Reflections on Identity: Narratives from Educators 3031467930, 9783031467936

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Neil Hopkins Carol Thompson Editors

Reflections on Identity Narratives from Educators

Reflections on Identity

Neil Hopkins • Carol Thompson Editors

Reflections on Identity Narratives from Educators

Editors Neil Hopkins University of Bedfordshire Bedford, UK

Carol Thompson University of Bedfordshire Bedford, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-46793-6 ISBN 978-3-031-46794-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

Editors’ Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Neil Hopkins and Carol Thompson

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Reflecting on the Identity of the Teaching Profession: Time for Some Higher Status? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andy Goodwyn

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The Researcher as Inter-disciplinarian: A Reflection on Professional Identity in a Specialised World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Neil Hopkins

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Identity and Leadership in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darren Bourne

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“Making More of a Difference”: The Creation of Teachers’ Identities as Professionals Who Deal with Disadvantage . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steve Connolly

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Managing and Implementing Educational-Technological Change: A Case for Co-development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Pike

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A Democratic View of Professional Development in HE . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jon Rainford When to Show the Way, When to Lead the Way and When to Step Away – Exploring the Roles and Identities of Teacher Educators in Post-compulsory Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carol Thompson and Elaine Battams The Invisible Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jim Crawley

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Some Thoughts and Reflections on Identity, Teaching, and Writing, and How They Might Affect One Another . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Oli Belas Reinterpreting the ‘Professional’-isation of Outdoor Education in the Context of Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Lewis Stockwell Beyond “Paraprofessional”: Empowering and Equipping Teaching Assistants to Develop a Sense of Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Allyson Goodchild Identity in the ‘Impossible Professions’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 David Mathew Final Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Neil Hopkins and Carol Thompson

Editors’ Introduction Neil Hopkins

and Carol Thompson

Starting the Conversation . . . When compared with other professions such as law and medicine, educators do not have a strong sense of professional identity. There could be many reasons for this, not least because, as a sector, education has been compliant to the demands of others. In the UK, funding controls enforce ever-tighter budgets whilst external bodies demand continual improvements. The national teacher shortage in schools has outlined a range of recruitment and retention challenges including: falling teacher numbers, an increasing pupil population and 1 in 5 teachers leaving the profession within 2 years (EPI, 2022). Similar situations exist in other countries; in Australia and America there remain significant teacher shortages (Guardian, 2021; Campbell, 2021). In addition, an increased focus on ‘evidence-based’ practice has provided a framework for what is and isn’t considered good teaching, constraining choice and the freedom to take creative approaches to the role. The rising number of preferred protocols for practice raises questions about whether or not educators are trusted to use their own professional judgement. As a result, exploring what it means to be a professional in this context has not been high on the agenda for most teachers or leaders. A sign of the times perhaps? But all of this has created a situation in which teachers and education leaders have begun to question their professional roles and even their own status as ‘professionals’. Whilst there have been some attempts to address this through programmes of professional recognition (an example from the UK is the Chartered College C-Teach programme), these initiatives are not as widely recognised as they might be leaving educators with a compromised professional status. One might even think that the rise of professional bodies and recognition for N. Hopkins (✉) · C. Thompson University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_1

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teaching could be seen as an attempt to re-invigorate a profession which has been de-professionalised through a range of control measures. Enhancing professional practice and status within any setting involves developing an understanding of the wider landscape and how this influences what we do. In addition, it requires practitioners to establish strong values in relation to their role and professional identity. In order to fully understand what it means to be a professional educator, it is necessary to critically reflect on and challenge assumptions about the profession as a whole by taking into account a range of perspectives. In order to do this, we must also give consideration to how we talk about our roles internally and with others. The theory of narrative identity describes the way in which we internalise our ‘stories’ in creating a sense of self. These stories are based on an integration of the way we have constructed past events to provide a unified narrative of our lives. In adulthood, our stories become an operating manual for dayto-day life, they show us what to do and provide a clear strategy for how to do it. They even provide the narrative for how we present ourselves to others: ‘In this way our stories become the foundation of our personalities and influence the way we work, think about ourselves and interact with others.’ (Thompson, 2019: 26) Whilst narrative identity theory is often concerned with the stories we construct as children, it cannot be separated from adult life. As adults we form our identity through the range of roles we play and a significant part of this is professional identity, which informs the knowledge we acquire and the values we claim. When we talk about ‘professional identity’ we are considering the ways we might combine our attributes, experiences and values in terms of a profession (Ibarra, 1999), which is an important part of seeing ourselves within the profession. Within this book we aim to capture the stories of a range of education professionals, working in different contexts. This includes narratives from senior leaders, middle managers, teachers, academics and teaching support staff working in settings as diverse as Further Education Colleges and the National Health Service. Each provides an ‘insider’ view of professional identity from their own unique vantage point. Using reflections as a form of personal inquiry, chapter authors explored their professional identity from a specific standpoint and within a particular context. This involved cultural analysis and interpretation not only of identity but of the ways in which environmental factors contribute to it. The reflections provided an opportunity to explore the topic with an experienced eye as well as offering a space for reflexivity. Instead of an introduction, we want this to be the start of a conversation on the issue of how professional identity in education is conceived and described by colleagues in the field. What the following chapters convey is a range of issues and themes around this central topic. Identity is explored from the angle of teacher education in terms of students and teacher educators and views are offered on educational leadership and identity, especially against the backdrop of dealing with change during the pandemic. Some chapters discuss professional identity in what are sometimes neglected areas of the field giving a wider perspective.

Editors’ Introduction

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We hope the following accounts provoke conversations on identity and that they encourage readers to resume their own narratives in terms of what they do and who they are.

References Campbell, N. (2021). America is facing a teacher shortage crisis. Available at: https://www. visiontimes.com/2021/11/16/teacher-shortage-crisis-union-disputes.html. Accessed 4 May 2023. Education Policy Institute. (2022). Teacher shortages in England analysis and pay options. Available at: Teacher shortages in England: analysis and pay options-Education Policy Institute (epi.org.uk). Accessed 4 May 2023. Guardian. (2021). It is unsustainable: Guardian readers on the crisis of Australian teacher shortages. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/30/it-isunsustainable-guardian-readers-on-the-crisis-of-australian-teacher-shortages?CMP=Share_ iOSApp_Other. Accessed 4 May 2023. Ibarra, H. (1999). Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 764–791. Thompson, C. (2019). The magic of mentoring. Routledge.

Reflecting on the Identity of the Teaching Profession: Time for Some Higher Status? Andy Goodwyn

Background I was an English teacher in secondary schools for the first 10 years of my career, moving next to become the PGCE course leader for English at a large university in Southern England. Over the years I added being MA course leader for an English programme and becoming a head of several education departments. I gradually developed as a researcher, initially very much about the subject of English and its teachers, a theme that continues to fascinate me. I developed a complementary theme about what we mean when we talk about good teaching and especially ‘expert teachers’, this remains a contested idea and term, not least in the teaching profession itself. It is an international phenomenon with many countries developing schemes to identify their best teachers and to keep them working in the classroom and not moving out into management or similar roles. My research has investigated this global development and I have been involved in advising on a number of national and international developments. I have published a considerable number of articles and books about both my themes and in a personal chapter like this one I mention a number of publications because they are part of my identity and my reflections on teaching. This chapter will chart my emerging identity as a teacher and researcher and how it is entwined with the teaching as a profession. I am a passionate believer that teaching is underrated and the profession itself must take a stronger line on its own expertise and pride in its professionalism and achievements. I present a case for teaching to revise its identity to claim, and deserve, high status.

A. Goodwyn (✉) University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_2

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Key Questions Why is teaching such a self-deprecating and modest profession given the incredible work done by teachers every day? What are ‘models of expert teaching’ and how might they be of benefit to the teaching professions in individual countries and internationally in raising the status of the profession.

Introduction: Was I a Great Teacher? I once had an unusual but arranged meeting with two women, originally from Coventry in England, in a hotel lobby in Santa Monica, I had not seen them for 30 years. One of them had contacted me to ask whether I was ‘the Andy Goodwyn’ who was her English teacher and form tutor in her first year at secondary school? Most teachers have especially strong memories of their first classes and my only doubt was which of the two Janes [the names are changed] she was – but once she mentioned her best friend Joanna, I knew exactly. They have an interesting story about emigrating to California which I subsequently learned at that meeting. It had so happened that I was scheduled to attend a research conference in San Francisco the next month but had planned a few days in Santa Monica, just an hour from Orange County, where she and her best friend now lived. When I asked why she had got in touch she simply said ‘For me you were THAT teacher, the one who changed my life’. The story is intended as an illustration of my identity, my life as a teacher and the way I am typical of many teachers for whom education is THE vocation and whose motivation is almost exclusively intrinsic. I wanted to make that much mentioned difference and, at least for her, I did. Having worked in education now for over 40 years, I have met many former pupils and students who have expressed various forms of gratitude and that has been a reward beyond any extrinsic materiality. But, was I a ‘great teacher’? On reflection, I think not, but more than competent. Was I an ‘expert teacher’, which might be a different animal? Certainly, when she met me, I was far from such a category, indeed I was an idealistic novice with tremendous passion and enthusiasm and an authentic liking for children but still an absolute beginner.

Teaching as a Modest Profession, Why Is That a Problem? This chapter is concerned with the identities of real teachers, many of whom have been part of my research over the years. It is equally with the nature of the identity of a professional group, called teachers. My experience of school teachers, of which

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I was one for 10 years, is that they are, generally, extremely modest, even humble about their work and their professional importance. Very frequently one hears the disclaimer ‘it is all about the children/young people’. Secondary teachers, again of which I was one, also ‘love their subject’, mine was English and that is the subgroup that I claim to know best. It contains plenty of characters and charismatics – but they are just as modest in their professional claims. Of my many projects, the one in which I observed and interviewed six, arguably expert teachers of English, over a complete academic year, certainly proved that point (Goodwyn, 2010). Another key explanatory factor about that ‘modesty’ is that teaching, as an expertise, can be considered a ‘fluency expertise’ (See Koetzee, 2014). In the Dreyfus brothers’ conceptualisation of expertise (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986) there is a continuum in skill development from novice to expert, and as teachers become more accomplished much of their classroom decisions and actions become unconscious and automatic. It is only when the lesson is not going well that more conscious activity takes place. This model is also focused on teacher performance; not in the neoliberal sense of being measurable, but in the agentic sense of the embodied actions of teaching and interacting with students. To look at a model of expert teacher characteristics, for example Hattie’s (2003) which contains 16 dimensions, makes it clear that the knowledge needed to operate all of these facets would need to be stored and tacit, accomplished teachers rarely ‘surface’ their deep expertise although it is absolutely there all the time. Modesty is to some extent a side effect of unconscious competence (see Goodwyn, 2010). Currently, teaching is, at best, a second-tier profession (Goodwyn, 2004), slipping towards an even lower status due to relentless ideological pressures to make teachers mere deliverers of packaged material. One crucial element in being ‘second tier’ is that the profession is not self-regulating and does not ‘own’ the standards by which it is governed and judged, creating an enforced humility, not professional confidence. Identity is a complex term and, for some theorists, identity itself is a complicated mash up of social forces and external positionings, including language which some argue ‘speaks us’ rather than that we are articulating our thoughts. I take a critical realist, essentialist view. There is an essential, ‘core’ self, dynamic and changing but, remarkably resilient, forming in childhood, including the influence of education and those great teachers. Maturing, we take on a range of roles in the external world and the internal self considers and reflects on these roles. Margaret Archer’s theory (Archer, 2010) about inner conversations shows reflection as part of human agency and action. Teaching is an especially powerful and emotionally involving profession with the word vocation – especially apposite. ‘Becoming a teacher’ adds very significant demands on the self and requires a very strong professional role identity, partly an extended self and partly the professional community of practice. Each teacher retains an essential personal identity; experienced teachers are known for having developed a personal ‘style’ of teaching, but their more collective identity is to belong to a modest and dedicated vocation. There is an undeveloped element in this collective professional identity, what Winch (2014) has categorised as ‘occupational capacity’, meaning the exemplary

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professional is not solely a respected member of the particular group but understands the nature of the whole profession and its place in the social and economic order. This status allows for being critical of the profession but also to be an articulate advocate of the values and value of teaching. This role can be seen as having a truly civic dimension. Whatever the virtues of the teacher unions they are always associated with ‘conditions of service and pay’. The recent emergence of the Chartered College of Teaching and its ‘Chartered teacher’ model (Goodwyn & Cordingley, 2016) could be a way forward for developing a new kind of influential voice for the profession as a whole? The profession of teaching lacks high status in relation to various other professions and it lacks a strong, independent voice, so recruiting the best graduates is difficult. Secondly, for teachers, most status, and certainly most material rewards, are outside the classroom in management and consultancy, widely recognised as a major problem. Thirdly, whereas most powerful professions are comfortable with identifying their exemplary practitioners, teaching simply is not.

Teaching as a Novice Profession? Teaching as a profession is relatively new compared to the Law or Medicine. It is constantly questioned whether an actual teaching qualification is needed? England certainly has a considerable number, probably 5% (Howson, 2020) of unqualified teachers who are ‘practising’ and this is not just in private schools; unthinkable in medicine. My own, amateur, start in teaching was in language schools and a Further Education college, where I was younger than many in my classes and certainly had much longer hair! That haphazard start was followed by an ‘old style’ PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education), i.e. two terms at the university and one in school. I later helped design an early version of the school based model that became established in the 1990s. Even then I was fascinated by the concept of the ‘good’ teacher and the ‘great’ teacher and certainly I wanted to fulfil my classroom potential. I started in a tough Coventry comprehensive (where I met Jane and Joanna) and really struggled initially as I think most beginning teachers necessarily do. It is a key stage to be a novice and find out that you are consciously incompetent and have a huge amount to learn. We are in danger of losing sight of this valuable stage (Goodwyn, 2022a, b, c). My identity then was, as I felt it, a dedicated and professional English teacher, very active in the local branch of my subject association and my union. Very soon (3 years) I was ‘chosen’ to be second in department. Needing a job in London, it seemed after 5 years in the profession that I might at least try for a Head of Department (HoD) role, which I secured and becoming ‘proper’ management, with responsibilities for colleagues, their classrooms and their students. I later learned that, as the youngest Head of Department in the school, the older HoDs nicknamed me ‘sunny boy’ – I like to think this was a mixture of disrespect at my lack of experience with a bit of admiration for my energy and enthusiasm.

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The Road Not Taken As I started my fifth year as a Head of Department, I had sufficient experience to be a good candidate for a more senior position and, like so many teachers, I now had a family and long-term financial commitments. In the mid 1980s, the only real option was to move out of the classroom, probably completely. At this time there was nothing on offer like the Advanced Skills Teacher or the current Lead Practitioner. My current research investigating the emergence of the Lead Practitioner demonstrates that many such roles are really retention oriented although there are other factors (Goodwyn, 2019a, b, c, d, 2022a, b, c). My other options were to go straight for senior management, e.g. Deputy Head in a school, become a Subject Advisor for English for a Local Education Authority or move into Teacher Education. It is indicative that I was interested enough in all three routes to apply for jobs in each domain although working in a university did appeal to me more strongly but I only had a Masters at that time and no PhD – it seemed the longest shot at the time. I was surprised to secure interviews in each domain; the first happened to be to become a PGCE tutor at a ‘good’ university and I was very happy to accept the post.

Who Am I? Teacher? Academic? Researcher? The move into Teacher Education is notoriously difficult and complex for one’s professional identity (Goodwyn, 2011). Most such ‘movers’ experience severe role conflict; this is a field in itself (see Goodwyn, 2022a, b, c). Tutors who come into Higher Education (HE) with many years’ experience in education and dedication to their school students, transfer their focus to their teacher education students for whom they now feel absolutely responsible. They also feel strong internal pressure to model exemplary teaching to their students. However, the external pressures are typically to start that PhD and earn a place in the academic community. My threeyear contract was designed to demand I proved my scholarly worth. This phenomenon is still very much a reality (Goodwyn, 2022a, b, c). For teacher educators, new ones in particular, part of their identity shock is their discovery that Education is seen as a marginal discipline compared to the mature homes of scholarship of the established subjects like Philosophy or History. Simultaneously, the new tutor lost some status as a credible teacher having ascended to the realms of theory and its ethereal distance from practice. I still recall walking down a school corridor in the October of my first year as PGCE English tutor with a Head of English who spoke to me as if the reality of schools and classrooms needed explaining to this alien from a remote planet. I believe the conversation was well intended. She was also sharing a genuine perception that the academics in Education departments were remote from schools and there was some truth in that many, many years ago but the creation of a real partnership model fundamentally revised that view. In my case partnerships with schools and the then ‘new’ school based PGCE

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model were soon established and I had the enjoyable experience of spending hundreds of hours back in the classroom observing my students and almost as many hours in staffrooms talking to teachers about those students but also about life as a teacher. I felt absolutely in touch with schools and teachers for the next 20 years. I have never stopped being a teacher, my identity became extended, not conflicted.

What’s in a Name? Expert or Highly Accomplished? Over 30 years I have been involved in various forms of professional development. One major theme has been perceptions of, and conceptualisations of, ‘expert teaching’. However, teachers do not like the term ‘expert teacher’ and this is not restricted to the UK, it is a phenomenon in many countries. In any group I have worked with on this topic, when presented with a list of titles from various schemes, the only agreement is to reject expert teacher and to prefer a different title although no consensus would emerge. Is this evidence of careful critical thinking? Or is it illustrative of persistent doubt and ambiguity? In my view, it is a ‘bit of both’. My own questioning in an investigative way of what we mean by ‘expert teacher’, started with the subject of English (Goodwyn, 1997). When the first National Curriculum for English was published in 1989, its formative document was the Cox Report (DfE, 1989). The key point for me at the time was that the report identified 5 ‘models of English teaching’ (Goodwyn, 1997) suggesting that all of them were equally valued by teachers – I disagreed. I investigated what teachers actually did value and what mattered for their approach to teaching. (Goodwyn, 1997). It was clear that their priorities would have profound implications for how they would define being a good English teacher. Through a collaboration with some US colleagues, who agreed to repeat my research with American teachers, I came across a brand-new initiative in the USA where a commission was set up that recommended the establishment of a new, independent body to develop a way of identifying and developing teachers and to give them a high level recognition and status. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) was established in 1987 and continues to this day, making it the most enduring body of its kind in global history. The NBPTS designed a model of expert teaching (Highly Accomplished Teacher (HAT)) that required individual teachers to produce a varied portfolio of evidence of their classroom teaching, developed over a year. Passing meant becoming a ‘Board Certified Teacher’ but with no extrinsic reward like a pay increase or a new role, effectively it was simply a new ‘status’. There was a significant fee and no system of funding, almost all teachers paid for themselves. What was the identity of such teachers that led them to take on this challenge with no guarantee of reward? It so happened that a group in the very first cohort of HATs were English Language Arts teachers who had been supported by The University of New Mexico (where I had a connection) over the year they had spent recording and reflecting on

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their practice. I felt a strong wish to meet these pioneering teachers. I was able to contact ten of them and spend a week in New Mexico interviewing them. They had just had their results and five passed and five ‘failed’. The five ‘failures’ all insisted that they did not feel disheartened, just disappointed, and determined to follow the programme again. All ten felt it had been a hugely valuable learning experience and that the programme had been fair and thorough. Not surprisingly, they felt that the teaching profession would benefit from this kind of status and recognition as they all considered teaching undervalued. Their teaching identities and their essential self were tested by this robust challenge and that they emerged stronger and clearer about their strengths but also their urge to strive to be an even better teacher. That experience was a key moment in my own professional identity. It moved my question from ‘can we identify exceptional teachers’ to ‘how can we identify them and when we do, what might be the role (or roles) that such recognition could provide?’

The Advanced Skills Teacher and Teacher Identity Since my interest in expert teaching began to develop in the early 1990s, it has become clear that we now have a global phenomenon; there are differing models in many countries (Goodwyn, 2016). Such models are necessarily specific to a country/ culture but much can be learnt from each model and adapted to enhance another, or very often a new version. The term Advanced Skills Teacher originated in Australia in the 1980s (see Francis-Brophy in Goodwyn, 2016), chiefly as a retention scheme but the term was taken up in England in the mid 1990s and launched as a scheme in 1997. More recently the term Highly Accomplished Teacher has been adopted by Australia as a part of a national strategy. In England the term Chartered teacher was adopted in England after it had ‘failed’ in Scotland. The very choice of ‘Chartered’ is fascinating, evoking as it does a very particular semantic and cultural history. The idea of a Chartered subject expert who is also a teacher, precedes the Advanced Skills Teacher (AST). Chartered Physicist for example originates in 1985 (see Goodwyn, 2016), so why did ‘Advanced Skills Teacher’ seem the best term in 1997? Having examined the Highly Accomplished Teacher development first hand and met its first successful graduates, I was determined to create a local experiment of my own. I secured some modest funding and was able to bring together a group of local, expert teachers of English to design the Advanced Certificate in English teaching (yes, ACE was a smart acronym – the project and its outcomes are written up (Goodwyn, 1997)). The key learning point for me was that such teachers do have deep knowledge of teacher expertise and when that knowledge is surfaced the professional conversation is intense and developmental. I remain clear that this is why teachers must develop their own standards and continuously test them for robustness and relevance. The certificate had just had its first year with a small pilot group when there was the announcement of the new Advanced Skills Teacher in 1997, this initiative simply ‘took over’.

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What did the creation of an AST role actually signify for the profession, what did it ‘mean’ and what about that name ‘Advanced Skills’? No public declaration exists about the choice of name although research may yet reveal it. As mentioned, the term was in active use in Australia and had been for perhaps 20 years? But it was not ‘known’ in England and Wales. It can be associated with the ‘fluency’ concept of expertise as these identified teachers should have all the right skills but at a higher level on the continuum than their colleagues. It is by no means an ideal title but, at present, we have not found a better one; Chartered Teacher is more aligned perhaps with Winch’s (2014) occupational capacity’? In a factual sense the AST was a ‘recognition’, but more importantly a designation; that is, it was a defined role with a purpose and extrinsic reward.

