Educating Teachers in Scotland and Canada: Comparative Links of Part-time Employment

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    An increasing number of teacher educators in Scotland and Ontario, Canada are employed part-time in two or three departments, in one or two different university teacher education programmes (OCUFA, 2018). The auto-ethnographer of this research is employed as a 0.3 lecturer for a PGDE (Post Graduate Diploma in Education) programme in Scotland, and as a 0.6 senior lecturer for a B.Ed. and post graduate research programme in Ontario, Canada. The rich auto-ethnographic narrative of the teacher educator, in these two conflicting global contexts, is storied in this paper presentation. Scotland and Ontario share similar systems governing the professional education of provisional teachers. The GTCS (General Teaching Council in Scotland) Standards for Provisional Registration (SPR), and the OCT (Ontario College of Teachers’) Standards of Practice for the Teaching Profession follow very similar programmes of study. This auto-ethnography follows the narrative of a senior lecturer from Canada coming in to tutor part-time within a PGDE programme in Scotland (LeCompte, Preissle & Tesch, 1993; LeCompte & Schensul, 1999). Although similar programme content exists for the Scottish PGDE and Canadian B.Ed. student teachers, significant cultural differences within staff interactions and conditions provide a conflicting lens for the global education lecturer. Specifically: university cultural norms, in this case, differ with regard to how lecturers were expected to interact with each other, and with their direct reports. Student placement assessments, on both sites, focused on the act of professional teaching in front of the classroom; however, written programme assignments in one case paralleled standardised tests, and in the other, were design-based projects. Successful transitions from one role to another were observed as critical to the self-assessment of job performance. For instance, in one location, maintaining an ongoing programme of [REF] research was the premier determination of job competence; while in the other location, this was viewed with somewhat passive hostility. In one teaching community, positive partnerships with the schools were essential; while in the other, schools and the university traditionally worked independently of each other. The research relevance for international part-time lecturers working online and face-to-face in two different national programmes was that a framework for ‘effective tutoring’ needed to be objectively established in both work sites prior to any professional review (Leithwood, 2012; Leithwood, Louis, Anderson & Wahlstrom, 2004). And, if possible, critical professional reflections on the two global work environments needed to be established so that the part-time lecturer was able to effectively disseminate the learning development of both the students in the programme and their tutor in the national learning context (Lingard, Martino, Goli & Sellar, 2016).
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationAssociation for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE)
    Subtitle of host publicationAnnual Conference at Bath Spa University
    Place of PublicationBath Spa University
    Number of pages11
    Publication statusPublished - 14 Aug 2019

    Keywords

    • narrative representation
    • comparative education

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