and certainly not here at Cambridge – but simply to point out something that will seem to be self-evident to most people in this faculty: that one does not become a good teacher simply by being appointed to a job that has a title such as ‘lecturer’ or ‘professor’: that is, effective teaching has to be learned like most other worthwhile activities.

Learning from each other is a normal human activity, and is largely responsible for the way culture develops iteratively over time. But learning in informal settings tends to happen in a rather different way from learning in classrooms where one ‘expert’ is plonked in front of a large number of novices, with whom the expert often has no pre-existing personal relationship, for intermittent timetabled periods, separated by long enough periods for what had been presented in the previous class to be largely forgotten. Thus pedagogy becomes important. More on that theme later.

Perhaps, had I formally engaged with the study of Rousseau I would have appreciated that the chemistry department was engaged in a form of social contract. The undergraduates were aware that the department was really interested in research students, and in consequence somewhat interested in the one-third of those in the undergraduate cohort that might potentially make that transition from the ‘main group’ of chemistry students. But there was also a societal need for chemists beyond the academy.

So, part of the purpose of the university chemistry department was to prepare enough chemists to enter the chemical industry and to provide people with subject background to be chemistry specialists in public policy, law, and so forth, even school teaching, in exchange for which a fraction could be creamed off – or could at least defer entering such careers – to support academic research in the university.

The university provided society with the chemists it needed, and in exchange society allowed the university to entice a selection of the best ones to remain in the academy for a few years, or, indeed, sometimes, indefinitely. There was no necessary assumption that becoming a professional chemist outside of academia was inherently something inferior to becoming an academic researcher – just something different.

The university academic as a specialist

Whilst I have been talking about chemistry, I think something similar can be said about most university departments. I imagine that departments of archaeology, architecture, or arts history, contain teaching officers who are largely archaeologists, or architects, or arts historians, and a department looks to induct more novices to become archaeologists or architects or arts historians; some of whom will move into the academy, whilst others move into disciplinary practice or careers that may use their specialist education in some other field.

Something similar happens in medicine: a medical school prepares future medical doctors, some of whom will do academic research for part or all their careers, whilst most will focus on practice. However, here we find that there is actually a less clear division between academia and professional practice: teaching is provided by many who have clinical posts, and all medical professionals are expected to not only keep apace of the latest research relevant to their practice, but to contribute case reports when appropriate.

Many researchers in medical schools have clinical work which both motivates and informs, and also provides the context (and even if this language might not be used, the material), for their research studies. I will make an obvious point here – if we see the medical model as somewhat diluting the boundary between academic medicine, and medical practice, that certainly does not seem to have devalued medicine in any way as an academic field.

In this regard a department of education may seem somewhat perverse. If the chemistry faculty is made up of academic chemists, and the archaeology faculty made up of academic archaeologists, we might expect the education faculty to be made up of ‘academic educators’. But this is a problematic notion as in a sense all those university chemists and archaeologists and arts historians are also academic educators.

Indeed the term ‘academic’ would widely be taken to mean someone who is both a scholar, and a teacher. And some may see this as another kind of social contract – the university supports you to be a scholar, and in exchange you agree to give your “not … less than thirty hours’ lectures a year”. If every university department is full of academic teachers, what is special about the education faculty?

Is education a discipline?

I can avoid a problem here by shifting from ‘who’ to ‘what’. If the chemistry faculty is made up of people who do research and scholarship in the discipline of chemistry, and the archaeology faculty comprises people who do research and scholarship in the discipline of archaeology, and the art history faculty consists of people who do research and scholarship in arts history, we might reasonably expect the education faculty to be made up of people who do research and scholarship in education. That is indeed reasonable, and – I expect – not contentious. So what I have done here is shift the focus to the discipline: chemistry, archaeology, architecture, arts history, medicine…

…education?

This raises a genuine question of whether education is actually a discipline. The sociologist Basil Bernstein discussed how curriculum subjects or disciplines might be framed in different ways. Some subjects have clear boundaries between them and other subjects, and also between the academic treatment and everyday discourse.

So, generally, it is clear what belongs to, say, chemistry, and what does not. And chemical discourse tends to be clearly distinguished from everyday discourse where (much to the amusement or disgust of the initiated) sugar melts in hot tea, acids are corrosive liquids, and orange juice can be pure.