The Significance of the AST Role The role was formally available from 1997 to 2013 (DCSF 2009). The initial reaction was illustrative. A number of newspapers reported on ‘Super Teachers’ (Goodwyn, 2001a, b) and showed cartoons of suitably costumed characters flying in through classroom windows – when the Specialist Teacher Scheme was launched in Norway in 2016, exactly the same phenomenon occurred. I learnt this as a consultant on the programme. Such apparent ‘humour’ is worthy of serious reflection. Would doctors or lawyers get this treatment when appointing their own experts? Even if such professions brought in a new ‘recognition’ it would be treated more seriously. The patronising use of ‘Super Teachers’ is a valuable reminder that the public does take teaching for granted, including its own self-deprecation. Some unions were initially negative, even hostile with some local union branches effectively banning members from applying on the grounds that this was a divisive move. Some head teachers were unhappy with the idea of ‘out-reach’, as an AST might spent a whole day working in another school; it took a number of years for this tension to diminish (see Goodwyn, 2016). There were three small scale evaluations of the AST role, early in its establishment (Taylor & Jennings, 2004; Ofsted, 2001, 2003); all the reports were chiefly favourable. With colleagues, I undertook a major review of the AST role in the period (Fuller et al., 2012). The great majority of that evidence came from ASTs themselves but there were also interviews with local authority advisers and senior leaders in schools. However, there was no systematic attempt made by the Department for Education or Ofsted to monitor the effect of the role or even to gather evidence from the ASTs and senior leaders. There are no accurate reported figures but the estimate is that there were typically about 5000 certified teachers in total in any year; this is perhaps 1% of the workforce. The AST became a highly significant part of the profession’s identity (TDA, 2007); that it was summarily abolished by a neoliberal government is a meaningful act of damage. The General Teaching Council (GTC), a body that was meant to allow teaching to undertake self-regulation (like the General Medical Council), was

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also summarily abolished in 2013. The GTC in England was never popular with teachers but that was because it was inappropriately designed and its mission was flawed. Its summary abolition, however, is part of that pattern of keeping teachers ‘in their place’ – a second tier place. There is just about sufficient evidence to state that the AST role had become strongly established and was universally recognised as credible (partly due to it being externally assessed) but chiefly because it worked and added value. Even the contentious ‘out-reach’ had become securely accepted as benefiting the recipient schools but also the AST’s own development and home school’s improvements. The term had become so sufficiently esteemed that schools would post about their ASTs on their web sites and in promotional material; the public therefore were hearing about expert teachers and their work with a title that had professional integrity and standing. The ASTs themselves were adamant that the role had been ideal for keeping them in their classrooms as an alternative to management, that they were positively challenged by outreach and had developed new skills, were able to improve teaching and learning, especially in advising and developing other teachers. They also recognised that not all teachers respected their status and that head teachers and other senior leaders could be difficult. Although the role was a nationally recognised and formal status, with a unique pay scale and with its own annual conference and local networks, it was never conceptualised as the model for the teaching profession. Its title Advanced Skills, might also be seen as too ‘technical’, not a fluency recognition, as compared to ‘Highly Accomplished’? After summary abolition in 2013 and therefore the overnight demotion of 5000 teachers, the department set up an inevitable expert group/committee to look at an alternative. In summary, the group put forward the notion of the ‘Master Teacher’, to be a recognition without reward and they even proposed a new standard (Goodwyn, 2014, 2015). The term was probably borrowed (no reason was given) from the USA where it is used at state level, the term relating to ‘mastery’, as in the craft tradition, not Masters as in academic level. It is certainly in use in Singapore as one of a number of recognitions used there. However, research at the time (Goodwyn et al., 2020) suggested it had not only no currency but that its patriarchal (Master) connotations were entirely negative. It was one of those initiatives that was never subject to any real consultation and its half-hearted impetus simply evaporated. Therefore, the AST remains the only significant model of expert teaching that has been tried in England and Wales and it certainly had much success, its abolition being an entirely political decision. The title may not be used in state schools – a kind of air brushing of the profession’s history. It might be argued that it was also an economic decision, but the retention issues are now more acute than ever and the endless challenge of retaining and developing the best teachers persists.

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The Chartered College of Teaching (CCT) and the Future of the Profession There is not scope in this chapter to do justice to the CCT, not least because, in policy and historical terms, it is still a new institution (2017). In Dreyfus’ sense, a novice – and novice status is, as in teaching, an entitlement to learn and develop and not to be inappropriately judged. Its mission is summed up as: The Chartered College of Teaching is the professional body for teachers. We are working to celebrate, support and connect teachers to take pride in their profession and provide the best possible education for children and young people. We are dedicated to bridging the gap between practice and research and equipping teachers from the second they enter the classroom with the knowledge and confidence to make the best decisions for their pupils (CTC Website, 2022).

Rather paradoxically this novitiate status is somewhat obfuscated because the Royal Charter granted to the college was technically a transfer of this status from The Royal College of Preceptors who were given this status in 1849. Fundamentally this rather convoluted story illustrates that the ‘new’ college was established in a way designed to gift it some professional status and credibility, to provide it with a mode of gravitas. At least at the symbolic level, this was a strategically good idea, teaching needs all the gravitas it can get and who the Royal College of Preceptors were is of minor relevance. In one way this body replaces The GTC as the advocacy voice for the profession, hence the mission above. However, it is not the ‘regulatory body’ so does not award Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) nor can it determine, in any legal way, the standards for teachers or the nature of Initial Teacher Education. Teachers were required to belong to the GTC as it was their registry and to pay an annual fee; the CCT is an independent body, its governance determined by Royal Charter, and any membership is voluntary. For this chapter, our main focus is its model of expert teaching, which is The Chartered Teacher: • Chartered Status is a professional accreditation that recognises the knowledge, skills and behaviours of highly accomplished teachers and school leaders. (CTC Website, 2022) • There is an interesting echo of the US NBPTS in ‘highly accomplished’. Whilst the CCT was being set up, I was involved in writing the consultation paper about how it should be constituted but especially about the name of its expert teacher model (Goodwyn & Cordingley, 2016). I recommended ‘Chartered Teacher’ (CT) on the grounds of the existing gravitas of the term, chartered, in well-established and high status professions. The CT concept was piloted between 2018 and 2020 and a significantly revised version is now operating, (for details see the CCT web site). It is essentially a fee based, recognition model with the evidence for the accreditation being gathered by the individual teacher and evaluated by the College. Some early research (Goodwyn et al., 2020) suggests the recognition is valued by the participants and, extrinsically, helps with promotion opportunities. The numbers involved

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are extremely small and it will be a considerable time before it will be possible to consider whether the profession is gaining status through the recognition. The development is an interesting contrast to the scale of the ambition of the Scottish Chartered Teacher (Goodwyn, 2016) but that, like the AST, was subject to political abolition. The CCT is perhaps a sounder, ‘acorn’ model for the long term? Meanwhile a very significant development is the emergence of The Lead Practitioner title (there are others) in schools, mostly in Multi Academy Trusts which has some elements of the AST (Goodwyn, 2022a, b, c). Research, using a weekly survey of job advertisements over 2 years pre-pandemic (2018–2020), suggested that 20–30 lead practitioners were being recruited each week and more anecdotal evidence suggests there may now be many thousands of such post holders in England. The Department for Education simply acknowledges the role in its web page on salaries; there is no definition or national recognition, at least, not yet. It seems most unlikely to have any relevance for the status of the profession. The development does demonstrate the vacuum left by abolishing the AST and an informal recognition that schools do need to recognise and deploy their highly accomplished teachers in specialist ways.

Not a Conclusion Almost everyone remembers at least one ‘great teacher’, some remember the particular teacher who deeply affected them and influenced a whole life. Our only proof is that enduring memory. But when we move to how the teaching profession is remembered and valued as a whole, we inevitably have a very much more mixed view. However, we know that doctors and lawyers are regarded in much higher esteem than teachers. I have argued that the collective identity of the teaching profession in part corroborates with its second-tier position in society. Having a properly established, robustly assessed and professionally credible model of expert teaching would not be the magic wand. However, it might be part of a long-term momentum to institutionalise an independent and assertively confident profession whose identity is strong and secure.

References Archer, M. (Ed.). (2010). Conversations about reflexivity. Routledge. Chartered College of Teaching. (2022). Available at: https://chartered.college/. Accessed 01 Nov 2022. DCSF. (2009). Advanced skills teachers. Promoting excellence. DCFS. Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA). DfE. (1989). English for Ages 5-16 [The Cox report]. HMSO. Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1986). Mind over machine. Free Press.

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Fuller, C., Goodwyn, A., & Francis-Brophy, E. (2012). Being an advanced skills teacher: professional identity and status. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 19(4), 463–474. Goodwyn, A. (1997). Developing English teachers. Open University Press. Goodwyn, A. (2001a). Second tier professionals: English teachers in England. L1-Educational. Studies in Language and Literature, 1(2), 149–161. Goodwyn, A. (2001b). Who wants to be a super teacher? The perils and pleasures of recognising expertise in English teaching. English in Australia, 129-130, 39–50. Goodwyn, A. (2004). The professional identity of English teachers in England. English in Australia, 12(1), 122–131. Goodwyn, A. (2010). The expert teacher of English. Routledge. Goodwyn, A. (2011). Becoming an English teacher: Identity, self knowledge and expertise. In J. Davison & J. Moss (Eds.), Debates in English (pp. 18–36). Routledge. Goodwyn, A. (2014, September). Head teachers view of expert teachers; do they see the advanced skills teacher as an innovation benefitting the profession, Paper presented at The British Educational Research Association. University of London. Goodwyn, A. (2015, April). Has the advanced skills teacher role been an advance for the profession? The views of principals and other senior leaders. Paper presented at The American Educational. Goodwyn, A. (2016). Expert teachers: An international perspective. Routledge. Goodwyn, A. (2019a). A voice for advancing the profession of teaching. In J. Wearmouth & A. Goodwyn (Eds.), Student and teacher voice (pp. 123–139). Routledge. Goodwyn, A. (2019b). Adaptive agency: Some surviving and some thriving in interesting times. English Teaching Practice and Critique, 18(2), 21–35. Goodwyn, A. (2019c). English teachers as researchers, from reflecting on practice to researching into practice. The English Magazine (Summer), 24–28. London: NATE. Goodwyn, A. (2019d). From ASTs to leading practitioners: New opportunities for expert teachers of English. The English Magazine (Spring), 26–28. London: NATE. Goodwyn, A. (2022a). Lead practitioners of English and the paradox of new curricular freedoms. In Annual conference of the British educational research association. University of Liverpool. Goodwyn, A. (2022b). The attrition of the expertise of teachers of English: From the rich pedagogy of personal and social agency to the poverty of the powerful knowledge heritage model. In A. Goodwyn, R. Roberts, C. Durrant, W. Sawyer, J. Manuel, D. Zancanella, & E. Scherff (Eds.), International perspectives on English teacher development: From initial teacher education to highly accomplished professional. Routledge. Goodwyn, A. (2022c). Hybrids? When staff become students: Emergent academic identity on professional doctorate programmes. In D. Trotman & L. Saunders (Eds.), Creative resistance: How professional doctorate programmes transform professional identity, knowledge and practice. Cambridge Scholars Press. Goodwyn, A., & Cordingley, P. (2016). The potential of chartered teacher status. Education Today, 66(2), 21–44. Goodwyn, A., Butler, C., Hopkins, N., Lindley, K., Majid, N., & Thompson, C. (2020). An independent evaluation of the chartered College of Teaching pilot ‘chartered teacher’ Programme. The Institute for Research in Education, The University of Bedfordshire. Hattie, J. (2003). Teachers make a difference: What is the research evidence? University of Auckland. Howson, J. (2020). https://www.nasbtt.org.uk/john-howson-how-many-unqualified-teachers-arethere/ Koetze, B. (2014). Differentiating forms of professional expertise. In M. Young & J. Muller (Eds.), Knowledge expertise and the professions (pp. 61–78). Routledge. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. (n.d.). nbpts.org. Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). (2001). Advanced skills teachers: Appointment, deployment and impact. HMI Report.

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Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted). (2003). Advanced skills teachers: A survey. HMI Report. Taylor, C., & Jennings, S. (2004). The work of advanced skills teachers. CfBT. Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). (2007). Professional standards for teachers advanced skills teacher. HMSO. Winch, C. (2014). Know-how and knowledge in the professional curriculum. In M. Young & J. Muller (Eds.), Knowledge, expertise and the professions (pp. 47–60). Routledge.

The Researcher as Inter-disciplinarian: A Reflection on Professional Identity in a Specialised World Neil Hopkins

All things are bound together. All things connect (Jefferson, 2001). –Chief Seattle, c. 1854

Background I have been a senior lecturer and advanced researcher in a ‘widening participation’ university in the East of England for the past 9 years. I have worked in a couple of academic departments that focus on education – one that specialises in teacher education (mainly teaching on qualifications in post-compulsory education in alliance with further education colleges), the other focused on teaching undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in education. Prior to my time in higher education, I worked primarily in adult and further education, mainly in the fields of adult literacy and teacher education (and employed by further education colleges). In terms of research, I have published a couple of books looking at the connections between political philosophy and education that focus on aspects of citizenship and democracy. I have also been published in a range of academic journals including the Journal of Philosophy of Education, the British Educational Research Journal and Modern Psychoanalysis.

Key Questions How do researchers with multidisciplinary interests position themselves in an increasingly specialised academic landscape? Can researchers with a multidisciplinary outlook still find communities of practice in order to develop their own identities? N. Hopkins (✉) University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_3

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Research in Education: A Practice? A Discipline? Neither? In terms of my discipline within the university, it is sometimes seen as something of a ‘mongrel’ entity: one part social sciences, one part humanities and another part best termed ‘miscellaneous’. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has even questioned the notion of teaching as practice in its own right and education as a discrete discipline: The teacher should think of her or himself as a mathematician, a reader of poetry, an historian or whatever, engaged in communicating craft and knowledge . . . It follows that you cannot train teachers well, until they have been educated into whatever discipline it is that they are to transmit. All teaching is for the sake of something else . . . Enquiries into education are an important part of enquiries into the nature and goods of those activities into which we need to be initiated by education (MacIntyre & Dunne, 2002: 5, 9). So, by MacIntyre’s lights, education is always the education of or into something else, an initiation into a tangible or identifiable discipline. One question MacIntyre’s interpretation leaves begging is: ‘What does that mean for us for whom education is the very thing that we are teaching or researching’? I expect a fairly typical response to such questions (from MacIntyre’s perspective) is that you are not teaching or researching education as such but (say) teaching practices as an aspect of psychology or an investigation of a national education system as part of the wider discipline of history or social policy. This might explain why education lends itself easily to interdisciplinary research and why it is often envisaged as a multidisciplinary endeavour – ‘education’ as such is pigment you can mix with a wide variety of base colours to create specific shades or hues but is not itself a base colour. As a person, I tend to move between and across disciplines, whether it be law, psychoanalysis, philosophy, politics, literature, history, the visual arts and often make connections back to the field of education. For example, a few years ago I wrote a journal article with a friend and colleague of mine who is a historian of the early modern period (Hopkins & Coster, 2019). We both have an interest in politics and society around the time of the Civil Wars (1642–1651) in the British Isles. One of my main areas of interest in education is citizenship and citizenship education and both of us view the Levellers (a political group who advocated civil rights and an emerging form of constitutional democracy) as important contributors to the public discourse during this time of conflict and debate. We wanted to explore the concept of political literacy by looking at the popular forms of political communication in the era of the Civil Wars (pamphleteering) and our own contemporary times (digital media). The paper explores the implications for various forms of citizenship education by comparing and contrasting these two periods and the impact the Levellers have had through their demands for political and other rights. This could appear to bear out MacIntyre’s contention above – here is an educationalist working with a historian (who also happens to be an educationalist too) on a piece where education informs aspects of history and politics. Does this make me a researcher on education or one that is exploring history through the lens of

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education? Perhaps I am neither or both? This is the kind of identity questioning that MacIntyre’s view generates for those of us in education. It is therefore with a certain relief that Stefan Collini offers a perspective where such questions might not retain the same resonance. With specific relation to the humanities, he has written: Better thinking . . . often occurs as a result of a sufficiently thoughtful and responsive re-encounter with the ideas of figures long dead, including figures who did not belong to the same discipline, or indeed any discipline (Collini, 2012: 80).

Education tends to be seen as straddling the humanities and social sciences – certainly this is the way I think of it, encompassing a variety of fields within its overall scope and focus. I can certainly identify with Collini’s quote above. Going back to the article I wrote with my colleague on the Levellers and citizenship education, it felt like a genuine engagement across subjects, a dialogue between history and education (with occasional voices from politics and philosophy also making themselves heard). At no time was I aware particularly aware of disciplinary boundaries or that this would even be a concern. It was the meeting of minds that was important – the ability to work with someone with expertise in an area I wanted to learn more about and make connections with.

The Challenges for Interdisciplinary Work Is it a problem if, as Collini contends, some of the best work is done by researching across subjects? Intuitively, I would say ‘no’ because I have seen the benefits of doing so. But the situation is not as straightforward as I, perhaps, am describing it. In the United Kingdom, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a project conducted, usually over a seven-year period, to determine where government funding will be allocated to support national and international research projects. The exercise is a merit-based system in which institutions submit a portfolio of research ‘outputs’ (including case studies) to a panel in each ‘Unit of Assessment’ (UoA). These panels then grade outputs using a star-rating from zero to four to determine a final evaluation for an institution in a given UoA which then decides the government research money allocated to the university concerned in this particular field. The problems occur when research straddles such ‘Units of Assessment’. For example, should the article written on the Levellers and citizenship education be included in UoA 23 (Education) or UoA 28 (History)? Such a concern has been highlighted by the Physiological Society in a report commissioned in the light of REF 2021: Overall, the ‘problem of fit’ to a relatively rigid set of disciplinary-based structures for assessment is acknowledged to have a disincentive effect for interdisciplinary research (The Physiological Society, 2021: 14).

When research is assessed and graded according to strict disciplinary boundaries, and money and time is at stake for future endeavours, there is a danger of work that

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seeks to move beyond such boundaries being sidelined because it does not fit neatly into the parameters of a given method of assessment. Such is the dilemma for those of us who enjoy and see the benefits of interdisciplinary research. Do we stick to our guns and pursue research that is we find rewarding but might not necessarily fit well into the university’s strategy for the upcoming REF or do we, perhaps, sacrifice some of our aims for the betterment of our employer’s future revenue? This question becomes more urgent as universities increasingly gravitate towards a business model in terms of income revenue and research metrics. In fairness to higher education institutions, often this trend has been due to government policy and its demand that HE operates more like a market. Collini, for one, has been highly critical of this move: One of the supposed benefits of treating universities as though they were businesses is that their efficiency can then be measured and improved [. . .] One thing that needs saying [. . .] is that in several important ways universities are now less efficient than they were twenty years ago before the commercial analogy started to be applied in earnest. After all, two of the most important sources of efficiency in intellectual activity are voluntary cooperation and individual autonomy. But these are precisely the kinds of things for which a bureaucratic system leaves little room [emphasis in the original] (Collini 2012: 134).

I am perhaps more fortunate than some of my colleagues in other institutions in that I do have a considerable degree of autonomy (at least at present) over what I can research, including interdisciplinary work. However, this freedom does come with a cost. I have this space largely, in my view, because I am not at a research-intensive university and research is not seen as a priority in my faculty. There are not many genuinely ‘research-active’ colleagues in the field of education at my university, so when it comes to anything like a REF submission (which we have been able to submit in education in both 2014 and 2021), it’s often a case of drawing together work from as many researchers as possible rather than being able to select specific academics who will contribute because there is a plentiful supply of research activity (as is the case in more research-intensive universities). I realise that this is a ‘doubleedged sword’ in a way – I am given the freedom to research and write only because it’s not taken as seriously as it might be within my place of work. Granted, the faculty does at least give me research hours in order to undertake my own projects (and this is not always the case with researchers in comparable universities). But there is also the danger that you can become quite isolated as there is not the same research culture or infrastructure in place to aid you in what you are doing as there might be elsewhere (Russell Group universities, for example). I have felt at times that I am a bit of a ‘lone wolf’, working in relative obscurity and scavenging for partners or funding. I suppose it’s a case of be careful what you wish for: do you want to work in a university where research is a priority but where you might not have significant control over the research you carry out, or do you want to work in a place where research is taken less seriously but where you do, at least, have the space to explore research themes and projects that genuinely interest you.

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The Relationship Between Research and Teaching David Willetts, the former UK Minister for Higher Education, in his book on universities has stated: The British system, with so much research activity in universities, gives students themselves a significant and underestimated role in the balance of our research activity because the distribution of academics partly reflects students’ choices about which subjects to study (Willetts 2017: 113).

My university primarily positions itself as a ‘research-informed’ rather than ‘research-intensive’ institution and the recruitment of undergraduates is seen as key to the financial health of the organisation. My identity is probably as much a ‘teacher’ as ‘researcher’ because of the dual role that I have. More of my time, in terms of my workplanning, is dedicated to teaching on undergraduate and postgraduate degrees than it is on actual research. I suspect this is the case with most researchers in schools or faculties of education at similar universities. The combination of teaching and research I see as a benefit for me in terms of the relationship between theory and practice (this is especially useful when the field itself is education). It also enables me to share what I have studied and written with students to gauge its usefulness and give them potentially new insight into what we are discussing. The fact that I want my research to inform my teaching also places an onus on it being accessible. I have said elsewhere: Academics are writers, whether they consider themselves to be or not – if the concepts they use are confused and ill-defined or the sentences full of clotted grammar and pretentious terminology, then it’s likely the thinking behind them could be at fault as well. Simplicity of prose is hard to achieve (especially when the ideas themselves are difficult to pin down and express) but makes for a stronger piece of work that is more likely to be read properly (rather than just skimmed for a reference) (Hopkins, 2022).

Where disciplinary boundaries are being crossed, the need to make the work intelligible to people in the different fields (including students) is an important factor. This is a difficult balance for me as both a researcher and a teacher. I don’t want to over-simplify the work and compromise what has been said by myself and others. On the other hand, if what I am saying cannot be engaged with by those scholars in those disciplines I am trying to appeal to, then my work will not gain the readership that I hope it will. The specialisation of language and expression that is symptomatic of contemporary studies in the various disciplines makes it challenging for those of us who often choose to operate on the boundaries and intersections of particular subjects. If I write an article on aspects of education that encompasses philosophy and psychology (say), there is often that nagging doubt of there not being enough philosophy or psychology to satisfy the peer reviewers who have an interest in either the philosophy or psychology of education or that what I have written does not explore that particular aspect of the paper deeply enough. I have sometimes had interactions with journal or conference reviewers where this very situation has come up in the dialogue: ‘We like what you have written . . . but it doesn’t go far enough in

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its analysis of [fill in the disciplinary blank] to be accepted as an article or conference presentation’. I don’t want this to come across as a gripe – I respect those reviewers and their opinions. They have important functions to fulfil in the academic process and very often do them without any financial incentive and squeezed into already busy working lives. But it does illuminate some of the hurdles that interdisciplinary study encounters as part of the being in the world of higher education and competitive research cultures.

Communities of Practice for the Interdisciplinary Researcher Fortunately, the outlook for interdisciplinary research is by no means full of clouds – there are passages of sunlight to give encouragement as well. The very fact that my colleague and I got our paper on citizenship education and the Civil Wars published in a reputable journal is obviously a positive. Another recent positive outcome occurred for me and another friend and colleague who now works in the National Health Service after a stretch of time as an academic in my own university. We are both educationalists who share an interest in psychoanalysis (both in terms of clinical practice and how it is used as a theoretical framework in many other disciplines). Our mutual interest might have something to do with Freud’s famous allotment of education and psychoanalysis as ‘impossible professions . . . even before you begin, you can be sure you will fall short of complete success’ (Freud, 1937: 467). From our online conversations during the 2020/2021 Covid-19 lockdowns, we began to explore potential connections between classroom talk (in the form of dialogic learning) in education and something called the ‘analytic third’ in psychoanalysis. According to Thomas Ogden, a key theorist regarding this concept: This third subjectivity, the intersubjective analytic third, is the product of a unique dialectic generated by/between the separate subjectivities of analyst and analysand within the analytic setting (Ogden, 2004: 169).

Our contention was that there is a sense of ‘co-creation’ in both the classroom and the analytic setting. Through the use of dialogue and interpretation, an entity (call it ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’) evolves as part of the interaction, created by both parties (student and teacher, analyst and analysand) in the midst of their communication. Although there are differences in terms of the aims and context of these professional situations, we used educational and psychoanalytic theory and practice to argue that there are discernible connections between both enterprises in how meaning is formed and shared through challenge and exchange. This discussion between us eventually evolved into a paper, ‘The (Co)Creation of Shared Meaning: An interdisciplinary discussion ‘between’ dialogic learning and the analytic third’ (Hopkins & Mathew, 2022). However, the interdisciplinary nature of the paper did cause us initial difficulties when it came to finding a journal willing to publish the article. We decided to submit to psychoanalytic journals that we thought were open to interdisciplinary research but were politely rebuffed on the grounds that

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our work was not psychoanalytic enough – a familiar problem as I have already recounted in this chapter. Fortunately, this summer the editor of a respected psychoanalytical journal based in New York contacted us to say that the editorial panel enjoyed reading the paper and were willing to publish it in a forthcoming issue. There is also an interesting and positive post-script to the submission being accepted. The editor arranged for a Zoom meeting with both of us. I thought this was a courtesy call (unusual itself regarding journal publication – it was not something I’ve experienced before). However, during the meeting, the editor spoke of his belief in the need for psychoanalysis to work more closely with other professions and how our article had struck a chord with what he and colleagues in the institute connected to his journal thought was the way forward in terms of future practice. To quote Otto Kernberg, a key thinker in psychoanalytic education (beside many other areas of the profession): [there is] the generally growing conviction within the psychoanalytic community at large that a major rapprochement with the university is essential for the future of psychoanalysis [emphasis in the original] (Kernberg, 2011: 92).

