Innovations around place attentiveness in a Scottish Initial Teacher Education programme

The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) is a Scottish university formed through a partnership of tertiary colleges, which are situated on mainland Scotland and its chief archipelagos. The northernmost of these, UHI Shetland, is based in the sub-Arctic region. Our geographical territories, the challenges that they bring, and their cultural terrain help us to identify with the experiences of some of our fellow institutions in the Arctic region. This has become even more evident to us when we have explored the five pillars of Arctic pedagogy (UArctic Thematic Network, 2019), which we have reflected on in collaborative staff development sessions for our Teacher Education team.

Some of our pedagogic elders have noted the sense of place attentiveness that student teachers develop on our programmes (Redford and Nicol, 2021). Indeed, a weekly online seminar brings together student teachers from across our different campuses and regions, where they discuss their developing values, knowledge and practice, learning from each other’s engagement with people and place.

As practical innovations as part of the development of our programmes, we have introduced our student teachers to the five pillars of Arctic pedagogy and have set them Reflective Exercises for which they locate artefacts about the context of their first two placement schools and for the second of these that they integrate into their teaching practice. This paper presents this process and the findings of the first cycle of this research, which takes the form of practitioner enquiry (cf. Timperley et al., 2014).