Thus the metaphor of how students coming to classes can be seen as border-crossers who may be bemused by, or misinterpret, the language and customs when visiting chemistry-land, or history-land, or economics-land and so forth. Teachers are advised to try and ease the transition and make the visitors seem at home – and it is so tempting to make a Brexit reference at that point. Education struggles here in two regards.

Firstly, so much that is explored in educational research could be considered within the domain of other disciplines such as sociology or psychology. Where chemistry has its special techniques of distillation, reflux, gas-liquid chromatography, infra-red spectrometry and all the rest, education uses techniques developed in psychology or anthropology or other social sciences. We use Likert scales, and participant observation, and structured interviews, and document analysis, and Kelly’s triads, and so forth – but so do people in many other areas of research. We talk of habitus and cultural capital and working memory and thick description and identity and motivation and metacognition and a great many other things that have their origins elsewhere in the academy.

Someone using Fourier transform n.m.r. spectroscopy to analyse their chemical sample is using one of the specialised techniques of chemistry- but someone using a life-history interview to learn about the career experiences of a retiring teacher cannot claim this is specifically an educational technique. If we adopt Kuhn’s notion of the disciplinary matrix that sets out what it is that is specific to working in a particular research tradition, then education seems to do a lot of borrowing.

Everyone is an expert on education, as we’ve all spent years at school

We in academic education also suffer from that great human faculty – ‘theory of mind’. People are mind-readers, or at least people tend to think they are. Human social experience largely consists of evaluating what others are thinking, and what they are intending, or suspecting, or hoping, or fearing, and so forth. People are generally pretty good at this – although the existence of misunderstandings and confidence tricksters shows we are certainly not infallible.

We are also pretty good at effective communication – at understanding each other, at sharing meaning. Again, we are by no means perfect communicators, but in most everyday social contexts, especially ones that are familiar – people function reasonably well. So we all, informally, engage in explaining things to others, and indeed in evaluating other’s knowledge and understanding of topics in everyday life – and we have an everyday language for this. We talk about how intelligent someone is, what their level of knowledge is, whether they have misunderstood something, what is on their mind…

In education we draw upon this everyday language to discuss our professional concerns, but this has consequences. In other fields there is a disciplinary lexicon which is generally unfamiliar to the uninitiated, and which is formally learned as part of becoming an expert. This is part of what provides the framing that sets the academic field apart from the everyday world where sugar is said to ‘melt’ in hot tea.

Yet in teaching, professional discourse often has a surface similarity with everyday discourse as it adopts the ‘mental register’ of terms that we all use to speak about such mental features as thinking, understanding, knowing, learning, etcetera. Now, I am in danger here of seeming to be suggesting that there is no point in an Education faculty, as actually what we in such a faculty know about is all covered elsewhere – if not in the common-sense knowledge shared outside the academy, then elsewhere in the university.

Clearly, I do not think that, but I do think there is a risk of a perception there that needs to be guarded against.

Dichotomous education faculty

The treatment I am offering suggests a dichotomous model of education faculty teaching staff. Now clearly this is a gross simplification, but that is fine because I am scientist, and science constructs models, and as is well known, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”.

This is not a particularly nuanced or sophisticated model, but that is also fine because I am a teacher, and teachers use teaching models that offer a high level of simplification to introduce a key idea to learners. These act as a starting points for more sophisticated thinking to be developed once a starting point has become familiar and has been consolidated into memory.

I try to follow Bruner here and work with ‘honest’ simplifications that retain the core essence of what is being represented. My suggestion is that to a first approximation the faculty of an education department comprises two classes of academic.

One group are grounded in one or other of the foundational disciplines from which educational studies have developed – philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, etc. – and have developed personal programmes of research in some aspect of philosophy of education, history of education, psychology of education, sociology of education, etcetera. In a sense, these people have probably made a direct transfer from one academic department to another. An economist who specialised in educational contexts could work in either an economics department or an education department – they have a valid passport and may cross those borders relatively effortlessly.

One might think of this group, the educational foundation scholars , as having professional expertise in a home discipline that they are applying in education – perhaps like builders and plumbers who decide to work in another country where there is a demand for their skills, although these disciplinary migrants would be classed as ‘tier 1’ – highly skilled workers.