‘Communities of practice’ has almost become a cliché since the time Lave and Wenger (1991) popularised the term in relation to professional collaboration and knowledge-sharing; it is sometimes used almost unthinkingly in academic circles, such is the traction the phrase has gained in universities and elsewhere. But I think the idea still has a resonance, especially when mentioning the circumstances just related, where people from different backgrounds and professional stances have a desire to meet and work together on a mutual set of interests. It’s in these groups and communities, I suspect, where much of the unseen but productive work occurs around interdisciplinary research. That’s certainly been the case with me although I’ve tended to work in informal rather than more formal networks such as the British Educational Research Association (BERA). This is not to dismiss formal communities of practice, however. They often provide an invaluable foundation of support and contact to enable people from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to come together and share ideas. From such groups often comes important findings in interdisciplinary knowledge.

My Own Practice as an Interdisciplinary Researcher So why do I prefer more informal contacts and networks? I suspect I am not a particularly good ‘joiner’ of formal groups – I tend to get anxious at the thought of committees and meetings and the responsibilities that go with these. I probably work best on the periphery of such entities (to adapt Lave and Wenger’s concept). When I think of those scholarly associations I have joined over the years, my habit is to get involved but not too involved – I make connections with individual members but lay low when mention is made of leading a group or submitting my name as a candidate for the executive. It’s in these informal networks with specific colleagues and friends

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where I work best – we have a shared interest that we want to explore or go into more detail over. In fact, I’ve come to see interdisciplinary research with the colleagues I’ve worked with as a form of friendship. The words of the twentieth-century English poet Donald Davie come to mind in his poem, ‘To a Brother in the Mystery’: How you cut stone, my emulous hard gaze Has got to know you as I know the stone Where none but chisels talk for us . . . (Davie, 2002: 118).

There is something about working closely on a piece of work from the seeds of an initial idea, through the research and writing process, to the editing and submission for publication that replicates the ebb and flow of personal relationships in other areas of life. I have experienced pleasure, frustration, the need for space, and excitement (alongside many other emotions) as part of the collaborative writing experience. Because I am often working with someone from another discipline besides education or at least with a strong interest in fields other than education, I genuinely learn something from the exchange (and I hope they do too). I think this is probably how I come to work with those people I end up collaborating with – there is an intuitive selection (on my part at least) of writers whose work I am interested in but also of who they are as people. It takes a certain degree of patience and tolerance to put together a text that is coming from a variety of angles. People invariably have different writing styles and tones of voice, especially if they have been used to writing using particular registers or formats associated with certain disciplinary expectations – there needs to be a willingness on each part to work together to achieve some form of coherence. This is often one of the hardest parts of any interdisciplinary writing I have done collaboratively, the tension between a consistent approach and the space for some form of individuality. It takes a lot of patience, discussion and labour to achieve a sense of equilibrium between these different factors. I suppose, for me, the interest in interdisciplinary studies is due to the fact that I have a ‘magpie’ mind, looking for pieces of glitter from a variety of gardens. I tend to move between and across disciplines, looking at a law review article which then leads me to a modernist poem that reminds me to refer back to a psychoanalytic clinical paper I was trying to relate to an article on classroom practice (not forgetting a leisurely flick through a Rothko exhibition catalogue in the meantime). John Dewey stated that ‘all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance’ (Dewey, 2007: 113). Interdisciplinary research is such an adventure – you don’t know quite how the different fields are going to coalesce until you actually start the research, even if you think you have a sound working premise to begin with. Equally, you have little to lean back on when things become difficult or awkward – you are in danger of falling between the proverbial two stools with neither offering you sufficient support. This is the risk that comes with any interdisciplinary thinking. But with the risk does come a sort of freedom – if I may mix metaphors, it’s a bit like creating a recipe from ingredients you haven’t tried

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before. You think they might go together but until you actually do the necessary slicing and boiling, you can’t be quite sure. This was certainly true of the paper on dialogic learning and the analytic third (Hopkins & Mathew, 2022). These are concepts that are hard to pin down (particularly the analytic third) even within the host disciplines of education and psychoanalysis. By then trying to explore where these terms have links across the two professions was eliciting the risk of notionally tying together ideas that were not even fully accepted within the field. Indeed, some of the feedback we received during peer review from psychoanalytic journals was making points in this regard. This is, to some extent, the push-and-shove of academic critique – people are protecting their disciplinary and theoretical boundaries from encroachment by those they perceive as less knowledgeable or deeply immersed in the realm of enquiry. But it could also be the fact that it sometimes takes the comparison and exchange that occurs across particular disciplines to help clarify the definition or use of a key term. This can be difficult for those academics who are steeped in their disciplinary histories and practices to acknowledge – it can often take ‘outsiders’ to push that part of the debate along. This is not meant as a criticism of those academics – I’m offering an example of where interdisciplinary research can have a purpose and benefit to each discipline under discussion. The magpie is not about theft only – it does bring new things to its chosen habitats.

Conclusion What I hope to have shown in this chapter are the prospects and benefits of research from the interdisciplinary perspective. It is true that with the pressure to find ‘new’ knowledge, there is often a tendency in higher education to focus on specialisation in the hope that mining deeper will retrieve the sought-after nuggets of insight. Certainly, exercises like the UK’s Research Excellence Framework have raised serious concerns in the academic community regarding the push towards disciplinary research at the expense of work that prefers to investigate knowledge and information across disciplinary borders. However, there does appear to be a greater acknowledgement of the importance of interdisciplinary research in recent years. It is encouraging to see funding agencies explicitly asking for interdisciplinary projects and bids when they put out calls for applications. There is also a trend towards accepting more interdisciplinary work in specialised academic journals as well as the creation of journals that specifically aim at research that encompasses a range of disciplines. As I have said earlier on, my gravitation towards interdisciplinary work is borne out of personal interests. Although I would describe myself as an educationalist (if pressed on what I would term as my research identity), this doesn’t begin to cover what interest me or the writing I have done in my career in higher education. I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with a range of people on a variety of projects that have straddled disciplines and professions. It is not saying too much to state that these partnerships are a significant factor in my identity as a writer and researcher – I

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have personally learnt a great deal by working closely with colleagues. Such partnerships are also able to shine a light into a field of study that might not have been considered in that way before – they offer a different angle on an issue or theme that can enrich the disciplines under discussion. That, ultimately, is why interdisciplinary research continues to excite me and why I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit within higher education.

References Collini, S. (2012). What are universities for? Penguin. Davie, D. (2002). To a Brother in the Mystery [1961]. In Neil Powell (Ed.), Collected Poems. Carcanet. Dewey, J. (2007 [1916]). Democracy and education. Echo Library. Freud, S. (1937 [2002]). Analysis terminable and interminable. In Wild analysis (A. Bance, Trans.). Penguin [electronic book]. Hopkins, N. (2022). Orwell: On writing clearly [PESGB Blog]. Available at: https://www. philosophy-of-education.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/NHopkins-Orwell-%5E0-WritingClearly.pdf. Accessed 3 Oct 2022. Hopkins, N., & Coster, W. (2019). The Levellers, political literacy and the contemporary citizenship curriculum in England. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 14(1), 68–81. Hopkins, N., & Mathew, D. (2022). The (co)creation of shared meaning: An interdisciplinary discussion ‘between’ dialogic learning and the analytic third. Modern Psychoanalysis, 46(2), 167–186. Jefferson, W. (2001). The world of Chief Seattle: How can one sell the air? Native Voices Book Publishing Company. Kernberg, O. (2011). Psychoanalysis and the university: A difficult relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 92, 609–622. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. MacIntyre, A., & Dunne, J. (2002). Alasdair MacIntyre on education: In dialogue with Joseph Dunne. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 36(1), 1–19. Ogden, T. (2004). The analytic third: Implications for psychoanalytic theory and technique (pp. 167–195). Psychoanalytic Quarterly. The Physiological Society. (2021). The future of interdisciplinary research beyond REF 2021 [online]. Available at: https://static.physoc.org/app/uploads/2021/11/03154159/Interdisciplin ary-research-and-REF-report_WEB.pdf. Accessed 26 Sep 2022. Willetts, D. (2017). A university education. Oxford University Press.

Identity and Leadership in Education Darren Bourne

Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. –Alain Badiou

Background Starting out in Sound Design and Music Production, a creative career that continues to this day alongside research and consultancy projects, I have been a senior leader in a post-16 Further and Higher Education provider for over 20 years now, having begun the education side of my work-life teaching Sound and Music Technology at degree level. My EdD thesis explored private enterprise in FE and provided an opportunity to become familiar with the philosophy of Alain Badiou. I have recently completed a chapter in a book celebrating the work of contemporary theatre company Bodies in Flight, having taken on the role of sound designer on three of their shows in the 1990s. This chapter will explore the complex of inter-relationships between leadership and professional identity in education, drawing on my own professional experience and set against the backdrop of multiple contradictions seemingly exposed through the Covid-19 pandemic. I will argue that Alain Badiou offers a way in to the investigation of leadership identity through his notion of the subject, to which he ascribes a particular meaning and a figure he distinguishes from our everyday existence as ‘human animals’. I will use his view of subjecthood, understood here as a mode of agency, to help draw out a fresh approach to thinking leadership, guided by the following questions.

D. Bourne (✉) Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_4

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Key Questions Which aspects of professional identity are peculiar to the leadership role? How has the pandemic impacted how we understand leadership identity in education? What can the work of Alain Badiou offer education, even though he is nearly invisible in the education literatures?

Leadership Identity in Tension Identity can be understood as relating to being perceived as ‘professional’, both from the outside but also from the inside as a felt internal sense or confidence. In education, the development of professional identity has been more often explored at the sharp end of classroom practice (e.g. Beijaard et al., 2004) but is no less critical at the leadership level. The issues are different, partly because leaders are facilitators of organisational change. As such, leaders are apt to provoke negative perceptions, often attached to their identity, a somewhat unconscious response to the discomfort that can often accompany larger-scale change. Of course, this assumes that change is a core concern for leaders, but the theme of change plays an important part in the argument of this chapter. It is perhaps worth reflecting that change is at the heart of education at all levels, as evidenced through numerous spontaneous testimonies – often years later – of individuals’ claims to a changed life, seen as resulting directly from their educational experiences. So, leaders in education need the capability to work with change, which in turn implies a degree of agency. Teachers demonstrate agency in the classroom too, arguably necessary to exercise the freedom and creativity needed to encourage the process of change they see the potential for in their students or pupils (Thompson, 2018:17). Education leaders have a somewhat problematic association with agency, though, because they themselves can be at the root of tensions around constraints in agency deeper in the organisation. Leaders may even worry about agency, perhaps fearing that those led might exercise their agency in choosing not to follow, even though that same agency could equally well manifest in deciding to be led. Of course, leaders are also followers, both within and outside of their institutions. They must also exercise a degree of intrapersonal agency, to cultivate their own sense of professional identity. The interrelationships between identity, agency and leadership are patently not straightforward and sometimes in conflict.

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Education During the Covid-19 Pandemic Similar interrelationships and incongruities are evident on a more global scale, especially more recently. Relevant to the time of writing, during the Covid-19 pandemic we have witnessed some extraordinary feats of bureaucracy, albeit set against perhaps equally astonishing blunders. The deployment of millions of vaccinations within weeks is clearly impressive, records for which are now stored in our NHS mobile app for travel abroad. Such a speedy distribution at scale relied on high levels of compliance, a lack of agency in some senses at some levels. As these far-reaching and striking global moves played out, at a local level within my own provision it quickly became clear that our learning delivery was not going to run smoothly by employing an overly top-down style of leadership. Sudden and radical external shifts called for a more dialogical approach to negotiate the intricacies and novelty of the situation. A decentred decision-making process was found to be more effective, to take account of the human and messy nature of the educational endeavour within an unusually unstable setting. The provision had been challenging enough to hold together in more usual times, when not hurtling at such unprecedented speed, but the swing over to online learning virtually overnight will no doubt remain with those involved in making it happen for a long time to come. Landing full-time in the virtual classroom brought fresh challenges, even though online learning was not so new in and of itself. The pre-pandemic organisational policy infrastructure had been built up with care over time but many of the familiar guidelines and ways of working now no longer applied or needed updating or replacing. As a likely near-universal illustration, the laws of physics do not permit a physical teaching space to disappear suddenly and unexpectedly, but online, cameras or microphones can easily be turned off, creating just that impossible event. We now know this eventuality can be unintentional or not, perhaps through operator error, a computer malfunction or loss of internet connection, but we also know it can be a critical and frustrating issue for both students and staff. New policies and guidelines had to be developed on-the-fly to legislate for such common problems in this new world. Early debates centred on whether visual participation with a webcam should be compulsory and, if so, whether that rule applied to all time in class regardless of the learning activities. The new phenomenon of parents, siblings or pets descending on sessions, whether deliberate or not, also needed swift bolt-on legislation. It became apparent too how differently students interacted using the chat function on Teams, which called for further sticking-plaster regulation. As well as new policies, we found ourselves in need of different data to guide our sense of what a new ‘good’ might look like. For instance, a decision had to be made what constituted attendance in an online session, especially if cameras, microphones, or even both were not working. New data points like chat logs, view counts and downloads became essential indicators, amongst a whole host of other back-end metrics made available through drip-feed by software companies, who were also

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responding as best they could when they saw their software tools being pushed into unusual modes of service at record levels of volume. The above recollections are no doubt recognisable to many across the planet as many educators continued working during the various levels of lockdown. Previously, time-tested reliable data points and mature policies had been a vital support, whether it was in the classroom, student support, technical services, management, and so on. The pre-pandemic, relatively smooth functioning of learning, at least for much of the time, meant that people were able to relax their agency to a greater or lesser degree and to allow the organisation to help achieve things for them. This was generally a good thing because it freed up energy to be applied elsewhere. Working life has shifted, though. One key indicator of this transformation is in my own organisation where offsite working remains part of workforce deployment, which would have been unthinkable prior to 2020. At the time of writing, the pandemic appears to have made working life markedly more reactive and responsive, making thinking in the moment more frequently necessary. This is a point for further comment, and we will return to thinking, a central theme in Badiou’s work, later.

Leadership Incongruities Exposed Outlined briefly above are some of the ways in which Covid-19 seems to have exposed some of the workings of what was previously taken for granted, with both positive as well as negative consequences. Similarly, at least for me, the pandemic has uncovered aspects of my own professional identity, even though on reflection some of the more hidden mechanisms have perhaps been there all along. One area thus revealed relates to agency and a sense of control. I may be unusual in this, but I have often found myself wondering how much control I really have in my leadership role. Although quite possibly my particular variant of imposter syndrome, I am interested whether this is a question more generally for other leaders and managers in education. Of course, this may also relate to my preferred approach. Rather than viewing teacher agency as something to treat with caution, my preferred perspective is that of needing teachers to exercise a high degree of agency, thereby enabling me to focus on allowing or creating a space for teachers to excel as much as possible, at least as an aspiration. The 1960’s formulation of this executive dichotomy was the ‘Theory X, Theory Y’ model (McGregor, 2006). In this view, Theory X cast personnel as fundamentally effort-averse with low inherent motivation and who needed ongoing cajoling into productive work. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Theory Y described individuals with abundant initiative, who simply needed to be left alone and given space to shine. Even this original perspective suggested links between motivation, agency and identity but this simple X-Y explanation has been extended further over the years. There is now general agreement that real work situations are more likely a combination of the two, or maybe more, opposing factions (Morse & Lorsch, 1970). Motivation is now understood to be less fixed and more of a fluid category, which

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certainly reflects my own experience, where productive outcomes depend on the person or team I am relating to, at a particular time and in a specific circumstance. Paraphrasing Badiou, difference appears to be, quite simply, what there is (Badiou, 2002:25). We can, and perhaps should, question the usefulness of theory in real situations. This is especially true in light of our pandemic experiences, which have left us with a more-or-less continual need to rethink what we previously believed to be stable. The emerging situation is clearly complex. During the pandemic we saw a shift towards bureaucracy to achieve extraordinary outcomes in a highly uncertain context. However, at the same time, there was an apparent complementary movement down into detail, into difference, with perhaps a swing towards a reinvigoration of a place for agency. This double move was not so straightforward, though. For many, perhaps most, the period of the pandemic brought numerous serious personal and professional challenges that made it difficult to engage consistently in work. Furlough and lockdown became new common terms and working life changed radically during the imposed restrictions, perhaps settling into a new locus of work activity at home, and maybe even involving simultaneous home schooling. For some education professionals, working from home meant their kitchen table being pushed into service as a classroom or site for pastoral meetings with students for part of the day. Governments have since become nervous about gaps in learning (Department for Education, 2021) and negative impact on the development of our younger generation, the future workforce, adding a layer of ethical pressure to an already compromised situation for those involved in teaching. It is difficult to see how to best navigate this extraordinarily complex context, especially bereft of some of our trusted pre-pandemic touchpoints. At an organisational level, the virus has exposed some of the previously hidden edges inside the systems we work within. We have spotted institutional strengths we had not noticed before but previously unseen weaknesses have also become apparent. Education at scale is hard to imagine outside of institution and to a large extent, at least in the short term, we must probably work within what we have. If the organisational infrastructure has been stretched and our organisations are bent out of shape, it becomes important what sense we now make of the places we work in. Although it has been the case for some time that our institutions possess ‘legal person’ status (Fox, 1996), in some senses organisations operate as persons in themselves in other more recognisable ways. Organisations can exhibit uncannily human qualities, like jealousy, anger, compassion, care and so on, often at variance with the company statement of mission or values. If organisations can act like persons, things are clearly not quite what they seem, especially when we work within these ‘persons’. Individually, from our own inner-world perspective, we know that being a person is actually not so straightforward; often things don’t fit together as neatly as we might wish. Psychoanalysis explores how we each incorporate and negotiate the various drives, impulses, thoughts, emotions, and feelings – often in conflict – that constitute our internal world, further compounded in interaction and relationship with others. In a similar way, organisational interactions are characterised by complex approaches, needs, agendas and strategies, sometimes

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deliberately obscured to, or by, other parties. There are often multiple stakeholders, thereby piling on further levels of complication, layers that sometimes seem to operate independently of each other, whether in consort or in conflict. So, perhaps one way of viewing leadership, a working definition, is that which enables navigation of this complex territory. If navigation really is a fitting metaphor, I would argue that the thinking of Badiou could be employed as our North Star.

Why Badiou? To me, the work of contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou is rich in possibilities but is also far from a comfortable choice. His writing is enigmatic and easy to misread or misunderstand. Given the problematic nature of theory when viewed from within real situations, it is easy to challenge the use of the work of a theorist, especially one rarely referenced in education thus far. It is only fair to query what such an idiosyncratic exploration might yield. In response, I would argue that Badiou is well-suited to the exploration of complex situations, even though his work is itself complex and often difficult. Any outline of his thinking in the space we have here is a necessarily brief and partial survey, but I hope I can convey a flavour of why I believe his approach holds promise, even tantalisingly. Firstly, and with a practical, observational bias, my own engagement with his philosophical system over an extended period has transformed how I experience myself professionally, a shift over time that is simultaneously radical and subtle. Refusing to deliver a confidence born from well-defined contours, our metaphorical North Star, Badiou’s work is nonetheless an orientation, an approach with an obscure promise to have been proven true at a point in the future. We will see why that is, later on. Noted already, Badiou is only minimally visible in the educational academic literature, likely because he has written very little explicitly about education, perhaps surprisingly, given his prolific output and his own academic standing. A rather gnomic and opaque summary statement, often quoted by educational researchers looking for a foothold in Badiou’s work, is that ‘education’ (save in its oppressive or perverted expressions) has never meant anything but this: to arrange the forms of knowledge in such a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them” (Badiou, 2005b:9). This headline clearly needs some unpacking. Some have argued grandly that Badiou’s thinking reconciles the two overarching orientations in Western philosophy, analytic and continental (Norris, 2014). Again grandly, he may also provide a new approach to the long-standing philosophical problem of free will. Noting the problematic nature of the contemporary idea of freedom, he has claimed that, ‘Today, the concept of freedom contains no immediate value for seizing because it is ensnared in liberalism, in the doctrine of parliamentary and commercial freedoms’ (Badiou, 2008:173). Whilst evidently contemporary, Badiou draws strongly on Plato’s work, a move notably distinct from many modern philosophers, which he believes is based on the obvious ubiquity of change,

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rendering Platonic changelessness odd, or perhaps naïve (Badiou, 2013). Strangely, even Badiou himself would probably agree that in some ways theory or philosophy has little to offer our investigation. There thus remains a clear question why we would look to philosophy to illuminate education at all, and why focus on Badiou specifically. There are two main strands to help respond to this charge. Firstly, Plato’s Republic contains the germ of a coherent thinking of education at the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition. Although this may seem distant and therefore with little importance to concerns of today, it is worth reflecting on the continued relevance of these early ideas. For example, the basis of the tripartite system of education that underpinned post-war British schooling is based on Plato’s view of an ideal society expounded in his Republic, which divides the populace into gold, silver and iron ‘types’. Pupils were to attend different education settings depending on their interests and capabilities across grammar, technical or secondary schools. Whilst controversial and never fully realised as envisioned, this perspective is still live today to an extent, contributing to contemporary debates around vocational approaches (Jones, 2016). The other aspect of why philosophy might be a useful triangulation point for education after all is Badiou’s approach to philosophy itself and what he claims it is able to achieve. Philosophy comes with expectations that may turn out to be unfounded and should perhaps therefore be applied in new ways. Badiou argues in his Manifesto for Philosophy that the role of philosophy is to comment on what happens after the fact, rather than being an agential force in and of itself. Puzzlingly, then, Badiou – the philosopher – himself relegates the status of philosophy. In denying philosophy agency, he also proposed a new notion of ‘anti-philosopher’, including the likes of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Lacan (Badiou, 1999). Briefly picking up on the theme of change, if education is the field of (human) learning, then it makes sense for the domain of education to be capable of itself learning. Whilst this problematically lends personhood to the venture of education, it seems sensible that the field would need to be able to change in order to remain in step with the context in which it exists. Looking from the other direction, and more politically, education can (and perhaps should) also impact its own context, so the relationship is a dialectical one. Taking this idea a little further and applying it to our knotty dialogue between leadership and agency, and in fact agency in education in general, if a teacher finds themselves lacking in agency for whatever external reason, through multiple stakeholder influences on their role – perhaps overbearing management, the ‘terrors of performativity’ (Ball, 2003), awarding body requirements, organisational business need, and so on – the challenge could itself be interpreted as an educational problem. Cross-cutting this already complex dual dynamic is the additional psychoanalytical tension between the external stimuli and the teacher’s internal world. To help begin to make sense of all these pieces we will need Badiou, but first we must return to the early years of Western philosophy. When Plato proposed his version of effective education within his ideal Republic, he was pointing to the idea that if all citizens had the correct internal organisation or approach, they would

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naturally play a positive part in the overall machinery of their community. Of course, the difficulty for Plato was in deciding what that ‘correct’ approach should be. It was not obvious what people would need to know or be able to do to interact with others and contribute positively to the public sphere. Furthermore, even if it were clear what those core knowledge and skills needed to be, the problem of how those attributes might be instilled in every one of the population remained. At least the overarching aim of education was clear to Plato’s Socrates, ‘for the object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful’ (Plato, 2007:128). In terms of leadership, and still linked to education, the early Greek questions were similar to those of today, despite arising within such a different milieu. For Plato, the very function of a leader was somehow out of sorts in an ideal world consisting of well-educated individuals. Citizens were effectively self-sufficient as a result of their inner make-up. Individuals were immanently enabled to interact optimally and to build a functioning community from the ground up. Plato therefore proposed that a ‘Philosopher King’, ‘who is sovereign over himself’ (Plato, 2007:352), should lead. This was someone who had no particular desire for the status of leader, but who led out of duty, being the best person for the job, themselves fully educated in the art of leadership (Ibid., Part VIII). Plato’s Philosopher King did not lead by instructing people what to do, but by ensuring that everyone had the inherent qualities to enable the best possible cooperation. In many ways this vision resonates with more contemporary notions of deep democracy (Green, 1999), as well as the work of Badiou, unsurprisingly, given his status of self-proclaimed Platonist (Badiou, 2013:12). In fact, Badiou has even undertaken his own modern translation of the Republic (Badiou, 2012).

