Anthropology and the Arctic: Inspirations for change on a Teacher Education programme for developing understandings of place to enhance the educational practice of student teachers

The University of the Highlands and Islands provides postgraduate and undergraduate qualifications that prepare students for teaching in Scotland through programmes of Initial Teacher Education. With its most northerly campus being on the sub-Arctic Shetland Islands, and it serving a large and in many ways disparate land mass and various archipelagos through its other sites, the institution finds that it can relate to the educational experiences of teachers and learners in other northerly regions. These experiences have been encapsulated into the term 'Arctic Pedagogy' (UArctic Thematic Network, 2019), which intrinsically links place and education, as educational praxis is so profoundly connected to experiences of place.

This paper explores some of these connections, and also the changes made to the university's Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) programmes that seek to enhance the extent that student teachers are prepared for teaching on school placements and for being part of the educational community within schools, by promoting their understanding of the cultural contexts in which schools are situated. Inspired by the discipline of anthropology, lecturers on the programme share with students examples of the cultural diversity existing in a range of places that form part of what it means to be a person learning in a given place, modelling the approach that the student teachers themselves will take.

The paper considers the programmes' existing contribution to place awareness in education (cf. Redford and Nicol, 2021), and articulates the changes being made, inspired by anthropology, that are consolidating connections between education and place.