The other group, the disciplinary specialist education scholars, will also have a disciplinary background – part of their professional identity may be to be a mathematician or a historian or a biologist or whatever – but they have not entered the faculty of education by a direct transfer from another university institution, but through a practice-based route. These people have spent time in professional educational practice – for example, as teachers.

Their route to the education faculty, and the justification of their employment there, is based on what they have achieved working within an educational context beyond the academy since they originally graduated. These people have earned permanent residence status in Education due to their long term commitment to educational work.

This would clearly have an important consequence if, in a time of financial pressure and resource limitations, a university decided to consider closing an education faculty (let’s call this EdExit) and considered whether it could redeploy staff who did not wish to take early retirement or a redundancy package. Our first group of colleagues, the disciplinary migrants, could potentially redeploy back into other departments. They have their own disciplinary citizenship and so another home to go to. A sociologist of education is still a sociologist. She can teach about aspects of sociology – and indeed has been doing so in the education faculty. She can carry on doing research that will fit in sociology journals.

What about our specialists in secondary maths teaching, history teaching, primary literacy, special educational needs, citizenship education, human rights education, and others who have achieved permanent residency in the now threatened state of education? A historian who became a history teacher and has an international reputation in areas of history pedagogy and curriculum analysis and development, but who has only published in education journals, will not fit into the history faculty. That institution probably does not offer any courses that this specialist is suited to teach on, and research into, say, the development of effective history texts for 11-14 year olds, whilst of value to the wider society, is not seen as fitting into the departmental research profile (and certainly not the REF submission).

I know that if the university wanted to re-deploy me to another department I would not be too optimistic. Given my own experiences with the implicit ‘creative writing’ component of my own undergraduate course, I would not even qualify as a competent lab. demonstrator. Of course, this would not be the case everywhere in the world. In the United States, for example, major University departments of Physics and Chemistry in research intensive universities may have physics education / chemistry education research groups, working under distinguished professors who specialise in educational research WITHIN their discipline.

So, the expertise we have here does not relate to scholarship in the disciplines themselves per se, but relates to specialisms in disciplinary pedagogic knowledge, and this should be recognised and valued. I am not sure why, when, at Cambridge, it was decided to offer provision to develop teaching expertise for research students and for academics, this was done in a completely distinct part of the university, rather than being entrusted to the Faculty of Education.

I suspect it may be significant that when the university decided to build, and sponsor, a primary school, it centrally involved the faculty of education as a core partner, yet, when the university entered a partnership to develop a university technical college, it did not think to involve the faculty of education at all in the planning. Presumably, the university centrally considered the faculty of education had no relevant expertise to offer!

The Faculty of Education’s U.S.P.

But this is just where a faculty of education brings unique specialist expertise. This is what the faculty of education can offer that is not available in the rest of the university. This is where the faculty of education offers a wealth of experience and scholarship to support the wider society.

The core foci of educational scholarship are learning and teaching. Now a faculty of education cannot make an uncontested claim on learning, as the psychology department will understandably have something to say about that. Although nor should we cede this focus wholesale. Psychologists are interested in the nature of learning – the processes and mechanisms and general patterns. They will carry out of some of this work in curriculum contexts. But their aim is to use the curriculum material as a context for developing a generalised model or theory that may be widely applicable.

However, disciplinary specialist education scholars are interested in applying learning theory to understand the challenges facing learners making sense of the actual target knowledge or skills set out in the curriculum. Generalised theories are only useful to the extent they can be applied in understanding the learning of the actual material that is to be learnt.

There is a parallel here between two categories of research student studying in the faculty of education. One group are seeking to answer generalised theoretical questions and they usually visit a particular education context to collect data that they hope will offer findings they can abstract from the context to generalise more widely. Those in the other category are collecting data in a context of particular interest to them, primarily to understand, or help change, some aspect of that specific context.

To an outsider it may seem there is a clear hierarchy here: generalisable theoretical knowledge is surely more valuable than specific context-bound knowledge? But such confidence in generalisation across educational contexts is misplaced. Such contexts are complex with too many variables to identify (let alone characterise) and they are highly diverse. Therefore it is equally important to find out not only ‘what generally is’ and ‘what generally works’ but also ‘what is here’ and ‘what works here’. Educational research is often only effectively applied when there is context-directed research to complement theory-directed research.