Alain Badiou in Brief With the essential background sketched out, we can now turn squarely to Badiou. The above dilemma around how a state relates to its population is at the heart of Badiou’s output. His first major large-scale philosophical work was Being and Event (Badiou, 2005a), which outlined the conflict, difficulty or contradiction between an ongoing state of being and the interruption of that being by something that happens. Badiou defined being and event as unavailable to each other, such that being is unable to describe what happens, but equally what happens sits outside of what is. For Badiou, an event is completely and radically outside of any particular situation, a situation that prior to an event cannot possibly describe an event yet to happen, because it has no words to name it. An event is outside of the lexicon but inside of the situation as a ‘monster’ (Badiou, 2013:19), something impossible, an excrescence. As an important side-note, Badiou, whose father was a mathematics professor, deployed mathematical set theory to illustrate his famous and controversial claim that, ‘mathematics is ontology’ (Badiou, 2005a:4, original emphasis). Skipping over

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the underpinning technicalities for the purposes of this chapter, for now we can simply think of Badiou’s being as an existing stable state, as opposed to his event. Badiou’s event has two key characteristics; an event happens by chance and is rare. To highlight these qualities, he has used the metaphor of a volcano (Badiou, 2013:110). In following along this far, some readers may already be trying out Badiou’s being-event lens to cast the Covid-19 pandemic as an event. Surely, the coronavirus sweeping across the globe is an evident interruption of the stable state. Actually, no. Badiou has denied the pandemic evental status, demonstrating the subtlety and sometimes counter-intuitive nature of his thinking (Badiou, 2020). He does allow the status of event to, for example, the discovery of zero in Mathematics, which was absent from ancient Greek thought (Badiou, 2013), the breaking away from classical tonality in Music in the early twentieth century by Schoenberg (Badiou, 2005a, b), and the French Revolution in Politics (Badiou, 2005a). Closer to home, forging a link with psychoanalysis – Jacques Lacan was one of Badiou’s teachers – the event of falling in love is a more universal experience, but for many retains a rarity at the individual level (Badiou & Tarby, 2013). The root of my argument is that this fundamental being-event contradiction bears a relationship to our thorny problem of leadership and agency in education, perhaps in a milder form, by viewing each educational establishment as a sort of ‘mini-state’, a stable ‘state of the situation’ (Badiou, 2005a:99). However, to better appreciate this parallel, we will need to grasp what Badiou means by his use of the term ‘subject’ and how that relates to the notion of agency and, in turn, professional identity. Although a true event – as a ‘monster’ – should not exist, whilst rare, it does exist, at least momentarily. Within an evental situation, someone, or perhaps a group of people, becomes subject to the truth of that event. I maintain that we can claim a link between agency and subjecthood in the specific sense of Badiou’s subject. Complete agency implies an agent who is totally free to act, somehow existing outside of the strictures of the situation they operate within; their freedom is key to their agency. In a similar way, Badiou’s subject is also in some sense free from the strictures of the situation they find themselves in. The subject responds to the chance happening of the often vanishingly short-lived event by helping to bring a new situation into being, a successor to the ‘state of the situation’. This new situation is built piece-bypiece in ‘faith’ to the event, which is likely no longer in existence at the time of this process of building, and so cannot be brought to bear as justification for any actions in any tangible way. Time and again, common words are pushed into service in Badiou’s philosophy, taking on particular ‘re-meanings’ in the process, remembering these words are also in translation from the original French. This is one of the stumbling blocks in engaging with his work and we need to take great care to avoid falling foul of misunderstanding critical points. His writing forces us to really think, which is itself, at best, surely an aim of effective education more generally too. For example, whilst Badiou himself claims to have no religious leanings, he exemplifies subjecthood through the prophet Paul in the Bible, unpacking his own approach to the word ‘faith’ over 111 pages (Badiou & Brassier, 2003). One of only a handful of academic papers to date that have used Badiou in the educational context focused on this

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notion of faith through the Greek word ‘pistis’, which was argued to be more appropriately rendered as ‘conviction’ (Strhan, 2010). Whilst Paul might exemplify subjecthood as a notable individual, Badiou’s subject can be singular or collective. Importantly, anyone can be subject to a truth; of no particular privilege, class, occupation, or ability. A subject to a truth does not have to be, and is often not, a leader – the CEO or principal perhaps. The subject is anyone. The event is always a chance occurrence, although Badiou has explained that the event is more likely in a context characterised by instability (Badiou, 2005a), so the ‘anyone’ who is subject to a truth is often someone at the inherently unstable fringes of a community or a situation. Those at the periphery have, by definition, more freedom in the sense that they are less tightly bound by the rules, not abiding so strongly within the ‘encyclopaedia of the situation’ (Badiou, 2005a:327). Following this thread, Badiou provides a helpful dimension to our leadership identity-agency incongruity. Oddly, Badiou’s analysis suggests that our focus on the leader within a situation, our looking to them for answers, is misplaced. Rather, the solution potential, the possible ways out of the stuckness of a situation, the freedom to act, may well come from the fringes, even from a voice that had previously been suppressed. In this way, Badiou expounds a radical equality. At base there is only difference: ‘A main characteristic of my philosophy is that it doesn’t see ‘the other’ as a problem. Alterity is what there is. Everything is different from everything else, everything is other than everything else.’ (Badiou & Tarby, 2013: 57). So, through a Badiouian lens, even though our leaders may take the credit, it is probably not they who instigate real change. This is clearly uncomfortable for those in leadership roles, of course including myself. Badiou seems to question the true function of leadership, or maybe what leadership can be. All this alongside the more mundane concerns around how to organise education provision to achieve positive outcomes for all the stakeholders involved. As a result, at best, leadership is about not turning away but trying to hold conflict. Such an exploring and working with and within multi-levelled contradictions, some of which have been outlined in this chapter, is an endeavour for which I have found the work of Badiou useful. According to him, and contrary to many of his contemporaries, the truth really is out there. For him, truth is hidden inside the event, which is not any-thing but a happening. In response to the event, a truth is worked out – in some senses it is created – by Badiou’s subject. Being the best that we can be, as subjects to a truth, we are enabled to move beyond the determined nature of our experience and the contexts within which we act. So, as leaders we should perhaps brace ourselves for the event, but also look to others – individuals or groups – who may be subject to a truth, and especially at the fringes. Badiou views his subject to truth in some senses as heroic, and to make the point draws a distinction with our normal state as a ‘human animal’ (Besana, 2010:38). Picking up one of our themes again, thought and thinking is a crucial element of Badiou’s subject. In fact, thought distinguishes the subject, ‘Thought is the specific mode by which a human animal is traversed and overcome by a truth’ (Badiou et al., 2004:73).

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To be the one who stumbles on the next big breakthrough is perhaps an inspiring notion, but Badiou’s notion of the subject has its detractors, who complain that we cannot sit around waiting for an event and that Badiou’s system is at root an obscured messianism (Žižek, 2009). However, we do not have to sit around waiting for an event, because ‘we can still be working out the conditions of fidelity to past events’ (Strhan, 2010:245). We can look to events of the past and understand them afresh as having never really concluded; they are in some ways always still ongoing. For Badiou, for example, the French Revolution is still resonating through history and in that sense is not yet complete. So, if we imagine the original envisioning of an approach to education in Plato’s Republic as an event, the consequences of that moment are still being worked out. A choice we can make – our decision, our wager – is to be subject to that truth. This forever incomplete, the subject necessary to working out the consequences of an event, is clarified linguistically in another of the few papers that have used a Badiouian thinking of education: ‘The proper verb tense for ‘truth’ as Badiou uses it is neither the present nor the past, but rather the future anterior’, relating the future anterior tense to Lacan’s ‘anticipatory certitude’ (Heyer, 2009: 442). The truth will have been proved to be true.

Hope for the Future The fragments explained so far do appear to illuminate our perspective in interesting ways. For example, over the last few decades there has been an increasing emphasis on the financial imperative to define how learning is delivered. Some of the more human, developmental aspects – overly messy and presumably inconvenient – have been subdued, being obliged to take a secondary role to the business of education provision. Stephen Ball has strongly criticised this direction of travel, summarising that, ‘[v]alue replaces values’ (Ball, 2006:144–145). Along similar lines, remembering mathematics is one of his fundamental touchpoints, Badiou has commented explicitly on the tyranny of the count. ‘What counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted. Conversely, everything that can be numbered must be valued’ (Badiou & Mackay, 2008:2). This neoliberal approach to education, the stakeholder influence, and the suppression of the professionalism of teachers that accompanies it, is the focus of Ball’s analysis and he strongly advocates resistance to what is generally assumed to be inevitable (Ball, 2016). However, following Badiou’s argument, the process of neoliberalisation is incomplete in the same way as the working out of the French Revolution is incomplete, and we can always become subject to the truth of education, and in Plato’s terms learn to love what is beautiful. It is down to us to explore, to discover ways to stumble towards a better destination, or at least unearth clues that might lead in a more positive direction. This is our challenge, in which I am confident that Badiou could be one of our guides. For me, his sometimes perplexing style, his challenge, appears as an

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encouragement to really think, to uncover truth, and not to simply proliferate opinions, because, ‘[o]pinion is beneath the true and the false’ (Badiou, 2002:51). Badiou does not allow the pandemic the status of event, but it is clearly an unstable context, within which perhaps truths bubble under the surface. Plato’s Republic was not a full-blown Badiouian event either, but it does persist, and the mark of truths is their persistence. According to Badiou, truths are eternal (Badiou, 2013). Although written 2380 years apart, perhaps teaching us to love what is beautiful is essentially the same thing as arranging forms of knowledge such that truth may come to pierce a hole in them. Badiou’s output is vast and complex, and the surface of his formidable philosophical system has barely been scratched here. Only a few of his terms have seen little more than a brief definition. The starting points here were being, event, subject and truth – the cardinal points for the trajectory of a truth (Badiou et al., 2004). We have explored how Badiou’s subject might relate somehow to, and even enrich, our notion of agency and perhaps point to a deeper set of meanings for (professional) identity. Through this all-too-brief survey I have tried to capture my own insistent intuition that the work of Badiou could be profoundly important for our collective enterprise of education; to our own becoming, as well as empowering us to help others become, more than a ‘human animal’.

References Badiou, A. (1999). Manifesto for philosophy (N. Madarasz, Trans.). State University of New York (SUNY) Press. Badiou, A. (2002). Ethics : An essay on the understanding of evil (P. Hallward, Trans.). Verso. Badiou, A. (2004). Theoretical writings (R. Brassier & A. Toscano, Trans.). Continuum. Badiou, A. (2005a). Being and event (O. Feltham, Trans.). Continuum. Badiou, A. (2005b). Handbook of inaesthetics (A. Toscano, Trans.). Stanford University Press. Badiou, A. (2008). Conditions (S. Corcoran, Trans.). Continuum. Badiou, A. (2012). Plato’s Republic (S. Spitzer, Trans.). Polity Press. Badiou, A. (2013). The subject of change: Lessons from the European graduate school (D. Rouselle & W. Schirmacher, Eds.). Atropos Press. Badiou, A. (2020). On the Epidemic Situation: Alain Badiou on the COVID-19 pandemic. Available at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4608-on-the-epidemic-situation. Accessed 3 Mar 2023. Badiou, A., & Brassier, R. (2003). Saint Paul: The foundation of universalism. Stanford University Press. Badiou, A., & Mackay, R. (2008). Number and numbers. Polity Press. Badiou, A., & Tarby, F. (2013). Philosophy and the event (L. Burchill, Trans.). Polity Press. Badiou, A., Feltham, O., & Clemens, J. (2004). Infinite thought: Truth and the return of philosophy. Continuum. Ball, S. J. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 215–228. Ball, S. J. (2006). Education policy and social class: The selected works of Stephen J. Ball. Routledge. Ball, S. J. (2016). Neoliberal education? Confronting the slouching beast. Policy Futures in Education, 14(8), 1046–1059.

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Beijaard, D., Meijer, P. C., & Verloop, N. (2004). Reconsidering research on teachers’ professional identity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(2), 107–128. Besana, B. (2010). The subject. In A. J. Bartlett & J. Clemens (Eds.), Alain Badiou: Key concepts. Acumen Publishing Limited. Department for Education. (2021). Understanding progress in the 2020/21 academic year: Interim findings. Renaissance Learning, Education Policy Institute. Fox, D. R. (1996). The law says corporations are persons, but psychology knows better. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 14(3), 339–359. Green, J. M. (1999). Deep democracy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Heyer, K. D. (2009). Education as an affirmative invention: Alain Badiou and the purpose of teaching and curriculum. Educational Theory, 59(4), 441–463. Jones, K. (2016). Education in Britain: 1944 to the present. Wiley. McGregor, D. (2006). The human side of enterprise: Annotated edition. McGraw-Hill Education. Morse, J. J., & Lorsch, J. W. (1970). Beyond theory Y. Harvard Business Review. Norris, C. (2014). Derrida, Badiou and the formal imperative. Bloomsbury Publishing. Plato. (2007). The Republic (D. Lee, Trans.). Penguin Classics. Strhan, A. (2010). The obliteration of truth by management: Badiou, St. Paul and the question of economic managerialism in education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(2), 230–250. Thompson, C. (2018). Finding the glass slipper: The impact of leadership on innovation in further education. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/10547/623546 Žižek, S. (2009). The ticklish subject: The absent centre of political ontology. Verso.

“Making More of a Difference”: The Creation of Teachers’ Identities as Professionals Who Deal with Disadvantage Steve Connolly

Background I was a teacher in London schools for almost 20 years. During that time, I was both a senior leader and a curriculum specialist, eventually becoming an assistant headteacher in a specialist visual and media arts school at the back end of the Blair/Brown Labour administration. During this time I developed three interests (media education, technology and social inclusion) which led me to complete a PhD in Media Education and move across to work in HE, teaching on undergraduate and postgraduate ITE (initial teacher education) courses. I have always been fascinated by the way that educators seek to deal with social disadvantage. Working in two widening-participation universities and a number of schools in areas of high socioeconomic deprivation, I am drawn to the way that questions of literacy, curriculum, inclusion and leadership often coalesce around issues of disadvantage. These interests are particularly relevant to my current role, where I teach on a range of education leadership courses, while researching ideas about curriculum. I have written a book about the role of media in the subject curriculum for English and this has led me to research more widely on the inter-relationship between knowledge and identity, particularly as these things pertain to social mobility.

Key Questions To what extent do teachers feel able to tackle disadvantage in their day-to-day work in a school? S. Connolly (✉) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_5

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How does the researcher’s own experience as a teacher and leader working with disadvantaged pupils influence their view of disadvantage and the way it is articulated by the teachers interviewed? Should schools have to do ‘compensatory’ work on disadvantage when much disadvantage is as a consequence of non-educational government policy?

Introduction To what extent do classroom teachers construct their own identities as professionals who are able to tackle pupil disadvantage in their day-to-day work in a school? While so much disadvantage, in England at least, is generated by factors that teachers may feel unable to influence, there is some evidence that professionals within schools do feel able to ‘make more of a difference’ to the lives of children outside school and in their futures by focusing on particular aspects of school life. This chapter reflects on data taken from an evaluation of a programme designed to raise attainment amongst disadvantaged pupils in schools in one local authority in England. The evaluation included extensive interviews with teachers involved in the programme and these raised a number of questions of teacher identity. In many of the widely cited pre-existing studies of teacher identity (Beijaard et al., 2000) the role of the teacher as someone who has a role to play in dealing with disadvantage is largely absent. However, more recent literature has touched on the emergent desire of educators to make a difference to the socioeconomic life chances of the pupils they teach (Crawford-Garrett, 2017). The reflections offered here aim to make a contribution to this emerging literature, by analysing the way in which educational professionals engage in school-wide initiatives to support students. However, it also explores their identities as practitioners who are thinking about disadvantage at both the level of the whole school and the pupil in the classroom. Addtionally, the chapter gives me, as a researcher the opportunity to reflect on my own experiences of tackling disadvantage, whilst comparing them to those experiences shared by the teachers in the study.

Making a Difference, Having a Choice The hope is, is that they then stay on at 6th form and hopefully go on to further education, but at the same time, even if that doesn’t happen, there’s still work to be done within this area in terms of like, they could do really well. . .I kind of want to say by moving out of (this town), but that’s not always the right thing. Because it might be then that they’re gonna make more of a difference staying at home or staying in this area and it’s having a choice, isn’t it? That’s the thing. (Art Teacher, Secondary School)

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This is an extract from an interview with a teacher who is considering the impact of a programme aimed at raising attainment amongst disadvantaged students. The programme itself runs in a number of schools in a number of local authorities, and this chapter outlines the way that the idea of making ‘more of a difference’ outlined by the teacher in the quote above has a number of different resonances for both the teachers in the programme and me as a researcher who used to work with disadvantaged students. These include the difference made by the teacher to the student; the difference made by the school running the programme to both the students and the development of the professional identity of the teacher; the difference made by teachers who become involved in research, in both voluntary and paid capacities; and the difference made by the research itself to tackling disadvantage. In looking at some of these multiple ‘differences’ and the identities that come with them, there is a need to make a connection with some broader ideas about teacher identity and the way that it is formed over time, while at the same time, reflecting on the ways that teachers think about disadvantage in education.

Some Views of Teacher Identity Teacher identity is a much-explored concept, with many scholars suggesting that it is built around ideas such as expertise (Beijaard et al., 2000, 2004) or relationships and social constructions (Czerniawski, 2011). Within this, particular conceptions of teacher identity, such as Borg’s (2003) teacher cognition – here in relation to language teaching – show that identities are both diverse, and in some instances, highly specialised. In relation to disadvantage, a number of scholars have suggested that many teachers see their role as being key in addressing issues of poverty and social justice, but that the origins of this aspect of teacher identity might be quite individualised and nuanced. For example, in an American context Van Galen (2010) has suggested that white, working-class pre-service teachers from a disadvantaged background themselves could see becoming a teacher as a means of teaching white, working-class students to ‘beat the system’ (Van Galen, 2010:254). In Sommerville and Rennie’s (2012) work however, the creation of this aspect of teacher identity focuses more on the building of community and the idea that teachers need to develop more nuanced understandings of community in order to tackle disadvantage successfully. These views contrast with those articulated by the Teach First New Zealand participants featured in Crawford-Garrett’s (2017) study whose realisation that the combination of social justice approaches to disadvantage within a prestigious, corporate teacher education programme, backed by commercial industry, does not necessarily do what they expect it to do. These global views of teachers tackling disadvantage are helpful, but they only tell part of the story, because they tend to focus on early career teachers and they also tend to allow the participants to consider the issue of disadvantage through the lens of their professional training. The teachers in the data presented below are simply giving their views of disadvantage as they see them without that lens.

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Project Context and Methods The data reflected upon here is taken from an evaluation of an intervention project designed to raise attainment amongst both primary and secondary age students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Disadvantage here is defined by pupils who qualify for the ‘pupil premium’ – an extra payment made to schools to support students from households who qualify for free school meals – and in some instances, pupils in other kinds of economic and social hardship. The project ran across a number of schools in a local authority in the East of England, and the interviews conducted with teachers were designed to assess the impact or success of that project on these children. However, as the interviews went on it became clear to me that many aspects of teacher identity were being revealed and explored alongside the discussion of the effectiveness of the wider project. Methodologically, the evaluation of this project took a case study approach, interviewing a number of teachers at two schools, one primary and one secondary, who were involved in running the interventions, with four teachers at the primary school and eight teachers at the secondary school participating. It should be emphasised here that the selections from these interviews are used as a stepping-off point to think about the nature of teacher identity, both for the participants and the author, in relation to both being an educator and helping disadvantaged students.

Positionality It is important to note here that my positionality is a complex one, and probably brings a particularity to both this data and the wider issues under discussion in the chapter. I am currently an academic teacher and researcher working in higher education in the UK, and I have been a teacher educator in the same context previously. Prior to that I was a teacher and leader in secondary schools in the UK, including being a senior leader in a school in one of the poorest wards in the greater London area. All these experiences make for a complex view of teachers and disadvantage; as a teacher I understood that disadvantage and social exclusion were strong motivating factors in choosing where to work and be a school leader (Connolly, 2013). However, since moving into teacher education and subsequent academic work the ability to theorise these experiences of disadvantage via a combination of academic perspectives has meant that these original motivations have been complemented by the desire to offer ‘bigger picture’ explanations of educational disadvantage. In effect, the idea of explaining why teachers might feel the way they do about tackling educational disadvantage – and using a range of theoretical perspectives to elucidate this ‘why’ – has come to have a significance for me which complements the work of tackling the disadvantage itself. It might be tempting for the reader to think that these two things are not in any way equal or comparable; that offering explanations is an easy endeavour when compared to

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teaching disadvantaged pupils in a challenging environment. It should be noted though, that my experience in teaching in Higher Education has been at two post-92 universities, on a range of courses both designed to widen participation and appeal to local people from diverse backgrounds who want to work in education. Many of these students would themselves have experienced disadvantage, and so the academic work of asking ‘why’ teachers might want to work with educational disadvantage has been reflected both back on to these students and filtered through their experiences. These experiences were often relayed back in my lectures and seminars as a desire to help people who came from similar backgrounds to themselves, as well as a wider struggle to access higher education and associated social mobility. For me, addressing educational and social disadvantage has been at the heart of teaching and research for the large part of my career in education. This centrality brings with it certain biases – indeed, I am conscious that the way that some of the questions are asked of these teachers being interviewed probably betrays some of these biases. However, this centrality and the complex layers of experience which underpin it also give me a unique perspective on these issues, which I have grouped below into three broad themes and attempt to answer the first of the key questions at the start of the chapter.

