Two weeks ago it was Vancouver and tomorrow it is Hong Kong – this is well and truly the conference season. At the International Learning Conference – my colleague (Graham Hardy) and I are presenting a paper on trainee teachers views of becoming a professional and in particular how trainees view themselves against the profession they are entering. We will follow this up by analysing how trainee teachers views change across the year to hopefully give some steer as to how we should prepare trainees for a profession.
Interestingly (at least I think so) although completely different, the paper links to my previous paper on the ‘Illusion of Knowing’ – in that how does one assemble an image of what it is to be a professional from disparate chunks of information assembled before entering a profession? This is particularly interesting when the profession itself is a changing and dynamic one that that is constantly shifting. Even more interesting (again, for me) is the tool that we used to define what it means to be professional is taken from the General Teaching Council’s Code of Conduct and Practice. Again in an earlier post you will see that the GTC itself is threatened and it’s own identity is being challenged whilst the new government has also starting questioning the value of PGCE programmes.
So every facet of the research is in a state of uncertainty and by the time we arrive in Hong Kong a few other areas of uncertainty could have been thrown into the mire!
Interesting times.
By the way – my reading for the trip is Jonah Lehrer’s The Decisive Moment – How the brain makes up its mind…
Dr David Spendlove's Blog 