Teacher education research in the UK: the state of the art

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the current state of teacher education research in the United Kingdom (UK). It commences with a brief historical overview of developments over the last century. Some recent «capacity building» initiatives designed to enhance and develop teacher education research are described. There is then a focus on a particular web-based resource that draws together a significant number of publications in UK teacher education research from 2000-2008. This database is then analysed in order to identify in which journals and by which authors this work is produced. The range of methodological approaches and substantive areas of focus that appear to predominate in teacher education research in the UK are reviewed, according to categories within the database. This demonstrates that there are some very real challenges to be faced by teacher education researchers in the years ahead, similar but not identical to those faced elsewhere.

Measuring up? Metrics and research assessment in UK teacher education

“…This study builds on the capacity building activities of the Teacher Education Group (TEG) which produced an annotated database of research in teacher education undertaken in the UK and published between 2000 and 2008 (Murray et al, 2008;Menter et al, 2010). The creation of the TEG bibliography was funded by the British Educational Research Association (BERA), the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), and the Education Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy (ESCalate).…”

“…It was established by the research community to enhance the visibility of UK research in teacher education to enable its interrogation and use by teacher educators. Each retrieved research article was tagged to identify the core research themes and methodological approach (Menter et al, 2010). The study reported here uses the same list of core journals (appendix 1) and retrieval methods to extend the mapping of research to 2013.…”

The place of research in teacher education

“…The constant pressure to develop programmes that are highly practically orientated means that many universities are more interested in recruiting staff with 'professional rather than academic capital' (Furlong, 2013, p.143) and that some universities are less likely to develop or invest in the academic profiles of their staff when neither government directives or inspection frameworks pay tribute to research (Furlong, 2013). According to Menter et al (2010), only one third of staff working as academics 14 in departments or faculties of education in the UK were returned research active in the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008 (the predecessor to the REF). There may therefore be a gulf between educational research and those who 'mobilise' or teach this knowledge, as highlighted by Nelson and O'Beirne (2014, p.36), when they call for more and better brokerage between the producers and users of research through a centrally coordinated 'knowledge mobilisation infrastructure'.…”

“…One of the major reasons for this lies with issues of methodology. Most research on teacher education in the UK has adopted interpretive or practitioner enquiry genres (Menter et al, 2010) and is thus similar to the type of research conducted in teacher education. Commenting from a U.S. perspective, Borko et al (2007, p.8) also note the predominance of these approaches and explain their popularity by saying that they 'lend themselves to study the teaching and/or learning processes, a topic of deep interest to most teacher educators; in addition, studies within these genres often can be conducted by individual scholars and without external funding.'…”

“…Commenting from a U.S. perspective, Borko et al (2007, p.8) also note the predominance of these approaches and explain their popularity by saying that they 'lend themselves to study the teaching and/or learning processes, a topic of deep interest to most teacher educators; in addition, studies within these genres often can be conducted by individual scholars and without external funding.' Whilst this type of research has been helpfully applied at the micro level of teacher education to inform curriculum development, the challenge of aggregation has resulted is the absence of a coherent knowledge-base that can be used to inform larger policy decisions (Tatto, 2000;Borko et al, 2007;Murray et al, 2008;Menter et al, 2010).…”