Disadvantage and the Wider World I think if you haven’t had that at home then to come into a setting where other children are behaving to a set of invisible rules that you just have to kind of pick up it’s really difficult. (Headteacher, Primary School) It is about them moving away from that learned helplessness and taking their own initiative to take part in the lesson and to do things outside of school as well. . . knowing the right kind of language to use for the right situation. . . and seeing those things take root. (Key Stage 1 Teacher, Primary School)

The above quotes, from interviews with teachers in the case study primary school both look outwards and acknowledge that tackling disadvantage, at least at one level, involves getting pupils to engage with the wider world. A recurrent theme in the project was the idea of ‘broadening pupils’ horizons’ as a means of overcoming disadvantage and many of the teachers interviewed felt that there was a delicate balance to be struck between, on the one hand, staying within one’s community to build it and make it better, while on the other hand realising that greater opportunity and possibility may lie outside that community. The hope expressed by the Art teacher whose words are quoted at the very start of the chapter, that students will have ‘a choice’, was echoed by teachers who were clearly very conscious of not being derogatory about the environment that their disadvantaged pupils both came from, and indeed often felt comfortable in. As a consequence, they articulated the idea that the knowledge and skills gained in school might equally be used to help the place where they lived, as much as they might be a passport to the wider world. I recognise this sentiment. As a school leader who worked in a number of materially

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poor areas, I often found it quite difficult to reconcile students and parents’ pride in their local community with what I observed. Crumbling school buildings, poor housing stock, few local facilities and inadequate support from the local authority did not often stop people saying (if not thinking) that their community was ‘the best place in the world to live’. As a result of this view, teachers and school leaders had to be quite careful about expressing the idea that young people might better themselves by leaving that community. This was particularly the case when thinking about young people going to higher education in populations where very few individuals went or had been to university. The notion that HE was ‘not for them’ or ‘something that someone else does’ sometimes made it hard to encourage clearly able young people to take this path. The idea articulated by the teachers here, that you are developing your skills and knowledge in order to not only go out into the wider world, but also come back and support your own family, friends and neighbours is an important one, which is a valuable perspective from the project.

Disadvantage and Teaching and Learning For a number of teachers in the project, there was a direct connection between the nature of teaching and learning that disadvantaged pupils received, and their ability to overcome that disadvantage. Before discussing the data which conveys this connection, however, I want to consider my own experience of this; I worked in a school, as a senior leader, for a head teacher who thought that teaching and learning, would, almost exclusively, address every issue that disadvantaged pupils faced. Consequently, if staff members raised concerns about pupil behaviour, he would maintain that these concerns would be met by better teaching and learning. There probably was some truth in this, but many staff perceived these constant exhortations to ‘teach better’ as a means of avoiding wider, structural issues that the leadership of the school needed to address. As a consequence, I view the data in somewhat sceptical terms, while acknowledging that the commitment of the staff interviewed to this view of teaching and learning is undoubtedly strong. Consider for example, this Maths teacher in a secondary school, who also happens to be the Pupil Premium lead for the school: Referring back to PP (pupil premium) any of the research, anything you read, quality teaching is the biggest factor that impacts their outcomes. That being said, the more systematic your curriculum, the more you embed retrieval practice. The more you embed low stakes assessment, the more you ensure that their fundamentals and foundations are in place. It will help all kids but it’ll help disadvantaged kids even more. (Maths Teacher, Secondary School)

This response reveals some very particular perspectives on teaching and learning which reflect the evidence base that the teacher is working from. The terms ‘retrieval practice’ and ‘low stakes assessment’ especially, indicate a view of teaching and learning that comes from the kind of research-informed practice promoted by organisations like the Education Endowment Foundation. This is, in many ways, a

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very positive development. Despite some questions around the types of evidence that the EEF produces (Wrigley, 2018; Burnett & Coldwell, 2021) the notion of a teacher using a research base to address problems of disadvantage in their classroom is clearly valuable, and I would suggest this might connect to Judith Sachs’ notion of ‘professional activism’ (Sachs, 2000) where the teacher sees being research informed as part of their ability to actively address disadvantage. Similarly, some teachers perceive conversations around assessment and grading to be key to the identification of strategies for dealing with disadvantage. While there is an acceptance that assessment outcomes are not everything (see below) there is the view that understanding them is necessary for dealing with disadvantage. One middle leader in the secondary school focused on that reminders of this were always present, but that they took on a particular significance for the disadvantaged pupils in the school: Every book has their target grades on the front, and it just gives you that chance to go ‘come on that’s your target!’ you know, and then just giving them that. . . thought process that they can achieve more often makes a huge difference. Because the rationale behind it is that because they’re disadvantaged, actually, they have not performed academically as well, as they perhaps could have done back when, you know, the targets are projected – it’s off the SATs, [Standard Assessment Tests] isn’t it? So, you know, it’s just sort of saying, ‘Right, well, we’re not accepting that, you know, as a school, we can push you to your maximum capacity of academic ability because we, we believe you can do it. (Head of English, Secondary School)

While there are many voices in educational thinking which assert that the exam system, with all the associated baggage of predicted and target grades is a driver of disadvantages (Brighouse & Waters, 2022, for a good summary of this view), these teachers, who have to work within that system, cannot afford the luxury of adopting such a position. So then, the conversation must be about target grades, but the way that the conversation is facilitated becomes much more important. The emphasis on belief, high expectations and confidence becomes key to the pupil’s chances of success. From a personal point of view, these emphases are vital and have underpinned my view of social and economic disadvantage for much of my career (Connolly, 2013 again, for more detail on this.)

Disadvantage, Culture and Economics So much of the disadvantage that the teachers see and discuss is directly economic in nature. A lack of opportunity to engage in certain kinds of activity which might be seen to support academic attainment really lies at the heart of what it means to be a disadvantaged pupil in these contexts. Two examples, one each from interviews with primary and secondary colleagues, illustrate this point. The first is a Geography teacher talking about residential trips, the second a primary colleague talking about harvest festival:

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In one sense, this example is typical of the kind of activity – in this case a Geography field trip – that often makes the difference to building what policy makers in England refer to as cultural capital. I have written extensively about this idea and the many problems with it elsewhere (Bates & Connolly, 2022, 2023); however, putting these to one side for the moment, this is an attempt to make something that does support academic attainment but is often inequitable, more equitable. In the second example, there is something more intangible, but important about the connection between finance and disadvantage: One thing we wanted to make sure was that children who are disadvantaged knew that they could give back to society and that they have the influence to change the world . . . we have put together a structured programme of how our disadvantaged students are going to be giving back to the community as they move up through the school so it’s things like they deliver harvest baskets, they decorated the local Christmas tree. . . (Pastoral Support Worker, Primary School)

This comment establishes the implicit connection that exists between money, cultural experience and advantage. In the act of giving, the school is both giving pupils an opportunity to help others, but also tacitly acknowledging that many cultural experiences, even ones which are designed to help others, require a degree of financial stability in the first place. Similarly, there are related implications here, both about the school helping the pupils to help other people, but also understanding that to some extent, overcoming disadvantage involves building communities. These implications put capitals at the heart of the teaching experience and do suggest that Bourdieu’s (1986) view that all capitals (educational, cultural, social etc) ultimately all boil down to economic capital. To tackle disadvantage, at some point schools and teachers must have access to more resources. For me, this makes a fundamental point about theory and practice. Bourdieu’s ideas are often misrepresented by policymakers (Spielman, 2020) but they do give a framework that allows professionals to interpret the relationship between education and wider society. As a teacher – even one who was studying Bourdieu at MA and PhD level – I could not articulate this at a professional level at the time. Now as a researcher, I see this articulation as one of my key roles as a teacher educator.

Discussions: Personal, Professional and Theoretical Reflections In this section of the chapter, the data discussed above is considered in relation to some ideas from my own professional experience and academic interests. The hope here is that other teachers and researchers, and indeed teacher-researchers, might

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make use of these theoretical explanations, and eventually perhaps seek their own. The theoretical and professional perspectives reflected upon below have been encountered through teaching and research activities, and for me, these encounters often happened in a very random, haphazard, and often un-tutored way. This is probably similar to the way that many teachers encounter such theoretical perspectives, and the two reflections below attempt to answer questions 2 and 3 posed at the start of the chapter.

Teachers Tackling Disadvantage as Moral and Authentic Leadership: The Researcher as Teacher and the Teacher as Leader There is little doubt that some of the teachers’ commitment to tackling disadvantage was about leadership, or perhaps more accurately, the way that leadership within the school worked on a number of different levels to facilitate teachers dealing with these issues. A number of the teachers did, in their own right, hold leadership roles where addressing socioeconomic disadvantage was part of their job. Most obviously, this was seen in the Pupil Premium lead, who saw part of their job to lead people towards an understanding of what the programme was trying to do: I think the narrative of having an external sort of body come in and support us as well as probably helps in the communication to the rest of the staff team as the head teacher never wanted to feel like it was a bolt on, never wanted to feel like it was something that we’re sort of shoving down people’s throats. It is obviously a really important aspect of any school’s approach to support your students. And I think that was sort of using that . . .to help support those conversations with staff in school, about just raising the profile of pupil premium kids. (Maths Teacher/Pupil Premium Lead)

These designated leader roles and the support of the head teacher of the school give a visibility to the leadership of the programme in the school. This top level of leadership meant, that to some extent, teachers could not avoid thinking about disadvantage. Theoretically, one might be tempted to describe this as a distributed model of leadership at work, but in reality the teachers comments around leadership can be seen as being more closely related to a group of ideas which have come to be termed moral and authentic leadership. The reasons for saying this are quite complicated, but they lie in my own experiences as a school leader working in the early 2000s. In that period the National College of School Leadership, England’s professional body for school leaders had a particular emphasis on distributed leadership (NCSL, 2004) and this led to a particular preoccupation with head teachers being seen to distribute leadership across their teams. Speaking from personal experience, what resulted was a scenario in which teachers did more for less; they were asked to offer leadership in particular areas of school life that were neither core to the development of the school, or really entailed any leadership development. For example, individuals were asked to lead on the development of literacy policies

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which were never implemented; under the guise of ‘distributed leadership’ individuals doing this leading were often tied up with additional work that meant that they were seen as less of a problem by the head teacher. Fortunately, the teachers interviewed here do not appear to be operating in such an environment, hence the connection with ideas about moral and authentic leadership. For Philip Woods (2007), for example, authentic leadership is an antidote to the modern, bureaucratic tendency for organisations (particularly schools) to want to rationalise everything. In particular, Woods develops the idea of ‘social authenticity’ in which the leader seeks to be a true reflection of the social situation in which they find themselves. Similarly for John West-Burnham (1997) the idea of ‘moral confidence’ in leadership is a product of thinking about both learning itself and the wider moral purpose of the school. I would argue that the kind of leadership exhibited by the teachers interviewed here is much more akin to this, because they demonstrate a commitment to the community and the young people they teach from that community. This authenticity means that the distribution of leadership is much more even and invested in than if this role had simply been given to them by the headteacher.

Code, Classification and Compensation: Teachers Tackling Disadvantage Through a Sociological Lens As I have developed my career as a researcher, I have increasingly become aware of the ideas of Basil Bernstein as a rich source of thought for thinking about the way that theory might be used to support explanations of what happens in schools. Bernstein’s work is often opaque, densely written and mystifying for the uninitiated. However, with some application it frequently offers up good support for thinking about a topic such as the identity of teachers in relation to disadvantage. This is because Bernstein is, in my view, trying to offer theoretical explanations for the things that he saw in practice in the first 20 years of his professional life; before becoming an academic, he was a teacher and social worker. Consequently, much of his thought is concerned with how theory can be used to explain how education systems build in disadvantage through things like language, curriculum and classifications of knowledge. This appeals to me as someone who became a researcher later in life and now seeks explanations for the things I experienced. Consequently, two Bernsteinian terms might be of some use here when thinking about the way that the teachers interviewed in the study see their role in dealing with disadvantage; these are ‘code’ and ‘compensation’. Bernstein’s early work is characterised by identification of ‘elaborate codes’ (Bernstein, 2003) where codes are tacitly acquired socio-linguistic devices that, Bernstein argues, allow for an exercise of social power. For working-class students, failure to navigate these codes often results in limited opportunities in what is ostensibly an environment built by, and for, the middle classes. It is interesting to note that some of the teacher participants in the study

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imply that their work around the development of cultural capital is about helping students to break this code, and this has been dealt with elsewhere (Bates & Connolly, 2022, 2023). However, the ‘invisible rules’ referred to by one of the primary school teachers in the interviews quoted above suggest that, even in an education system which is consciously attempting to address disadvantage in a way that schools in Bernstein’s time as a teacher were probably not, the languages of privilege and social class still have a great deal of force. For me, reflecting on my own experience as a school teacher and leader, this theoretical insight is valuable, as it offers a way of supporting teachers who are dealing with the effects of disadvantage through introducing their pupils to particular kinds of knowledge. However, as suggested both below and elsewhere (Connolly, 2021a; Bates & Connolly, 2022) the narrowness of the way in which both ‘powerful knowledge’ and ‘cultural capital’ are framed in policy terms creates other issues, and these are brought into focus when we consider another term that Bernstein uses, namely ‘compensation’. Bernstein’s assertion that schools cannot be ‘compensatory’ (Bernstein, 1970) is often taken to mean that there are things that schools cannot do, and things that they should not do, because society can and should do them. However, in the context of this work on disadvantage, it is more accurate to see this assertion as being more about the way that society might demand that students and schools conform to a wider societal view of what education is and what school does. For Bernstein, school should not be about valorising what he identifies as vertical discourses of knowledge (Bernstein, 2003) but rather validating the idea that certain kinds of knowledge work in different ways for different communities, and more importantly, that the student’s own knowledge and experience are central to the educational experience (Bernstein, 1970: 154). Building on this idea, Gabrielle Ivinson (2018) has sought to establish certain kinds of community, technical and trade knowledge in terms of Bernstein’s horizontal discourse; in effect highlighting that working-class and disadvantaged communities build certain kinds of knowledge which have power – to use Michael Young’s (2008) characterisation – but not in a way that schooling recognises. Ivinson’s argument seems to implicitly lurk at the edge of a lot of the things that the teacher participants in the study say. The idea of ‘staying in this area. . .and having a choice’, articulated by the teacher quoted at the very start of this chapter, and ‘giving back to the community’ discussed by the primary school teachers, point towards the idea that knowing how to help your own disadvantaged community is a significant kind of knowledge alongside the kind you are meant to learn in school. The main problem in policy terms is that this kind of knowledge is frequently de-centred by both the National Curriculum and wider educational policy (Connolly, 2021b for a more detailed explanation of this) in England. As a consequence, my view is that Bernstein’s accounts of code, classification and compensation are still very valid theoretical accounts of the relationship between knowledge and disadvantage, because the phenomena that Bernstein observed are still at work in the school system in England.

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Conclusion This chapter should in no way be taken as a report of a complete account of a research project that set out to explore the relationship between teacher identity and educational disadvantage. Rather it should probably be read as a kind of ‘professional meditation’ on the relationship between the project data included here and the intertwining professional identities of both the teachers and me, the researcher. My experiences give me a very particular perspective on that data. It is important to note that assessing ways of dealing with disadvantage was one key strand of the original study, the question of teacher identity was really a by-product of that study; something that was noticed tangentially, in the process of unpacking the data. In reflecting on the comments made by the teachers in the study about disadvantage, I have attempted to think about the way that theoretical perspectives have changed the way that I think about both disadvantage itself, and my time as a school leader in a very disadvantaged area. Thinking about the attempts of the current Conservative administration to deal with educational disadvantage through an emphasis on ‘knowledge-rich’ curricula and cultural capital does highlight some very serious potential implications for the kinds of knowledge and experience which get validated by schooling. While the teachers in this study do use that (somewhat compensatory) vocabulary, it is important to note that they often recognise some of the limitations and are still motivated to help their students overcome disadvantage through education. Subsequent work by the author as a teacher educator has led to the view that helping teachers – particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds themselves – to navigate theoretical explanations around curriculum, leadership and professional activism, will better equip them to understand the problems inherent in trying to deal with disadvantage via the current policy emphases.

References Bates, G., & Connolly, S. (2022). Different people, different backgrounds, different identities’: Filling the vacuum created by policy views of ‘cultural capital. Journal of Curriculum Studies. Bates, G., & Connolly, S. (2023). Exploring teachers views of cultural capital in English schools. British Education Research Journal. Beijaard, D., Verloop, N., & Vermunt, J. D. (2000). Teacher’s perceptions of professional identity: An exploratory study from a personal knowledge perspective. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(7), 749–764. Beijaard, D., Meijer, P. C., & Verloop, N. (2004). Reconsidering research on teachers’ professional identity. Teaching and teacher education, 20(2), 107–128. Available at: https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.tate.2003.07.001. Bernstein, B. (1970). A critique of the concept of compensatory education. In Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language (pp. 159–167). Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2003). Class, codes and control: The structuring of pedagogic discourse. Routledge. Borg, S. (2003). Teacher cognition in language teaching: A review of research on what language teachers think, know, believe, and do. Language teaching, 36(2), 81–109. Available at: https:// doi.org/10.1017/S0261444803001903.

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Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Greenwood. Brighouse, T., & Waters, M. (2022). About our schools: Improving on previous best. Crowne House. Burnett, C., & Coldwell, M. (2021). Randomised controlled trials and the interventionisation of education. Oxford Review of Education, 47(4), 423–438. Connolly, S. (2013). Media education: A tool for social inclusion. In P. Fraser & J. Wardle (Eds.), Current perspectives in media education. Palgrave Macmillan. Connolly, S. (2021a). From curriculum theory to curriculum practice: Some observations on privilege, power and policy (29-40). In J. Wearmouth & K. Lindley (Eds.), Bringing the curriculum to life: Engaging learners in the English education system. OUP. Connolly, S. (2021b). The changing role of Media in the English Curriculum 1988–2018: Returning to nowhere. Routledge. Crawford-Garrett, K. (2017). The problem is bigger than us’: Grappling with educational inequity in TeachFirst New Zealand. Teaching and Teacher Education, 68, 91–98. Czerniawski, G. (2011). Emerging teachers-emerging identities: Trust and accountability in the construction of newly qualified teachers in Norway, Germany, and England. European Journal of Teacher Education., 4(4), 431–447. Ivinson, G. (2018). Re-imagining Bernstein’s restricted codes. European Educational Research Journal, 17(4), 539–554. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904117745274 NCSL. (2004). Distributed leadership in action. National College of School Leadership. Accessible online at https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/2052/1/download%3Fid=17152&filename=distributed-leader ship-in-action-full-report.pdf. Sachs, J. (2000). The activist professional. Journal of Educational Change, 1(1), 77–95. Somerville, M., & Rennie, J. (2012). Mobilising community? Place, identity formation and new teachers’ learning’. Discourse, 33(2), 193–206. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.666075 Spielman, A. (2020). Speech given at the Royal Opera House. Available online at https://www.gov. uk/government/speeches/amanda-spielman-speaking-at-the-royal-opera-house. Accessed 23 Mar 2023. Van Galen, J. A. (2010). Class, identity, and teacher education. The Urban Review, 42(4), 253–270. West-Burnham, J. (1997). Leadership for learning: Reengineering ‘mind sets’. School Leadership & Management, 17(2), 231–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/1363243977006 Woods, P. A. (2007). Authenticity in the bureau-enterprise culture. Educational Management, Administration & Leadership, 35(2), 295–320. Wrigley, T. (2018). The power of ‘evidence’: Reliable science or a set of blunt tools? British Educational Research Journal, 44(3), 359–376. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3338 Young, M. F. D. (2008). Bring knowledge Back in: From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of knowledge. Routledge.

Managing and Implementing Educational-Technological Change: A Case for Co-development David Pike

Background I am the head of Digital Learning in the Academy for Learning and Teaching Excellence at the University of Bedfordshire. My team manage and support the university’s virtual learning environment – BREO (Bedfordshire Resources for Education Online) – and the systems associated with it which include Blackboard (the overall learning management system), Studiosity (a writing feedback service), Turnitin (similarity detection service) and Panopto (a video platform for recording content). My research interests include the narrative experiences of technology usage, examining students’ behaviours through data, linking narrative and data about students’ activities, and making sense of metrics.

Key Questions In this chapter I examine the journey of making major technological change at a UK HEI (Higher Education Institution) and address two specific questions: As a manager of change how do I approach such large scale developments? What is the lived experience of a change manager and change recipients? Because the change I describe was focussed upon delivery I use Kotter’s (1996) eight stage model to provide a structure to highlight the involvement and experiences of colleagues associated with change.

D. Pike (✉) University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_6

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HEIs and Drivers for Change My change discussion focuses upon two distinct parts – the lead up and commencement of Covid (March 2020) and a major institutional change to BlackBoard Ultra. BlackBoard is a system used by universities in many different countries around the world, and the system itself is commonly known as a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). The University’s BlackBoard service is called BREO – Bedfordshire Resources for Education Online. BREO plays a key role in providing content, activities and spaces for staff and students to interact online and submit assesessments. It is a feature of every single student’s learning experience. The very nature of higher education (HE) in the UK involves constant development and change (Altmann & Eberberger, 2013) and pressures such as the globalisation and marketisation of HE, and more recently the OfS (OfS – Office for Students, 2022) and the TEF (Teaching Excellence Framework, OfS-TEF, 2022) continue to influence administrative and teaching activities within HEIs. The OfS set standards and targets for universities, for example: retention (the ability of an institution to maintain students’ presence during a course of study); attainment (ensuring students are completing assessments); and progression (ensuring students progress from year to year). The OfS makes the outcome data and the comparisons and meaning available to the general public and the OfS can act to intervene with institutions who perform poorly in any of these elements. Naturally, this prompts institutions to seek to enact interventions focused upon improving or enhancing students’ learning experiences and to manage students’ engagement via tools such as learning analytics which are designed to help alert an institution to students who may fail. The TEF is an evaluation mechanism devised and managed by the OfS. In the past it has been run on a 3-year basis and the intention is to produce data to compare the outcomes of students’ studies and activities. It also includes a significant survey delivered to finalyear undergraduates called the NSS (National Student Survey, 2022) and data about what types of work students undertake when they graduate.

Technology, Change and Innovation Technology is innovation and innovation can be derived from technology. This is a fundamental belief for those whose role is focussed on the implementation of technology (otherwise known as Learning Technologists or LTs) in order to support academic colleagues’ pedagogical practice. There is a tendency for organisations and LTs to act in a consequentialist manner as outcomes matter the most (Card & Smith, 2020). Some examples of how this works in practice are: • The belief that technology enhances learning (Kirkwood & Price, 2014; Gordon, 2014) • Disruption generates innovative practice (Christensen et al., 2018)

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• Change is made in support of sector wide influence (Barber et al., 2021) from external pressures (e.g. the OfS, TEF and NSS). Christensen et al.’s arguments around disruptive practice can be seen in strategies for technology implementation in HEIs (Flavin & Quintero, 2018). There seems to be a conception that specific examples of disruption are generalisable and will work in all types of settings. For example, a simple technology, such as the use of an iPhone in teaching is seen as a ‘game changer’. A consequence of this is the assumption that technology automatically qualifies as having an inherent utility. This led to terms such as digital natives (Prensky, 2001) being applied to new generation students (the colloquial term being generation Z) based on the assumption that students will be able to use technology efficiently and to develop vitally important study skills (Janschitz & Penker, 2022). A classification made by Entwistle and Waterson (1988) describing students’ approaches to learning as surface and deep suggests the assumptions around the use of technology. It is often assumed that the abundance of information means quality of information, but the reality for some students is: ‘Watching and re-watching video lectures, and preferring to look at diagrams, animations and images as opposed to engaging with the written or spoken word are perhaps not particularly advanced forms of digitally enhanced learning’ (Henderson et al., 2017:1576). This is interesting as it seems to contrast with feedback from the TEF, suggesting that students rewatching lectures was presented as an innovative use of technology (EalesReynolds & Westwood, 2018).

Agile or Waterfall? Within change management theory, there are different methods of implementing change, two of which are specific to this chapter: • Agile – which involves incremental change and development and takes an iterative approach where aspects of change are revisted; • Waterfall – which is a more traditional, linear approach whereby the next phased only begins after the previous phase has been completed. Agile developments are utilised where short bursts of development at speed are important whereas a waterfall approach involves strict stages of specification and delivery to pre-agreed criteria – the model is significantly less flexible and assumes that requirements will not change. In both cases care should be taken when making an assumption that universities are proficient at either type of change and that the language used to define change makes sense for the recipients (Marshall, 2010; Altmann & Ebserberger, 2013).