So, a healthy education faculty has a diversity of student research projects, some looking to develop general theories and some seeing how research can make a difference in actual, particular, educational settings. In the same way, I would argue that my two clusters of faculty academics carry out complementary forms of scholarship which are both needed if we are to advance educational knowledge in ways that are actually applicable in practice. This is not a hierarchical or competitive relationship but more yin-yang.

Teaching is the other core theme of education. Teaching can be understood in different ways. One understanding of teaching would be the professional work of teachers: the things that teachers are contracted to do, or the things that teachers do as a matter of custom and practice in some educational context. In my first teaching job this would have included spending my morning and afternoon breaks one day a week monitoring the ‘playground’ areas.

Another possible definition of teaching, and one I have more attachment to, is the set of deliberate actions carried out to seek to bring about some specified learning. In this definition, teaching and learning are closely linked, and clearly this meaning of teaching is at the core of any teacher’s work. Teaching can be in a formal or an informal context, and may concern knowledge, skills, attitudes or values. The intended learning may not follow, but the teacher’s actions need to be intended to bring about some particular desired learning. This does not necessarily imply the learning is also desired by the learner – although clearly life tends to be easier for the teacher when this is the case.

Curriculum

This does raise the issue of curriculum. Curriculum is about the identification of what it is useful for someone to learn (and so in teaching, for the teacher to teach). Curriculum brings to mind the timetable of classes, perhaps labelled with subjects – mathematics, history, religious education, physics, and so forth.

Yet curriculum would also include those things that may be taught outside of, or at least not entirely within, timetabled lessons: for example fairness, equity, honesty, toleration, empathy, and so forth. Those of us who have worked in schools, especially, will realise that much of our work around the school was concerned with such matters. It does not take long after entering work as a school teacher to realise that no matter how enthusiastic and committed one is to one’s teaching subject, this should be secondary to the role of socialising young people in terms of the values that make for a fair, non-violent, and caring society.

In a system with no education faculties, and so no locus for independent scholarship into teaching and learning of curriculum subjects, then it is very hard to see how an effective school curriculum can be set up. Curriculum is a bit like politics in an important respect: it is fine for ideologues to set out a vision for some imaginary utopia, but for a curriculum to deliver rather than just reflect aspirations it needs to be the art of the possible. Governments and learned societies can set out what they would like people to learn – but such goals may end up ‘dead in a ditch’ if they are not realistic.

Classroom teachers would have an idea about that – but they are unlikely to be asked, and in any case there are people who study just such matters drawing on both disciplinary and educational expertise. My examples are from science education, but clearly the same principles will apply in other areas of the curriculum.

I will assume here that the school curriculum will continue to be largely set out in terms of discrete curriculum subjects which reflect the academic disciplines such as history, physics, mathematics, and so forth. That of course should not be taken for granted, and there are strong reasons to consider that learning that takes place only within apparently discrete subjects has severe limitations.

Many important developments rely on groups of people from different specialisms working together in teams to solve problems or create innovations, and school curriculum that consists entirely of discrete and largely uncoordinated subjects does little to prepare people for this. However, it is also important to bear in mind that those multidisciplinary teams that society relies upon are not groups of generalists, but experts coming from particular specialist backgrounds to work together. So school needs to find ways to reflect this, by offering the tastes of the different disciplines AND also opportunities to work across subjects.

One recent trend has followed the idea that the sciences, mathematics, and technology, could be seen as part of one school subject: STEM. There is a real question of how one offers a model of STEM in the curriculum which avoids learning from within isolated silos, but does not dilute the very specialisms which give STEM its existence. That is a debate that higher education, politicians and practising teachers can contribute to: but which needs to be informed by research and scholarship into the teaching and learning of those subjects in schools.

Getting the curriculum wrong

The process of developing curriculum has three important components. The first of these is scoping the subject. So if we want to represent chemistry or history or mathematics, or design and technology in the curriculum, we first need to know ‘what counts' as chemistry or history, or whatever. We probably do not need education faculties for that. The university geography department could advise on what is included in or excluded from the discipline of geography.