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Kotter’s Eight Step Model I utilise Kotter’s (1996) model for two reasons: firstly, it enables a fixed structure to explain the stages of the VLE implementation; secondly, it is suggested by JISC (2016) as a model for the implementation and development of technology change. Figure 1 contains the full cycle. 1. Establishing a sense of urgency – identifying why change is necessary; 2. Creating a guiding coalition – forming a group or groups with a suitable powerbase to lead change; 3. Developing a clear vision – to support the change and developing an implementation strategy; 4. Communicating the vision – identifying and utilising mechanisms to communicate the new vision and change; 5. Empowering people to act on the vision – removing obstacles, making changes to systems, encouraging risk;

1 Establishing a sense of urgency 8 Anchoring new approaches

2 Creating a guiding colition

7 Consolidate and build upon gains

3Developing a clear vision

4 Communicating the vision

6 Creating shortterm wins 5 Empowering action from the vision

Fig. 1 Kotter’s eight stage model

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6. Create short term wins – visible improvements, rewarding those who make and embrace the change; 7. Consolidate and build on gains – embracing existing change and developing new opportunities to maintain momentum; 8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture – enhancing the delivery, performance and management.

Creating a Sense of Urgency: The Impact of Covid The Covid pandemic inevitably created significant pressure on organisations. This began with the movement to emergency measures, a period of stabilisation and finally a major change to the university’s VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) during the lull in UK-wide lockdowns. The timeline of events is as follows: March 2020 the UK proceeds into a full lockdown – the initial pivot to online learning; September 2020 – initial move to BlackBoard Ultra; September 2021 – the introduction of Studiosity and Turnitin as complementary services, BlackBoard Ultra 100% adopted by the university. Before Covid there was not much appetite for major change – colleagues had become comfortable with the operations of the VLE, and previous change efforts had left a somewhat negative air around technological change. Whilst there were longterm questions about the potential utilisation of BlackBoard Ultra, it was discussed in very loose terms though hidden from colleagues. The existing method of upgrades was a source of significant difficulties as much work was required to prepare the system for an upgrade – this was a key concern. The erupting Covid crisis in March 2020 caused pedagogical, technical and personal issues – everyone had to find a way to adapt quickly. I also had to consider the substantive technical difficulties of maintaining the system everyone was used to, and to respond to the technical constraints the Covid crisis introduced. During Covid, moving online caused significant disruption, and upon reviewing the public discussions and approaches of my peers their position was technology was being utilised in this context to deliver enhancement. Like Kirkwood and Price (2014), I disagree that enhancement is the correct term as it created a flawed reason for urgency. The reality for the COVID pandemic was that the use of technology enabled rather than enhanced student and staff learning engagements. Enablement of learning is also easier to demonstrate – if students could not access learning online then there would be clear signs of disengagement (activity, assessments and interaction amongst others). When considering my actions pre and post – Covid, I can see the same difficulties. In both instances a minimum standard was supposed to help staff enable students’ learning. It is a reflection of both the positions of Reed and Watmough (2015) with standards intended to aid NSS outcomes and EalesReynolds and Westwood (2018) where equity of implementation produces gain. However, this change was something set for, rather than in concert with, academic colleagues. The intention was to provide clarity and vision. However, colleagues did

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not share in the vision and it was experienced more as interference and compliance. On reflection, I am mindful of the balance between teachers’ awareness of pedagogical approaches for their courses, and the requirement to maintain consistency throughout the organisation.

Creating a Guiding Coalition What should the role of a guiding coalition be? In what ways could colleagues feel as though they play a part in guiding a coalition rather that being guided? Through the natural cycle of change the structures that existed within the university were no longer in place. There was no longer a single powerbase, and control was organisationally distributed. Instead of there being one standard a plurality of standards existed. This meant there was a range of approaches to using technology and a subsequent range of pedagogies. This of course makes it more difficult to standardise and messages get confused. In almost the same way as Henderson et al. (2017) describe the symbolic approaches students utilise in learning, colleagues were forced to try different approaches. On reflection, the idea of a guiding central coalition could have been developed in the form of local experts and change agents. This would have three benefits: firstly, ownership, which was a significant issue during COVID and the change to Ultra; secondly, colleagues can and perhaps should take greater responsibility for engaging and enhancing students’ experiences; thirdly, when implementations are locally standardised there is an opportunity to measure the utilisation and effect of technology. Where staff had learned new techniques they could be applied as longer term change to teaching and learning.

Developing a Clear Vision A clear vision at the time was essential but did rely upon everyone delivering to the same standard. At the time I termed this as a compliance approach, and permission had to be sought to use non-standard methods, for example live teaching, or using tools other than those mandated by the institution. A factor in arriving at this vision was the plethora of ad hoc ‘solutions’ offered by social media (in online spaces such as Twitter) attempting to determine ways forward. This compromised the design of a clear vision at an organisational level as there was no way to know if these ideas would work, could scale, or would be appropriate for students. The positioning of the vision was focused upon two elements: continuity in teaching by providing an online environment which reflected in-person experiences; and managing student and staff expectations. The Covid pandemic did change the way learning was viewed inside and outside the institution – specifically via mediums such as blended learning. My colleagues

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did a very good job of maintaining pedagogy online, but this was an understandable transfer of what they were doing in the classrom rather than a complete transformation of the teaching and learning experience. Therefore, should the vision have been longer term to aim for different types of pedagogy – or is it better to make one large change which then positions us for the next? This relates back to the Agile verses Waterfall methodology of implementing change. Refreshing or upgrading the VLE and updating Ultra in the way I approached it could not really be classed as Waterfall development (Van Casteren, 2017) but Agile in the most difficult of circumstances. In understanding that Agile change continually evolves in short steps, I had tried to reassure colleagues that it was OK to experiment and attempt iterative developments (Amiel & Reeves, 2008), but I had to be mindful not to lead them into breaking rules whilst working around perceived barriers. This is where I reflect on the notion of change – visions can either be collaborative and developed with the staff, or imposed upon them. Reflecting upon these points, it is clear there needed to be a stronger argument in favour of change. It is possible to align to the university’s overall objectives and support all groups of students. The change itself may have had merit in that it forced much discussion about the tools used to support our students. Reflecting on these points, what could I have done differently? Starting as early as possible is one potential response, arguing more coherently for specific change, and focusing change on one specific department at a time.

Communicating the Vision The university took a highly structured approach to communicating the vision by ensuring that academic communications were relayed by a single senior manager. This meant that many of my outputs had to be collated, very carefully curated and then tested to ensure they would not violate existing policy, procedure, or be difficult to implement from a technical standpoint. Working in these circumstances it is difficult to envisage what might come next, and it is the very essence of reflection-in-action (Schön, 1983). As is often the case, when a communication was published, or new guidance developed, some colleagues found immediate problems. The wording of the guidance revealed an inconsistency in practice or was not technically viable; in some cases colleagues’ practices where not always aligned with the new rules; the manner and style of assessment or learning was incompatible with the changes; students could not operate within the ambit of changes; and in very limited cases staff simply objected to the changes and so decided to improvise. In communicating the vision for change, I found that one question vexed colleagues: why? Why should we develop and implement practice in this way? Why are we being asked to do something different? In what way were the development and directions going to create an improved future? Two other difficulties existed: firstly, at the time it was difficult to know exactly when COVID would end; secondly, when it came to the change to BlackBoard Ultra – I believed my

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reasons were clear, but communicating my vision to colleagues who had limited understanding of the underlying needs of the system proved difficult. Despite my intentions to implement effective change, I found that not everyone shared my vision, and that the vision was interpreted in ways I failed to anticipate. In my arguments to develop change, I wanted to temper the process to make it controllable – I argued that first years were best placed to receive the change, and I felt more comfortable with this because first years generally had less experience of the institutional VLE and there would be an opportunity to direct change for them. Second and third year students and staff would invariably feel nervous about change. My vision was overridden by senior colleagues who suggested that if the change to Ultra was as effective as advertised we should offer the opportunity to all students.

Empowering People to Act on the Vision In June 2020, when the initial phase of the Covid pandemic had passed and the UK lockdown was eased, it became possible to release some of the more difficult conditions which impacted learning. It was at this point the university had reached a stable, but complex plateau. There were opportunities for staff to take advantage of techniques tried and tested during the earlier stage of the pandemic; colleagues also had become used to methods of online communications. During this time it became apparent that the digital learning systems at the university could withstand the pressure placed upon them, and this led to greater confidence amongst senior managers. Covid brought additional challenges for colleagues: for example, the decision was made not to have face-to-face lectures which caused a significant amount of angst. Staff desperately wanted to interact with students and maintain a semblance of normality. Colleagues perceived the communications from university management as inflexible in that it offered a somewhat rigid framework for practice, whereas they often had clear ideas of the type of pedagogy they wanted to employ. I felt as though the rules pulled colleagues back from implementing something that was pedagogically sound, but also I wanted to maintain a sense of fairness in that guidelines were intended to provide consistency. In some ways colleagues had become too risk averse, yet innovation by its very nature is supposed to be disruptive (Flavin & Quintero, 2018). Naturally it is easier for me to claim this because I do not have to suffer the direct consequence of my actions.

Create Short Term Wins In the middle of the initial Covid pandemic lockdowns the mere fact that colleagues where not introduced to any more change was seen as a positive – not making any more change was in itself a decision seen as a win by colleagues. There was also an

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opportunity to release some of the restrictions originally imposed by senior management. In finding stability with online learning, I had hoped that moving the university to BlackBoard Ultra would be a sensible next step. The progress and developments colleagues had made in moving learning to the online environment seemed like a good basis to make a further transition. My feeling was that colleagues would be able to treat the transition to Ultra as a natural step and would embrace new opportunities to test and try the pedagogy they wanted to deliver. I had also assumed that there would be newfound confidence from working online. The reality of efforts to deliver a short-term win ran into significant difficulty: I had anticipated that colleagues might want to engage early but everyone was change-fatigued from the COVID pandemic and the issues created by it. In thinking about my own approach, I was concerned that the specificity of the messages I wanted to deliver could get lost in translation. There is something to be said for detail but then problematically I found too much detail simply induced what is known in computer science circles as analysis paralysis where colleagues were unable to interpret instructions owing to complexity. This presented a dilemma as too little detail led to situations I could not predict (but later had to resolve).

Consolidate and Build on Gains Embracing these changes provided an opportunity for colleagues to move away from old ways of working and had the potential to start a pedagogical revolution. I wanted to ensure that new approaches were embedded into practice and using Ultra meant that familiar, and perhaps comfortable, ways of working could no longer be maintained. However, my intentions were diluted as the university made the decision to return to face-to-face teaching. This was despite both teaching staff and students now seeing the significant personal and professional benefits to working online. Although it was clear that significant gains were made in terms of how colleagues had learnt to manage the online learning environment, there were three key takeaways from this. Firstly, not all students can learn online – there is a need to develop study and learning skills which may not be present; secondly, students may not have the resources or time to access online learning; and finally, colleagues must be sensitive to these problems.

Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture In order to embed the changes, I utilised evidence from localised unit surveys which indicated that students were more focussed on how staff engaged with their enquiries and the guidance they received, rather than the more formal teaching aspects of their

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experience. Therefore, to enhance the delivery of change, the university could strengthen these activities which might lead to meaningful improvements. In addressing the final part of Kotter’s model, I wanted to use the opportunity to reflect upon the entire eight stage process, and my own practice and experience. The most significant issue in this appears to be a power structure. The model makes the assumptions that a guiding coalition is able to make changes within an institution, and it assumes that the institution is truly hierarchical and that an appointed group would have the ability to effectively lead this process. It is this last point which draws the distinction between those who implement change, those who experience it and those who manage it. The tensions experienced across these elements had not necessarily been considered. The university’s expectation was that once the change had been defined, it would be adhered to, whereas my experience was one of guiding staff to meet rules that did not always make sense. It is difficult to demonstrate the validity of rules when they are alien to what students have asked for. What was needed for effective change was a greater balance to allow staff time to leave old practice behind, have a period of reflection and find new ways of working. It is difficult to say if a similar event on the scale of Covid will occur again but it is likely that mechanism such as the TEF and NSS will have longer term consequences. The question is, what could and should the role of digital learning be moving forwards? In considering my own professional identity, I have three reflections: firstly, my own ability to negotiate and develop my own understanding of the meaning of change from colleagues’ differing contexts. Within this reflection I specifically reference the differing department and faculty perspectives upon the change I implement. Secondly, my own confidence – in making major change I sometimes considered wavering from the main aims of the changes implemented. This was the result of conversations with colleagues or uncovering an unrealised or new problem which had the potential to derail change and made me question my initial decisions. Finally, my own adaptability – in asking, negotiating and developing change with colleagues, I learnt to adapt and be adaptable. This has made me more open to the possibility of new ideas which arrive unexpectedly or ideas that can be incorporated into existing change initiatives. This more inclusive approach has made me consider the fluidity of identity in a professional role. In my own case, my role was initially framed around the need to be a ‘changemaker’ but the process itself highlighted the importance of listening and negotiating, changing my identity from implementer to co-developer. My final reflection is thus: when making change share the path with colleagues – much of the work conducted is hidden behind the virtual smoke and mirrors of servers, settings and pedagogy. This simply reinforces the power imbalance between the implementers and the recipients of change which is often experienced as diminished agency. However, if change is to be effective, the process must be more democratic. By co-developing change, it is possible to allow all parties a voice as a means of bringing together the changemakers, implementers and recipients.

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References Altmann, A., & Ebersberger, B. (2013). Universities in change: Managing higher education institutions in the age of globalization. Springer. Amiel, T., & Reeves, T. (2008). Design-based research and educational technology: Rethinking technology and the research agenda. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 11(4), 29–40. Barber, M., Bird, L., & Fleming, J. (2021). Gravity assist: Propelling higher education towards a brighter future: Report of the digital teaching and learning review [Barber review]. Card, D., & Smith, N. A. (2020). On consequentialism and fairness. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 3, 34. Christensen, C. M., McDonald, R., Altman, E. J., & Palmer, J. E. (2018). Disruptive innovation: An intellectual history and directions for future research. Journal of Management Studies, 55(7), 1043–1078. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12349 Eales-Reynolds, J., & Westwood, O. (2018). Teaching excellence in higher education: Lessons from the TEF. Independently published. Available eat: https://www.amazon.co.uk/TeachingExcellence-Higher-Education-Lessons/dp/1980759375/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=teaching+excel lence+from+higher+education&qid=1689336262&s=books&sr=1-1. Accessed 14 July 2023. Entwistle, N., & Waterson, S. (1988). Approaches to studying and levels of processing in university students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 58, 258–265. Flavin, M., & Quintero, V. (2018). UK higher education institutions’ technology-enhanced learning strategies from the perspective of disruptive innovation. Research in Learning Technology, 26. Gordon, N. (2014). Flexible pedagogies: Technology-enhanced learning. The Higher Education Academy, 10(2.1), 2052–5760. Henderson, M., Selwyn, N., & Aston, R. (2017). What works and why? Student perceptions of ‘useful’ digital technology in university teaching and learning. Studies in Higher Education, 42(8), 1567–1579. Janschitz, G., & Penker, M. (2022). How digital are ‘digital natives’ actually? Developing an instrument to measure the degree of digitalisation of university students – The DDS-index. Bulletin of Sociological Methodology, 153(1), 127–159. Joint Information Systems Committee. (2016). Managing change. [online] Available at: https:// www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/scaling-up-online-learning/managing-change. Accessed 23 Nov 2022. Kirkwood, A., & Price, L. (2014). Technology-enhanced learning and teaching in higher education: What is ‘enhanced’ and how do we know? A critical literature review. Learning, Media and Technology, 39(1), 6–36. Kotter, J. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business School Press. Marshall, S. (2010). Change, technology and higher education: Are universities capable of organisational change? Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 26(8). https://doi. org/10.14742/ajet.1018 National Student Survey. (2022). Available at: https://www.thestudentsurvey.com/. Accessed 23 Apr 2023. Office for Students. (2022). About the TEF. Available at: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/ advice-and-guidance/teaching/about-the-tef/. Accessed 12 July 2023. Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1–6. Reed, P., & Watmough, S. (2015). Hygiene factors: Using VLE minimum standards to avoid student dissatisfaction. E-learning and Digital Media, 12(1), 68–89. Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books. Van Casteren, W. (2017). The waterfall model and the agile methodologies: A comparison by project characteristics. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wilfred-VanCasteren/publication/313768860_The_Waterfall_Model_and_the_Agile_Methodologies_A_ comparison_by_project_characteristics_-_short/links/58a56b59a6fdcc0e07648bc9/The-Water fall-Model-and-the-Agile-Methodologies-A-comparison-by-project-characteristics-short.pdf. Accessed 12 July 2023.

A Democratic View of Professional Development in HE Jon Rainford

Background I have worked in education for the past 13 years. My career began as a teaching assistant in a SEN school before training as an Art and Design teacher focused on 14–19 education. I worked in secondary schools until 2014 when I moved to higher education to focus on work supporting access to higher education. More recently I have worked supporting the use of digital learning before moving into my current role as a Staff Tutor at The Open University. I have also undertaken consultancy work across the sector facilitating training for universities, UniConnect consortia and NEON. My research focuses primarily upon the tensions between policy and practice in widening participation and how we can better support historically underserved groups in higher education. I have been published in journals such as Perspectives, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Power and Education, and Educational Review. I recently co-authored The business of widening participation: Policy, practice and culture with Colin McCaig and Ruth Squire. This chapter reflects on a range of professional development activities I have facilitated with academic and professional services staff across the higher education sector. In doing so I will address the following key questions:

Key Questions What role does staff development play in developing professional identity? How can staff development be meaningfully co-constructed? J. Rainford (✉) Open University, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_7

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The Purpose of Professional Development Developing skills and competence can play an important role in developing professional identity. Whilst staff development can ensure the HE workforce is adaptable to current issues and technological advances, it is often something that is done to as opposed to with staff. Even in a sector which is driven by the importance of transformational learning experiences, rarely is professional development treated in this way and is often framed as training that is ‘delivered’ to staff to meet a specific need. Whilst there are alternative models which afford increased agency through co-construction of learning, often these can be more challenging to implement. Furthermore, for these to work well, they require active participation. This chapter uses a case study approach to explore how staff development can constrain or alternatively promote professional identity. In the process of becoming a professional and taking on a professional identity, staff development can play a key role. In particular confidence and competence can be provided by these activities (van Lankveld et al., 2017). Working with other professionals in a learning environment can facilitate understanding of how professional identities are enacted, in particular creating spaces for developing shared visions for what learning should look like can help individuals reflect upon their own professional identity (McCune, 2021). For example, whilst a development activity might be focused on the functionality of a new piece of software, professional identity development can take place through shared conversations as to how this new knowledge or skills can be integrated into their practices. However, professional development and its purpose is often contested and a complex issue. The managerialist approach to ensuring staff are appropriately ‘trained’ and professional development is ‘delivered’ to them is often in tension with the need for transformative learning experiences that are valued by staff. In light of this it could be framed as a ‘wicked’ problem – that is one where there is not a single solution and include several competing agendas (Peters, 2017). This chapter will first outline some of the relevant competing agendas that impact upon professional development activities before using three case studies to explore these in practice. Education professionals participating in staff development activities come with a wealth of expertise and are not empty vessels to be filled but active, engaged professionals who need the opportunity to explore how the development activity can support the development of their own professional practices. Yet many professional development activities are often framed primarily in terms of procedural training or knowledge dissemination and fail to acknowledge or engage with the expertise of these professionals. As such they often add to workload and pressure (McCune, 2021). The three case studies of professional development that follow consciously sought to resist a ‘delivery’ model and attempted to co-construct them with staff in a meaningful way. The reflections that follow explore the challenges and opportunities this created and how three different audiences of education professionals valued or resisted this co-constructed approach. In doing so, the chapter

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offers thoughts on the challenges this poses for meaningful co-constructed development that can have a positive impact upon professional identities.

Who Am I, What Have I Been and What Do I Believe? The case studies draw from autoethnographic reflections on my own practice. Autoethnography allows us to take our experiences and use them as an object of study for making sense of the world around us (Holman-Jones, 2005). As I have argued previously (Rainford, 2016), whilst autoethnography is a valuable tool, it is important to remember Tedlock’s (2005: 4676) warning that autoethnography requires us to balance the gaze inwards (the autobiography part) and the gaze outwards (the ethnographic part). I will therefore take a moment to shift the focus to an internal gaze to situate myself as a facilitator of professional development and to explore my own identity as an education professional. My professional identity at the core is as an educator. Whilst my role has drifted between being classroom teaching focused, strategic, and now a more holistic role of developing academics, at the core the desire to educate has been a constant. Central to my identity as an educator is the belief in the transformative potential of educational interactions. My pedagogical approach is underpinned by the importance of learner agency and making classrooms (both physical and digital) into transformative spaces (Hooks, 1994). This is important to acknowledge as it directly impacts my style and form of facilitation. My development activities are participatory by default, however I have been in positions where I have been required to ‘deliver’ institutionally developed development activities which are often more didactic in nature and leave me feeling unsettled. Reflection and reflective practice have also been central to my own identity development. This has required a conscious carving out time and space for both reflection in and on action, to use Schön’s (2003) differentiation and to date I have been fortunate that in all my roles I have been afforded the time and space to do this, something which is not always the case for other education professionals. My background as a social scientist also shapes my approach to reflection. I see evidence as key to reflection; both from my own practical experiences and formalised feedback mechanisms and data. Additionally, I am aware that my background and identity may be different from the staff engaging with professional development. Education professionals may be subject experts but may lack formal pedagogical training. This is more common in further and higher education and for educators working in spaces outside of the classroom. For participation and outreach work or those in non-academic roles it can be rare to have had formal pedagogical training. Through my experiences of facilitation, this absence of formal training can often correlate with a belief that the primary focus of professional development should be on being given knowledge or a skill by the trainer. This contrasts with my own belief that we need to first develop an understanding of why we do something before we focus upon the how and can be the cause of some of the tensions that the following case studies reveal.

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It is also important to reflect upon and acknowledge that the education professionals I have facilitated training for have an extremely wide range of professional expertise. For some, much of their development has been focused on informal forms of professional and on the job development. Others have extensive practical experience underpinned by formal academic professional development. This is an important point of reflection as there is something inherently different about working with professionals who understand how and why learning takes place versus those who want to just know how to do something for a particular purpose in the classroom. This positionality potentially creates tensions in practice. My own perspective here is that everyone in a classroom should be an active participant (Hooks, 1994) and that education professionals should first understand why something is valuable to them, which often might be different to the expectation of my participants. Therefore, if education professionals arrived at my development sessions wanting to passively consume instruction, this may result in disengagement or frustration on both parts, impacting the potential effectiveness of the professional development.

From Staff Development to Professional Development To examine the role of professional development, it is important to offer a conceptualisation of this in the context of this chapter. A useful starting point is Stefani’s (2003) definition of staff development which focuses upon improving capabilities and practice of educators. De Rijdt et al. (2013) in their review of staff development studies used a working definition that also included coherence, and focused upon knowledge, skills, and conceptual ideas as key aspects. Whilst the literature often uses staff and professional development interchangeably, I argue that professional development suggests something more focused upon supporting the development of an individual’s professional identity or expertise. Delineating exactly what an educational professional in higher education is can be challenging to grapple with. Whilst many individuals work within a role involving teaching and learning, some will identify as professionals but others may not. Whitchurch (2019) has previously deconstructed the idea of what it means to be a professional in higher education and highlighted the challenge of fitting traditional notions of professionalism (defined by pre-defined codes, knowledge, and professional bodies) to a sector diverse both within and across roles. This is amplified by the tensions between generalist and specialist staff who may have differing views on their identities even when employed in comparable roles. What is needed for this professionalism is expertise and it often through professional development activities that this can be developed. Yet being a professional and inhabiting that professional identity goes beyond gaining expertise and involves a shift in identity to viewing oneself as a professional. Despite this central role professional development can play in identity formation, associated activities are often seen as something that needs to be done over and

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above the role an individual is employed to do. As Van Schalkwyk et al. (2015) highlighted in their research in South Africa, there can be discordance between the provision and encouragement to participate in activities. They found professional development was not within the culture of departments and often fell to individual choice, a choice often driven by activities with immediate, measurable impact upon practice. Professional development is also challenging to define when it is not neatly packaged within formal boundaries. De Rijdt et al. (2013) conducted a review of literature on staff development in higher education which examined literature across management, HR, psychology, and education. In this review they included both formal and informal forms of staff development. The importance of more informal forms of development should not be understated, however the case studies focus on formal professional development. This is because I can reflect upon what takes place in my formal workshops whereas the informal elements that are often outside of my purview though none the less important.

Tensions in Professional Development Design and Facilitation The three case studies reflect upon a range of activities related to teaching and learning with a variety of education professionals working in higher education providers (HEPs). These professionals include staff on academic contracts who are more likely to formally identify as education professionals, through to professional services staff who may have some of their role devoted to teaching or facilitating learning but may in some cases not formally identify themselves as education professionals. This overlap between the academic and professional in higher education has previously been termed the ‘third space’ (Whitchurch, 2019). Some of the professionals likely to inhabit this space involved in the three cases include academic skills staff, library staff, and widening participation outreach staff. The use of the term education professional therefore is cast widely and has been placed upon them by me as opposed to self-defined. Reflecting upon my role in professional development in these three cases, I do so from three different positions: For case study one, I was working as the widening participation co-ordinator in a shared services team supporting a number of HE providers; case study two, a freelance academic expert working with a national organisation; and case study three, I was employed as a digital learning development officer within that institution. In each of these positions there are different power relationships and levels of tacit knowledge about the context in which the educators are working. These factors therefore may have also impacted the way in which education professionals engaged with the professional development activities. There are often tensions within professional development. These tensions are between the wants and needs of education professionals, the wants and needs of

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Fig. 1 Tensions in the focus of professional development

institutions, and the understandings of the most transformative way to support those aims by those designing and conducting professional development. This can result in tensions between the institution and educator, institution and facilitator, the facilitator and educator (Fig. 1).

Institutional Tensions To support national or institutional policy change, professional development is often required. This can be in terms of developing new knowledge, ways of being or understanding of a new process or technology. As will be reflected upon in case study three, the introduction of a new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is one example of this. To ensure that new technologies can be effectively used by staff or that new policies can be enacted, some level of professional development activity is needed. However, this need is often in tension with the wants of the education professionals. They may feel they have limited time or workload capacity to engage with these activities. Alternatively, they may feel this change is unnecessary, unwanted, or a challenge to their sense of professional identity. This can lead to resistance in the way such top-down professional development initiatives are engaged with due to the tension between institutional directives and professional autonomy. Likewise, there can be tensions between the best way to support professional development and the constraints or resources afforded to the facilitator. Again, this tension is often a limitation placed on the professional agency of the facilitator planning and facilitating the professional development.

Facilitator-Participant Tensions Within the provision of professional development there can be tensions at a conceptual level between expectations of education professionals as to what a facilitator conceptualises as the need and the best way to address this. These tensions are likely

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to be based on preconceptions from both sides on the value and anticipated impact of the professional development. Whitchurch (2019) also highlights how the location of development activities can have an impact upon perceptions and engagement. Here this also encapsulates the issue of agency. If the individual has actively chosen to engage with a development activity, then the depth of engagement is likely to be greater.

Educational Professional’s Agency There is also the potential for internal tensions within professionals’ minds when they are required to engage in development activities between what that individual may need in terms of development and what they believe they need. This can be particularly noticeable in both very experienced and very inexperienced staff. For the most experienced, when new regulations or guidelines are brought in, this may require engaging in professional development that they may feel is unnecessary or undermines their professional expertise. Therefore, especially if these staff are time poor, it also then means they are having to deprioritise activities they feel would be a more beneficial use of their time. This can result in feeling their professional agency is challenged whilst potentially having their time wasted. For less experienced professionals, there may be similar concerns from not having enough time to focus on their immediate concerns. Whilst professional development activities might be essential to their long-term development and thus their identity as a professional, this may be seen as detracting from what they feel they need to secure their emerging professional identity.

Professional Development in Practice Through three different yet complementary case studies, I will demonstrate how some of the issues highlighted above play out in practice and what can be learnt from that. The first two case studies focus on education professionals who can be broadly described as ‘academic related staff’ who deliver primarily pre-entry widening participation work. In contrast, case study three focuses primarily on academic staff teaching on higher education courses. Whilst on the surface these may seem to be distinct groups, I would argue that all these educational professionals have pedagogical approaches as central to their professional role and thus each case study has something to offer related to how different approaches to professional development may differently impact educational professionals’ identities when they may not self-define as professionals.

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Case Study 1: Developing Evaluation Skills The first reflection draws upon training facilitated in 2016–2017 to develop the evaluation skills of non-evaluators – that is staff without formal training in research or evaluation methods. Whilst on the surface evaluation may not seem central to pedagogic practice, developing methods to track and measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning activities when they do not lead to formal assessment is important to enable critical reflection. Whilst conducting the training, I was employed within a small specialist higher education institution as a Widening Participation Co-ordinator. The staff I worked with were all extremely experienced dance, drama and circus practitioners but had limited skills in evaluating their work (Rainford & Baptista, 2022). Working as an education professional without the benchmarks of formal assessment means that different mechanisms are needed to ensure its effectiveness. There is of course a tacit reflection in action and on action, but this is often not systematic or easy to evidence. To counter this within widening participation, there has been an increased focus upon formal evaluation mechanisms. Whilst evaluation has increasingly become a central part of pre-entry widening participation work over the past decade (Crockford, 2022), in large higher education providers, it is most commonly delegated to staff in evaluation roles or to external evaluators. In small specialist providers, there is often no available resource to facilitate this and thus evaluation also becomes part of the role of the educator. This does offer some distinct advantages in that embedding evaluation within practice can enable the education professional to have greater awareness of the effectiveness of what they are doing and to better develop their practice over time. This is therefore likely to have a positive impact on their professional identity. However, to do this in a robust and systematic way, these educators need professional development and support to enable them to evaluate their practice effectively. As might be anticipated, some staff undertaking this development activity saw the value of this whereas others saw attendance as an act of compliance, something the institution had mandated but not central to their professional needs. This aligns with my own research into widening participation practices (Rainford, 2019) which highlighted that often staff working in an outreach role consider evaluation to be outside of their remit. Within this case study I was positioned as both a facilitator but also in a position of institutional authority as the widening participation co-ordinator, therefore there were sometimes tensions between me as a representative of the institution and the participants – in others, a tension between myself as the facilitator and the participant. To mitigate these tensions and to gain buy-in from these staff, this required adopting an approach to professional development that constructed the development in a way that was mutually beneficial. This was done through a conscious concern to maximise the value of the workshop to ensure that they left with tangible progress towards being able to evaluate their practices in a way that was likely to work alongside their existing professional identities as opposed to being in tension with it.

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Traditional approaches to evaluation training might have focused heavily on the theoretical basis for evaluation or on practical training on how to use specific tools but in a way disengaged from practice. Whilst this type of training can be valuable, doing so assumes the time and space for educators to be able to reflect upon and put this training into practice. In this context, a different approach was needed. The training adopted a project-based learning approach over the one-day intensive session with each stage of the training being applied to an activity the educators already delivered. This enabled the learning to be immediately used in a very practical way and for myself as the facilitator to work with the professionals in working through how to select methods of evaluation that could be embedded in their existing professional work. For example, one educator focused upon an intervention to improve boys’ engagement in dance and developed both a theory of change and a specific survey tool to evaluate it within the professional development session. Therefore, the development enabled the professionals to not only gain knowledge and skills but in a way that was integrative to their practice. By adopting this co-constructed and practice-focused approach which focusing on the values and benefits for the education professionals, it enabled them to see how this could genuinely benefit their practice.

Case Study 2: Moving Widening Participation Outreach Online This second reflection similarly involves staff who facilitate university outreach work. In early 2020, many educators working within pre-entry outreach roles were required to consider how they could transform their programmes of primarily face to face teaching into online provision. As such I was approached to design and develop a programme of professional development. The course ran three times over the year and involved nearly 200 participants in total. This professional development was also designed to engage the participants in using the knowledge and skills actively within the training. This was accomplished though creating spaces for developing resources and plans for activities they could use in their own teaching. Whilst there was structure provided, they were allowed to focus on content that fitted within their own professional context. For the first cohort, this ran for 5 days spread over a period of 7 weeks. Two intensive days in week one and three and then a final day in week seven. The training was also developed around a community of practice approach (Wenger, 2010). Running on a TEAMS platform, the participants were encouraged to share and discuss ideas with other participants between sessions. Across the three iterations of the course, the feedback was very positive with most participants feeling it was beneficial and valuable. The impact upon the work in the sector was also positive through the translation of what was developed in the training into their own settings. Yet in feedback, the time and space for this collaborative

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working as a community was less well valued. Some participants offered feedback that they would have preferred being given more knowledge and information as opposed to time to apply that knowledge. This was also reflected in the uptake and engagement as a group outside of the synchronous sessions. During the three cohorts of the professional development course, we tried several different variations upon the practice tasks with varying levels of individual and group work, however in most cases, it was the sessions devoted to this where participation dropped. During the 7 weeks, we set several homework tasks and, again, these were engaged with to varying levels. From the course feedback, it was clear that more value was attributed to the taught sessions over the group work. Therefore, I would argue there was a tension between what I and the other facilitator felt were important and what the participants had placed the importance on. By offering space for co-constructed and participant led activities, some felt that they were not gaining the expertise they wanted ‘delivered’ to them in a ‘ready to go’ package. The more limited engagement outside of the formally timetabled sessions could also be attributed to tensions in the time available to the participants to engage in this with it being placed at a lower level of priority than immediate operational concerns.

Case Study 3: Not Just Changing VLEs but Changing Pedagogies The final case study forms part of a project I was involved in leading to equip staff with the skills and knowledge to use a new virtual learning environment effectively. There were many issues raised within this process, especially as it took place during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic which I have covered more extensively elsewhere (Pike & Rainford, 2022). However, this reflection will focus more narrowly on the staff development aspect of the project. Like case study two, we wanted to not only provide knowledge of tools and techniques to the participants, but we wanted to offer a structure to enable those education professionals to use the skills and knowledge directly to inform their practices in a supported way where they could have individual support and feedback as needed. Thus, we developed an asynchronous online self-directed training which was to be supplemented by live question and answer sessions in which we could help those professionals work through the challenges they might have faced in using that training within their professional practice. What we quickly found though was that the engagement with the self-directed material was limited and that staff were coming to the live sessions expecting to have content ‘delivered’ to them. They saw that hour as their ‘training session’ as opposed to being there to support and enhance the asynchronous element. In exploring these issues with staff, we found that one of the big tensions was in our focus as facilitators on how to think about the new VLE pedagogically versus the educators needs to

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know what ‘tools’ there were and what the new VLE could do in practical terms. This tension suggested that they wanted to work out how to fit their existing practices within the new space rather than engaging with the development to reconsider how they might enact their professional identity within this new environment. One of the most interesting observations from focus groups we did following this change was the comment from staff that they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Therefore, in this interaction, they might have been minimising their expertise as educational professionals and expecting us as technological experts to tell them what they needed to know, thus making a co-constructed learning environment in tension with their expectations.

The Ghosts in the Machine: A Barrier of Mindset? In this final section I will draw together some of the key issues from the three case studies with the potential tensions highlighted earlier in the chapter. These tensions can often be seen to relate to a mismatch between expectation and the reality of the professional development activity. Yet, these expectations are rarely ones that as a facilitator I had set. My position as a facilitator keen to co-construct learning clearly created some facilitator-educator tensions. Whilst my goal across all three cases was to fuse the educator’s role as experts in their own practice and with my role to develop their practices in a specific area, the relative success of this was variable. In all three cases, there were some educators who valued this approach and found it beneficial. However, in case study three there was several vocal participants who felt this approach was unhelpful. In framing the educators as experts in their own professional practice, this seemed to create tensions with their perceived lack of knowledge and the need for the facilitator to be the expert, disseminating knowledge to them. This led to a particular tension in their desire for a technocentric knowledge-based training as opposed to something that was far more pedagogical in nature that we provided. This could be in part down to their limited beliefs in their own expertise in an unfamiliar context and thus a deferral to the facilitator as expert to ‘deliver’ knowledge to them. The resistance to co-constructed professional development was also evident to some extent in case study two, where content focused sessions were valued more highly than the spaces for using the knowledge in the context of their own professional practice. Again, to some extent the lack of acknowledgement of their expertise may have been an issue. Compared to case study three, this group had far fewer staff who had had previous pedagogic training so developing online courses of learning may have felt significantly outside of their existing professional identities, again meaning a deferral to the facilitator as expert and placing a value in that. Only in case study one was a facilitator-educator tension less clearly present. Here, in contrast, not only were the educators informed of the project-based approach, but time and care were taken to explain why this was being used and

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how it was beneficial to them. This likely led to better initial commitment. Whilst case study two and three both had elements of this, they were informed of this retrospectively, after they had signed up to the workshops and thus the participants already had some form of expectations. In case study one, the participants also came with a much stronger professional identity. All the participants were experts in arts outreach and knew I was not. This meant the power dynamic was much more decentralised and generally focused on how we could use our skills and knowledge together to reach the best outcome. In contrast, for the other two workshops, generally the participants came wanting to take knowledge from an expert facilitator which meant there was likely to be more emphasis on the distance between their expectations and the reality of the development activity as they were framing professional development as something ‘delivered’ to them, not an activity they had equal ownership of. The focus in all three case studies of a desire to be trained to use tools again created tensions, some explicit, some less so. Whilst institutions often acknowledge the need for professional development, especially to accompany policy or strategic change, this is often focused on discreet training ‘sessions’. This attendance-based approach to professional development can both lend itself to knowledge dissemination approaches but also lead to the mindset that development activities are something to attend or tick off. This also means that the time set aside for them can be restricted to that attendance time. As in case study two, it can be seen how this removed the space for educators to engage between the session activities that were designed to provide the space for them to develop and embed their learning into their professional work, thus shaping their professional identities. This issue is not unique to formal professional development activities.

The Limitation of Professional Development’s Ability to Shape Professional Identity These reflections point towards the fact that professional development can be framed in different ways. It is these different framings that can limit its effectiveness despite facilitators designing training intended to be meaningfully co-constructed with time and space to not only acquire knowledge but to use this in a professional context in hope that it will positively impact professional identity. This can, as has been seen above fall short for several reasons. Firstly, if formal professional development is reduced to hours of attendance at an organisational level, it can create the mentality that professional development is something to be completed as opposed to a transformative experience intended to impact professional identity. Secondly, when facilitators try to offer something more suited to shaping professional identities and thus is not what is expected, it can lead to a mismatch of expectations between the facilitator and educator which might potentially create frustration or disengagement. And thirdly, even when the importance of reflective practice in education is

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considered, rarely are professionals given the time and space to do this, with timetabled activities also focused on student contact over self-reflection.

Conclusion As I began, some of the issues raised in this chapter are ‘wicked’ problems, in that there is not a single solution and include several competing agendas (Peters, 2017). Whilst calling this a wicked problem might be challenged as conceptual overreach, the complexity of the interaction between the wants and needs of education professionals, institutions and the professional knowledge and understanding of facilitators of professional development is clearly complex and not solvable in one way. The focus on learning design to encourage and support meaningful co-constructed development approaches for example can be seen to fall short, even with the best intentions of a facilitator as it requires the institutional conditions in terms of time, space, and value to allow education professionals to fully embrace this approach. Therefore, this places significant limits upon professional development’s ability to shape professional identity. If it is seen as something to do rather than something that can shape a professional, it is more likely to be completed and ticked off as opposed to being engaged with in a way that has the potential for professional transformation. The institutional agendas and individual education professional needs are in my mind linked and this requires structural change that would provide the impetus for individuals to have the capacity to rethink their expectations of professional development. In providing space and valuing reflection as a key element of workload could change how professionals value this key skill. I would also question if this were something that can be addressed from the ground up or if we need to think systemically about how we value this.

References Crockford, J. (2022). The challenging business of WP evaluation. In C. McCaig, J. Rainford, & R. Squire (Eds.), The business of widening participation: Policy, practice and culture. Emerald. De Rijdt, C., Stes, A., van der Vleuten, C., & Dochy, F. (2013). Influencing variables and moderators of transfer of learning to the workplace within the area of staff development in higher education: Research review. Educational Research Review, 8, 48–74. Holman-Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Sage. Hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. McCune, V. (2021). Academic identities in contemporary higher education: Sustaining identities that value teaching. Teaching in Higher Education, 26(1), 20–35. Peters, B. G. (2017). What is so wicked about wicked problems? A conceptual analysis and a research program. Policy and Society, 36(3), 385–396. Pike, D., & Rainford, J. (2022). We close on Friday – A case study pivot to online learning and beyond at a UK higher education institution. In M. G. Jamil & D. A. Morley (Eds.), Agile

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learning environments amid disruption: Evaluating academic innovations in higher education during COVID-19. Palgrave Macmillan. Rainford, J. (2016). Becoming a doctoral researcher in a digital world: Reflections on the role of Twitter for reflexivity and the internal conversation. E-Learning and Digital Media, 13(1–2), 99–105. Rainford, J. (2019). Equal practices? A comparative study of widening participation practices in pre and post-1992 higher education institutions. PhD diss., Staffordshire University, Stoke-onTrent. Rainford, J., & Baptista, V. (2022). Using theory-based approaches to embed evaluation within a small specialist performing arts institution. In S. Dent, A. Mountford-Zimdars, & C. Burke (Eds.), Theory of change (pp. 81–99). Emerald Publishing Limited. Schön, D. A. (2003). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Ashgate. Stefani, L. (2003). What is staff and educational development? In D. Baume & P. Kahn (Eds.), A guide to staff and educational development. Routledge. Tedlock, B. (2005). The observation of participation and the emergence of public ethnography. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Sage. Van Lankveld, T., Schoonenboom, J., Volman, M., Croiset, G., & Beishuizen, J. (2017). Developing a teacher identity in the university context: A systematic review of the literature. Higher Education Research & Development, 36(2), 325–342. Van Schalkwyk, S., Leibowitz, B., Herman, N., & Farmer, J. (2015). Reflections on professional learning: Choices, context and culture. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 46, 4–10. Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: The career of a concept. In C. Blackmore (Ed.), Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179–198). Springer. Whitchurch, C. (2019). Being a higher education professional today: Working in a third space (pp. 1–11). Springer.

When to Show the Way, When to Lead the Way and When to Step Away – Exploring the Roles and Identities of Teacher Educators in Post-compulsory Education Carol Thompson

and Elaine Battams

Background The authors are teacher educators working within a university/college collaboration supporting new and existing and staff within post-compulsory education (PCE) to achieve qualified status. The authors have complementary roles; one being the direct support for a cohort of trainees, the other overseeing the programme as a whole. Both of these roles have a single overarching aim, which is to prepare new teachers for their professional roles within PCE. With more than 60 years’ experience between them, the authors are well placed to reflect on the ways in which PCE teachers, and PCE teacher educators take part in the process of teacher education and how this experience informs their professional identities. Professional identity has been described as the way in which one might combine values, attributes and experiences in terms of a profession (Ibarra, 1999). It is an important aspect of seeing ourselves within the profession, rather than simply being associated with it. Such positioning is particularly challenging for those in training as they are often on the periphery of professional practice and the point at which they ‘become’ a professional is not always easy to recognise. Underpinned by research carried out with trainee teachers, this chapter explores their journeys and reflects on the impact this has on the identities of the teacher educators supporting them. The following key questions will be used to frame the reflections.

C. Thompson (✉) University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected] E. Battams Barnfield College, Luton, UK e-mail: elaine.battams@barnfield.ac.uk © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_8

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Key Questions How do trainee teachers learn how to be, how to act and how to understand their roles? What specific steps do they take on their journey to becoming a teacher? How do these journeys influence teacher educators’ professional identities?