The second feature is selection. We cannot include all of mathematics in school mathematics, so someone has to decide which maths we will include. University departments will have an interest here as they know what they would like new students to already know, but experts from faculties of education may be better placed to advise on what mathematics is likely to be most useful to most students (who will not go onto advanced study of maths), as well as how realistic it is to set particular targets for the general student population.

The third feature concerns how disciplinary material is represented in the curriculum – something that those not working in education may not even think of. This is a matter of modelling – of finding the optimal level of simplification. This requires simplifying complex abstract ideas enough for students of a particular age and level of study, whilst retaining the essence of the disciplinary idea represented.

This is where the disciplinary experts in the faculty of education are essential. University academics in the source department can set out the canonical account, but this will often make little sense to school children. Developmental psychologists can offer general advice about how demanding an abstract concept is for children of different ages, but are not well placed to appreciate how it can be authentically modelled for school classes within a progression of models of the disciplinary ideas. These different experts could be brought together to co-operate yet this very nexus of expertise already exists among the curriculum subject experts in the education faculty. It is those who specialise in studying the teaching and learning of the subject matter who are best placed to support this work.

Here I will give one example of what happens when such scholars are not sufficiently included in the process. This is taken from the English National Curriculum for Science, that is it is a legal formulation published under statutory instrument. The same form of words is copied into the requirements that are set out for examining boards, which explains why the same form of words again appears in the examination specifications of the English exam boards. A search of the web also finds the same form of words on a range of school websites, as part of information presented directly for children and their parents. This form of words is highly problematic. There are two aspects that are problematic and it will be helpful if I treat them separately.

This offers a model of the nature of chemical reaction mechanisms – of how reactions occur at the level of molecules and ions. You may be grateful to know that I do not intend to go into detail of this matter here. However, the formulation in the statutory curriculum would seem to exclude some important classes of chemical reaction. Now if I am pleading for the role of disciplinary experts in education faculties I can see I could be challenged on the basis that a chemistry expert, from a department of chemistry, should be able to spot this problem, and it does not need a subject-specialist education scholar. But I am not so sure. All chemical reactions can be understood as involving a shift in the electron density patterns around atomic cores so it might look to the expert chemistry academic that this is covered in the specified definition.

Yet a careful, indeed somewhat hermeneutic, analysis shows this cannot be how this curriculum statement is intended to be understood given the level of treatment of other related concepts. I am not saying an academic from a chemistry department could not have undertaken such an analysis, but it is much easier for someone who is familiar with the way the subject is represented and modelled in the curriculum, and with the relevant student learning difficulties, and the compromises needed in teaching, and so forth. Someone else could acquire such expertise, but why would they? That is not likely to be valued work in a chemistry department.

That said, other errors in the document should be spotted by anyone who knows about chemistry [the slide shows the National Curriculum reference to chocolate, butter and cream being 'substances'] – raising the issue of who actually wrote or checked the document!

This brings me to the other issue raised by this small extract.

"energy is conserved in chemical reactions

so can therefore be neither created nor destroyed"

This comprises of two linked components, both of which are independently fine.There is a fundamental law of physics, believed to always apply, that energy is always conserved, that is, it can never be created or destroyed. As energy is always conserved in all processes, this must include chemical processes such as reactions. What we have here is an error of logic. This is akin to saying:

Socrates is mortal

so therefore all men are mortal.

In terms of logical structure, it is not that different from saying

Sócrates played football for Brazil;

Sócrates was a man;

so therefore all men play football for Brazil.

Of course to appreciate that “energy is conserved in chemical reactions so can therefore be neither created or destroyed” is a logical howler one has to appreciate that conservation of energy is a higher level, more general, principle than conservation of energy in chemical reactions. I do not think that is a particularly high bar given we are talking about the people entrusted with specifying the science all children in England should learn.

Okay, errors occur. But how is it no one in the Department for Education spotted this howler? How is that the people responsible for preparing the requirements for exams did not spot and correct it? How come the subject specialists in the exam boards did not spot this, and correct it? How come the teachers in the schools reproducing this gross error on school websites did not spot this and correct it? I can only assume hundreds of people have spotted this error, or had it pointed out to them, but felt that they are not in a position to call out the government. One group of people who can call out such errors are academics – those with the academic freedom to be critical without fearing this might be held against them.

There have been a number of attempts to include more emphasis on the nature of science in the science curriculum – but largely undertaken without proper research and development to support teachers in acquiring subject knowledge, or advising on pedagogy or teaching resources. This is an area where there is a particular need for careful disciplinary scholarship, and the development of a viable curricular model that can be represented for school age students. Instead it seemed to be assumed that simply putting information in curriculum documents was sufficient. Arguably, there was a political and administrative process – but not an educational one.

Pedagogy

Turning then to pedagogy, I will refer to one other example where I think it is clear that subject-specific pedagogic expertise was needed. As part of the initiatives known as the Key Stage 3 Strategy the government commissioned subject-specific guidance on pedagogies in some areas of the curriculum. The actual advice offered included much of value, and in particular much that derived from research and scholarship in science education. But even in this context the lack of expertise of those charged with compiling the initiative materials was clear. The materials appropriately put a good deal of emphasis on the research-informed idea that students come to class with alternative conceptions and unhelpful intuitions which can lead to them not understanding or misunderstanding science teaching.

The Strategy accordingly recommended that teachers start a new topic with activities to elicit students’ ideas. However the gist of the advice was little more that to find out what alternative conceptions students had, and then challenge them, and then having corrected student thinking, move on. This very much gave the impression of advice from someone who had never actually taught any of the subject matter concerned at school level themselves, and so did not appreciate the subtle, interactive and ongoing challenge of guiding student conceptual change. Guidance was at the level of saying to a medical student that once you have diagnosed the condition that the patient suffers from, you should now simply proceed with the appropriate medical or surgical treatment. A little more specificity and detail would be valuable.

This is a real concern when we consider recent government thinking about initial teacher education as something that should be largely entrusted to the schools.That is, seeing learning to teach as something of on-the-job acquisition of craft skills and induction into existing custom and practice. Of course, there are many skilled and intelligent people working in schools who can make excellent teacher educators, and the model used in Faculties like this is a partnership model incorporating this expertise. Many of these same people would also be perfectly capable of progressing educational studies through scholarship and research, should they be so inclined, as long as they are sufficiently prepared for, and resourced in, such a role.

In general, though, a model of teacher preparation based exclusively within schools themselves is an insular model at best intended to reproduce and tweak the status quo, rather than question, challenge, and transform, educational practices. It is also a system in which there are inbuilt expectations to follow, rather than critique, government policies and initiatives.

I wonder if a teacher educator working in such a context would be given the freedom to give a public talk of the kind I am presenting today without someone wanting to preview and perhaps even censure comments that could be seen as critical of the institution, the system, the government, or its agencies? The scholar afforded academic freedom, the right to research and write as seen fit, without external interference, could be seen as part of the fourth estate that plays an important role in any democratic society.

In conclusion

The point of a faculty of education is to further research, scholarship and practice, in education.

Education has as its key foci, teaching and learning, and these should then be key foci of any faculty of education. Education implies something more than incidental learning – it suggests learning that is intended by someone (the learner, a parent, a teacher, a professional body, the society) such that conditions are deliberately organised with the aim of supporting that learning. Teaching and teachers are therefore central.

Curriculum is critical because that is the means of deciding what it is worthwhile to learn, and what level of simplification it is sensible to try and ask particular learners to engage with. Pedagogy is central because that is the process by which teaching can be undertaken effectively.

General pedagogical principles are important, but are not enough to guide good teaching. Effective teaching requires detailed work on analysis of subject matter, construction and testing of specific curricular and teaching models, and development of targeted resources, to support learning. It requires guidance on specific student learning difficulties, and explorations of treatments and sequencing of particular subject matter.

There is certainly a need to find ways to break down the compartmentalisation of learning that our logistically pragmatic timetable structures can encourage. So there needs to be opportunity for cross-curricular projects for example: but this will only be successful when it engages expertise from the different areas of subject teaching involved.

If we are to meet our social contract and justify public support, as well as our unique place in the academy, we must ensure that we support society in improving education, and an important part of that depends on disciplinary experts working to induct and develop teachers, and carrying out the scholarship and research to support practice, and to advise, and where necessary criticise, governments on policy.

That is the U.S.P. of a faculty of education, and that is what most taxpayers will understand as the point of a faculty of education; and that is what the faculty can tell the university it can do that cannot be done just as well somewhere else in the academy.      

 

The text of this lecture (DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18634.70089) may be downloaded here