Introduction As with many professions, teaching is influenced by numerous stakeholders, including the Department for Education (DfE), the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), parents, governors, unions, politicians and the general public. Education, like other national services, is a hot topic and everyone has an opinion on what it should look like, as well as the many ways in which it apparently fails (despite much evidence to the contrary, OECD, 2022/PISA, 2018). Teaching can be viewed as a controversial occupation; it is one in which professional players are subject to regular judgement, perhaps rightly so; it is an important undertaking. Teachers play an active role in the shaping of young minds and form the scaffold of every education system, they: ‘[. . .] play a significant part in liberating or constraining thought and in doing so can enhance or limit freedom’ (Thompson & Wolstencroft, 2021: introduction). Despite, or perhaps because of, this privileged position, teachers themselves are subject to much scrutiny and for the most part are expected to adopt a stance of compliance in order to meet the requirements of multiple masters. In addition, the continued drive to improve education as a whole has brought with it a stream of new initiatives which invariably lead to further guidelines informing teaching practice. The firm framework on which teachers must base their classroom activity, leaves very little room for deviation. Even more concerning is the way in which initiative-based practice has taken root, as Bennett says: ‘values become facts which are taught and propagated in educational training establishments. . .’ and ‘Teachers are blown hither and thither on the tides of policy churn, eroded by the ebb and flow, diminished, sapped and de-professionalised’ (Bennett, 2013: 2). It is perhaps inevitable that the creation of a powerful inspection regime, alongside the production of professional standards will enhance control mechanisms, which in turn require increased quality assurance processes to monitor compliance. Of course, there is nothing wrong with striving for improvements, indeed there is no argument to do otherwise . . . so what’s the problem? One issue is the narrow way in which guidelines for practice are approached. Who has decided that these are right? And even if they are. . . for how long? As Coffield argues, the current system of inspection, whilst having some merit, is overall ‘unreliable, invalid and at times unjust.’ (Coffield, 2017: 69) The same could be said for the current drive to introject an ‘evidence-base’ populated almost entirely by quantitative studies, often focussed on the minutiae of practice. Given the diverse and complex education system we are

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blessed with, is there ever going to be an ideal approach to teaching? One noticeable impact of all of this is the way in which teachers’ identities have become wrapped up in standards and protocols, rather than values, attributes and experiences. It seems that professional identity is prescribed rather than acquired. For trainee teachers in post-compulsory education, navigating identity is a challenge. They must blend the conflicting roles of student and teacher, as well as assimilate these with previous identities in their specialist areas. Many enter the profession via vocational rather than academic routes, so in previous lives may have identified as hairdressers, plumbers or engineers. As a part of this process, trainees complete a teaching placement where they are expected to integrate into already established teams. As ‘outsiders’ within these settings they do not always experience high levels of support and their involvement in established teams can be limited by their position. On the periphery they are seen as not quite a teacher – not fully a student. En route to becoming a teacher, individuals do encounter several hurdles and a significant barrier was presented by the de-regulation of the sector (DBIS, 2012). In practical terms this meant that teachers in PCE did not require full teaching qualifications – a move which set them apart from any other phase of English education. This could be viewed as an overall ‘de-professionalisation’ of the role which may lead to the marketisation of PCE initial teacher training, with further implications for the overall quality of provision (Lucas, 2013). This move also resurrected the debate about whether or not teaching overall should be defined as a profession. De-regulation and the perceived need to control teachers’ activities may suggest that the role simply involves following a set of guidelines, no professional judgement to be made, therefore no professional title to be had! This is not helped by the somewhat confused public perception of teachers and teaching. To illustrate this, we would like to share a personal story: I was in a meeting with a mortgage advisor trying to finalise the documentation for the purchase of my new house. As expected, there were questions about income and job role and one particularly interesting question related to how you might categorise your occupation – the choices were something along the lines of: Professional Technical Administrative Skilled Operative Thinking this was an interesting question, I decided it might be a good idea to debate the listings so asked the advisor: ‘How do you define professional?’ The response was . . .‘Well, for example, my boyfriend is an electrician, he had to do quite a long training for his job, so he would fit into the professional category.’ She then added: ‘So . . . shall we go for the next one down?’ And there it was, with a flick of the pen, the role that (contrary to the belief of the mortgage advisor) I had also undertaken a lot of training for, was firmly placed in the technical category. (adapted from Thompson & Wolstencroft, 2021: 21)

When faced with external controls and perhaps unfair perceptions of what teachers do – it is not surprising that many find it difficult to articulate their professional identity and yet, this is something which is central to developing a deep

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understanding of the role. As Sachs says: ‘It provides a framework for teachers to construct their own ideas of ‘how to be’, ‘how to act’ and ‘how to understand’ within their work and in society. (Sachs, 2005: 15)

Change – Learning How to Be The process of ‘learning how to be’, is usually embedded within teacher training programmes through activities such as reflective practice and discussion. It is also alluded to within the professional standards for the sector. These were initially composed as part of the requirement of Qualified Teacher Learning and Skills status (QTLS), the official equivalent to the more well-known Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). However, if teachers in PCE are not required to be qualified then they are also not required to evidence the standards and, outside of programmes of initial teacher training, the standards themselves have very little impact on teaching practice. Interestingly, these too make no reference to professional identity. Despite using the word ‘professional’ in each of the three domains: ‘professional values and attributes’, ‘professional knowledge and understanding’, ‘professional skills’, there is no mention of professional identity. The closest connection is a reference to the teaching role and responsibilities and . . .‘how these are influenced by legal, regulatory, institutional and ethical contexts.’ A nod to ethics but no reference to how identity might be informed by individual values and beliefs. (Education and Training Foundation, 2014) Teacher identity is a dynamic process; it is experienced at an individual level and is dependent on the working context. As suggested by Cordingley et al. (2019: 19) professional identity is formed through the development of a ‘personal professional pathway’ in which individuals adapt prescribed professional attitudes, knowledge and skills according to their context and work demands. However, to allow any form of adaptation, they must be afforded the space to create their own beliefs and values, something which is not currently evident within teaching roles. Trainees experience a complex process of change as they take steps towards becoming a teacher. This is especially true in PCE as many will still identify with previous roles and may have to step back in order to unlearn or adapt embedded values and beliefs before they can move in the desired direction. This act of letting go is often uncomfortable for individuals as it requires them to rethink aspects of their roles, perhaps even aspects of ‘self’ in order to accommodate new learning. This could be likened to crossing a threshold from one state to another. In doing so, trainees often experience some confusion as they are beginning to assimilate their theoretical and practical experiences as well as trying to position themselves in the role of teacher. Such confusion might be described as an ‘in-between, liminal state’, and as suggested by Meyer and Land (2003) one which can be experienced as ‘troublesome’ especially when theoretical learning seems counter-intuitive when compared with classroom practice. Yet, these stepping-stones (or as Meyer and Land would term them, ‘threshold concepts’) also provide a route to mastery of a

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subject and once integrated can be transformational. As one participant commented: ‘It’s like a feeling of ‘I can fly, I can do this, Eureka, I’m there!” For Meyer and Land, threshold concepts are irreversible in that once learned, they cannot be unlearned. They are also integrative in that they show how one topic links to the next. But what specifically are these concepts? The answer is. . . that depends on the subject; in economics an example would be the concept of opportunity cost. A fundamental aspect of economics is the notion of choice; individuals, groups and organisations all have to make choices and when making comparisons between options, we consider opportunity cost (or alternative cost) to help make a decision. Because no-one (or no single organisation) can have everything, choice and opportunity cost are threshold concepts in the subject. There is an element of being counter-intuitive . . . the idea that there is a cost to something we are not choosing somehow seems wrong but it does emphasise the importance of making the right choice. Other disciplines, such as biology will also have key ideas which form the gateway to the subject, for example: variation, randomness, uncertainty and scale (Batzli et al., 2016). If such concepts exist within teaching what might they be? Perhaps that teachers have a significant influence over learners’ learning or that what students learn is more important than what teachers teach? Perhaps a threshold concept is that we learn at different paces and in different ways? Or that learning does not happen in isolation? For teacher educators, the dilemma is that learning is often situated and what becomes a threshold concept in one setting may not be in the next. If we were able to create a definitive list that formed a framework for all teaching we would have to decide which setting to base our choices on and in doing so, we automatically exclude some settings and some teachers. In many ways the threshold concepts related to teaching have already been set out – we only need to look at Professional Standards for QTLS and there they are in black and white. . .using the word ‘professional’ liberally and not making reference to identity.

Overcoming Hurdles – Learning How to Act When reflecting on their experiences, student teachers often consider how they overcome specific hurdles to reach their goals. In the research underpinning this chapter, the participants’ accounts were littered with emotional highs and lows further heightened by the pandemic where the norms of daily activity were turned upside down and where potential support systems became distanced. Many of the obstacles highlighted in the data were related to the practical aspects of teaching. Participants expressed concern about the ‘pressures of the pandemic’ such as the unexpected demands of online teaching and lack of technical skills, as well as the additional workload created by having to upload materials to a virtual learning environment (VLE). Interestingly, all of these concerns relate to things embedded within the teacher education programme. Student teachers are expected to develop their digital skills and most settings do require them to use a VLE to share

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materials. . . so why were these participants feeling so challenged? It might lead teacher educators to question how effective their own teaching has been and whether or not they have encouraged their trainees to develop the resilience required to adapt to more challenging situations. Or perhaps the pandemic had provided a forum to express frustrations that weren’t otherwise shared? Maybe it simply provided additional opportunity for reflection at a time when participants were feeling constrained? Further concerns related to how trainees’ own learners were engaging (or not) with the online experience as well as how difficult it was to change teaching style once back in the classroom and adhering to social distancing guidelines. Again, apart from one or two responses illustrating how the pandemic had helped build confidence in different ways of teaching, the focus remained on the negative aspects of the change and the problematic situations it created. Most of the respondents it seemed, were well aware of the limitations of their learning, less so of the need to take responsibility for it. A key aim of the research underpinning this chapter was to illustrate the steps taken from being a trainee to becoming a teacher in the hope that this information would support the creation of an effective programme of teacher education. As outlined in previous research (Fuller & Brown, 1975, Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1980) there is evidence of distinct stages of development. However, in contrast to previous models, the data suggested that this is not a linear process. Trainees do not appear to take incremental steps towards becoming a teacher; their route is far more circuitous and can be encapsulated in nine steps: Tentative steps – decision to undertake training is taken which is experienced as a confusing and anxious time. Expressing concerns – evident in the early stages of training and focussed on concern about own abilities and the impact of ‘getting it wrong.’ Playing safe – at this point trainees are very aware they are being judged by others and a decision is made to follow ‘rules’ for teaching outlined by tutors and mentors. Sense of belonging – recognition that others are part of the journey and can provide support. This often represented a ‘turning point’ when trainees felt more able to take ownership of their learning. Balancing demands – experience and organisation protocols begin to influence practice and the theoretical aspects of the programme may seem troublesome and ‘at odds’ with practical teaching. Building confidence – at this point trainees can use feedback from others and critically evaluate their practice. They also reflect on how theory might inform what they do. Stretching boundaries – trainees feel more in control of their teaching and have the confidence to take ‘informed risks’. This is often the point at which more creative approaches to teaching are tested out as the trainees begin to develop their own teaching personas.

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Becoming a teacher

Sense of belonging Integrating ideas

Stretching boundaries

Playing safe

Tentative steps Expressing concerns

Building confidence

Fig. 1 Stages of teacher development

Integrating ideas – by this point there is a level of confidence in classroom practice and familiarity with theoretical concepts and some synthesis between theory and practice. Becoming a teacher – there is some awareness of own agency as trainees begin to form their understanding of the wider impact of the role and begin to see themselves as teachers. An outline of this journey is included in Fig. 1.

What Does It Mean to Be a Teacher? Learning How to Understand As a part of this research, participants were asked what being a teacher meant to them. Not surprisingly, many mentioned the more altruistic aspects of the role such as ‘helping others’ or ‘being able to support’ but did not embrace the role’s wider influence such as the impact on the economy or society. For most, professional identity was firmly linked to their formal occupation, and they felt they could not identify as being a teacher until they were employed in a teaching role; for example, one participant said: ‘I would argue that I feel like a teacher but without the logins and the full responsibility [. . .] there isn’t that recognition, so I wouldn’t call myself a teacher.’ Other responses questioned the ‘professional’ element of the role and in

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line with some of the literature, one participant described it as a ‘craft’ (Sachs, 2010), another cited the need for continuous development: ‘I think I view it like I am always in training. I wouldn’t call myself a professional. . . because you have always got to be developing.’ According to Fuller & Brown’s model, many of the participants showed concern for self and task (Fuller & Brown, 1975). For these trainees, the focus was firmly fixed on the support they received during their training and how this helped them to achieve their personal aims. Very few considered the knowledge they had gained and aside from copying what their own teachers did in the classroom, there appeared to be very little recognition of how the teacher education programme had influenced their teaching. Indeed, aside from the emotional support provided, most accounts (perhaps unknowingly) raised questions about how the programme had not prepared them for a challenging situation. This in turn, might prompt us to consider the purpose of teacher education overall and the role of teacher educators.

What Does It Mean to Be a Teacher Educator? Anecdotal evidence suggests that for many teacher educators (TEds) in postcompulsory education, the role was one which evolved, rather than something individuals sought out – as if it happened by accident, perhaps a harmless conversation on the way to the classroom? This somewhat incidental approach to recruitment also brought with it unfounded rumours about why certain teachers were allocated to the role of teacher educator, unflatteringly linked to George Bernard Shaw’s comment in his play 'Man and Superman' (1927) ; ‘Those who can do, those who can’t teach’, which quickly became ‘Those who can’t teach, teach teachers.’ Not the most positive start for developing a strong professional identity. Beginning a career as a teacher educator is no easy feat as TEds are generally seen as: ‘an ill-defined, under-researched and sometimes beleaguered occupational group’ (Menter et al., 2010: 11) For TEds in post-compulsory education this situation is even more challenged. As Crawley states, the Cinderella sector is often invisible to governments and the public at large: ‘[and. . .] within this professional invisibility, one group of professionals is even more invisible than many of the others, and that is post-compulsory TEds.’ (2019: online) As a teacher educator within a university setting, we see evidence of this almost daily. Universities struggle to comprehend the world of post-compulsory education, despite being a part of it themselves. Teacher Education departments are firmly fixed on programmes preparing teachers for the various phases of compulsory education and as a result tend to use a broad-brush approach to managing every programme within the department. This is understandable to some extent, but not when QTS requirements are inflicted on PCE programmes (which do not lead to QTS) for no reason other than it is something that is done in other phases.

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The traditional university-based route for teacher education is seen as an antidote to in-house or standardised training which often encourages regeneration of current practice. Its aim is to create an environment in which new teachers can develop their knowledge and skills in a way which allows them to be the teacher they want to be. In line with this philosophy, PCE teacher educators traditionally take the stance of facilitator, offering their knowledge and experience for critical analysis and encouraging trainees to synthesise this in relation to their own practice. Whilst this could be considered a vulnerable stance – knowledge ‘offered’ can equally be ‘refused’, it is one which has previously been very successful and allowed the sector to develop independent and creative teachers very focussed on supporting individual learners within a range of contexts. However, more recent pressures have meant that TEds themselves are under pressure to ensure their trainees’ success so perhaps a simpler model would be one that was much more instrumental. . . tell them what to do to pass and put the support in place to make sure that they do! In a way, this is what the DfE’s Core Content Framework sets out to do. This document outlines key content, based around ‘learn that’ and ‘learn how to’ statements which are also supported by a recommended reading list and whilst presented as a choice, its origins and wording suggest there really isn’t much choice at all: ‘In designing their curricula, providers should carefully craft the experiences and activities detailed in the ITT Core Content Framework into a coherent sequence that supports trainees to succeed in the classroom.’ (Department for Education, 2019: online) For individual TEds invisibility within the wider setting must be managed alongside the highly visible role of key support for trainee teachers. Not only must TEds have significant teaching experience, they are expected to be expert models for their own students and they must do this not in their own subject areas but in the more generic subject of teaching. Once you cross the threshold of teacher education you are no longer a teacher of English or Engineering. . . you are a teacher of teachers. Yet, like their trainees, TEds also have to assimilate previous and current roles, as teachers, rather than practitioners of a given specialism. This can create a sense of imposter syndrome (Clance & Imes, 1978) and an underlying fear of being ‘caught out’. In addition, the practical nature of teacher education means that trainees are expected to learn the ‘craft of teaching’ within a relatively short space of time in order to prepare them for their first practicum. Facilitating learning and imparting knowledge then becomes a balancing act which can so easily lead to a ‘delivery model’ and probably the antithesis of most TEds’ philosophy about teaching. To get the balance right, one must be able to provide just the right amount of ‘hand-holding’ but be very clear on when to let go. Like a good parent, the competent TEd knows when to show the way, when to lead the way and when to step away.

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How to Be, How to Act, How to Understand Like the trainees within their charge, it is important for TEds to form a professional identity, which informs their role in terms of how to be, how to act and how to understand (Sachs, 2005). On the surface this seems like a relatively straightforward thing to do. Most TEds have significant experience and have developed clear values and beliefs about teaching and learning. Articulating a professional identity should be simple. However, in the current education climate, it is very clear that these values and beliefs must align to those put forward by powerful bodies such as the DfE, whose ‘off-the-shelf’ approach to designing teacher education curricula has significantly reduced TEds’ agency. In addition, when reflecting on the data underpinning this chapter, the over-riding requirement of a TEd (from the trainees’ perspectives) has very little to do with sharing expertise but is focussed on how they provide a framework of support as trainees undertake their individual journeys. Perhaps this is more akin to the role of ‘cheerleader’ than educator? As one trainee stated: ‘The cheerful connections the tutors provided the strength to move on’ which reflected how tutor support provided encouragement and motivation to complete her studies. Yet, despite the somewhat limited perceptions of the role presented by the DfE and our own trainees, most teacher educators recognise the impact they have on their trainees’ development and know that the role is a complex balance of inspiring, challenging and supporting. Are we teachers? Perhaps. Are we supporters, maybe. . . but most of all we are believers, in both the process and the trainees we work with. Like expert mentors, a teacher educator will show the way, provide guidance and share knowledge. They will see this as a form of facilitation rather than direct instruction because they want to provide the space for trainees to experience their learning as individually as possible. The TEd’s focus is not to create carbon copies of themselves but to encourage trainees to be the best teachers they can be and it is perhaps because of this individualised approach, the role is not easy to define.

Conclusion We conclude this chapter with a confession. . . conceptualising professional identity for the teacher educator has not been an easy ride. Teaching is messy – teacher education, messier still. At times it has felt like being on a roller coaster, the clunky deceleration as we climb to the summit, when we just might have a workable description, followed by rapid acceleration as we spin towards the depths and realise things are not as clear as they seemed. Perhaps it is a metaphor which could be applied to any form of reflection, but it feels very much enhanced by the context.

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When asked to describe our roles we might say ‘We teach teachers. . .’ which often gets the response, ‘Oh that’s interesting . . . what does that involve?’ Well, it involves a bit of teaching, a bit of guiding, some cheerleading, some challenging. We are teachers and mentors but most of all we are the conduit through which our trainees develop themselves and that involves knowing when to show the way, when to lead the way and when to step away.

References Batzli, J. M., Knight, J. K., Hartley, L. M., Maskiewicz, A. C., & Desy, E. A. (2016). Crossing the threshold: Bringing biological variation to the foreground. CBE: Life Sciences Education Journal, 15, ARTN es9. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.15-10-0221 Bennett, T. (2013). Teacher proof – Why research in education doesn’t always mean what it claims and what you can do about it. Routledge. Clance, P., & Imes, S. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice., 15(3), 1–8. Coffield, F. (2017). Will the leopard change its spots? A new model of inspection for Ofsted. UCL IOE Press. Cordingley, P., Crisp, B., Johns, P., Thomas, P., Campbell, C., Bell, M., & Bradbury, M. (2019). Constructing teachers’ professional identities. Educational International. Crawley, J. (2019). Invisible educators or connecting professionals? Post-compulsory teacher educators, BERA Blog. Available at: Invisible educators or connecting professionals? Postcompulsory teacher educators | BERA Accessed 28 Nov 2022. Department for Business Innovation and Skills. (2012). Professionalism in Further Education. Final report of the independent review panel. Available at: Professionalism in Further Education: Final report (publishing.service.gov.uk). Accessed 20 June 2022. Department for Education. (2019). ITT core content framework. Available at: ITT Core Content Framework (publishing.service.gov.UK). Accessed 28 Nov 2022. Dreyfus, S. E., & Dreyfus, H. L. (1980). A five-stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition (No. ORC-80-2). California Univ Berkeley Operations Research Center. Education and Training Foundation. (2014). Professional standards for teachers and trainers. Available at: Professional Standards for Teachers and Trainers (et-foundation.co.uk). Accessed 10 June 2022. Fuller, F., & Brown, O. (1975). Becoming a teacher. In K. Ryan (Ed.), Teacher education: The seventy-fourth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (pp. 25–52). The University of Chicago Press. Ibarra, H. (1999). Provisional selves: Experimenting with image and identity in professional adaptation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(4), 764–791. Lucas, N. (2013). One step forward, two steps back? The professionalisation of further education teachers in England. Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 18(4), 389–401. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13596748.2013.847221 Menter, I., Hulme, M., Elliott, D., & Lewin, J. (2010). Literature review on teacher education in the 21st century. Education Analytical Services, Schools Research, Scottish Government. Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2003). Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge: Linkages to ways of thinking and practising within the disciplines. In ISL10 improving student learning: Theory and practice ten years on (pp. 412–424). Oxford Brookes University.

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OECD. (2022). World best education systems. Available at: World Best Education Systems (worldtop20.org). Accessed 12 Nov 2022. PISA. (2018). PISA 2018 results. Available at: Publications – PISA (oecd.org). Accessed 12 Nov 2022. Sachs, J. (2005) ‘Teacher education and the development of professional identity: Learning to be a teacher’ in Denicolo, P. And Kompf, M. (eds) Connecting policy and practice: Challenges for teaching and learning in schools and universities : Routledge. Sachs, J. (2010). The activist teaching profession. In I. Goodson & A. Hargreaves (Eds.), Professional learning series. Open University Press. Shaw, G. B. (1927) 'Man and Superman'. Available at: https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/archives/ production_detail/3118/. Accessed 12 October 2023. Thompson, C., & Wolstencroft, P. (2021). Being a teacher – The trainee teacher’s guide to developing the personal and professional skills you need. Sage.

The Invisible Educators Jim Crawley

Background I have been a senior lecturer in a South-West further education college for 20 years, and then a senior lecturer, teacher educator and researcher in a South-West university for 16 years. I have worked in departments including adult and community education, access to higher education, teacher education and education studies (mainly teaching on qualifications in post-compulsory education in partnership with further education colleges). I chaired the Post-16 Committee of the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET) from 2012 to 2015 and was a founder member and convenor of the national research network Teacher Education in Lifelong Learning (TELL). I have published two books on teaching in post compulsory education for trainee teachers and edited the only UK book specifically on post-compulsory teacher education. I have also contributed several chapters for books on postgraduate research and the post-compulsory education sector. In terms of research, I have published articles in the field of the professional situation of post- compulsory teacher educators in journals including Research in Post Compulsory Education and Teaching in Lifelong Learning, which was also the theme of my PhD. Teacher Educators make a very important contribution to teaching quality by training teachers to national standards, with a strong record in UK government inspections. Their contribution is however under-researched and under-valued to an extent where they have been described as ‘invisible educators’ locked in a ‘scholarly silence’. From the perspective of a leader of teacher education, this chapter explores the ambiguous identity of teacher educators and their role in organisations.

J. Crawley (✉) Bath Spa University, Bath, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_9

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Key Questions How do teacher educators balance their values as educators with the external requirements which impact on their roles? How do teacher educators develop their own identity when they are so busy helping others develop theirs? How does it feel to be described as an ‘invisible educator who is locked in a ‘scholarly silence’?

Introduction In this chapter I will discuss how my professional values have been built, and how my professional identity has developed positively and extensively despite many external challenges and often unreasonable requirements. I will also reflect on why teacher educators often appear to be invisible professionally, academically and within the policy discourse. The chapter also considers how I have dealt with that invisibility, and how I have to some extent achieved a quite distinct visibility within my own small and narrow area of post-compulsory teacher education (PCET). Although the reflections arise largely from my experience as a PCET Teacher Educator or ‘TEd.’ (Crawley, 2016a: 1), I would argue they are relevant to all TEds (and indeed many other professions). I consider models of professional identity and professionalism which have grown from my experience and research and how these models have helped some TEds develop a more positive professional identity. To conclude I reflect on why, overall, I think remaining somewhat ‘Below the Radar’ within your own strongly formed professional identity whilst also being connected to other professionals (in this case, TEds) is a position which can provide professional satisfaction for individuals within a TEd community.

Being an Area Adult Education Officer For a significant part of my early career, my professional identity and my personal identity walked along with me, the personal identity generally leading the way, and at times being quite forceful and career focussed. The professional identity however ambled quietly alongside and didn’t really come to the fore to any degree. I’d go as far to say I didn’t really have a notion of what my professional identity was at all for the first 10 years or so of my working life in education, and it just didn’t seem that important. When discussing careers with other TEds it is surprising how for many of them, adult and continuing education featured in their career before, or even alongside

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teacher education. In my case, after a series of interesting but generally short-term jobs working with unemployed teenagers with one further education college (in one case, back in 1976, using video and making TV programmes to help them gain confidence and work skills), I got the job which I would say helped me more than anything else to build a professional identity, if not necessarily to recognise it. Generally, I just got on with what was a brilliantly absorbing, engaging and wide-ranging job working as what was called an ‘Area Adult Education Officer’. This involved managing and developing an annual adult education programme across most of my home county near to Bath, putting on adult education classes day and night, across vocational and non-vocational topics and subjects each year. The adult education prospectus each year featured learning opportunities ranging from Psychology A-Level to Upholstery, Medau to Cookery, and Badminton to Floral Art. I was one of seven Area Adult Education Officers across what was then the county of Avon. Along with the job came a small responsibility within the county teacher education team. I started this job in the early 1980s. During the time I was employed in this role, the work ranged over multiple responsibilities, and included a teaching role in my home college. I taught Basic Skills, a short-lived spell teaching Computer Science O-Level (mind boggling), and Access to (Higher Education) HE courses. As part of my job, I would also visit classes to see how they were going, or to collect fees. On one occasion I visited a ‘medau’ class in a local village hall. I collected the fees and was then invited by the tutor to join in! This involved exercising using a large plastic inflated ball on the floor a of a village hall in collar and tie with a group of middle-aged adults!! I didn’t realise it at the time, but this was an early experience which foreshadowed many, many future teaching observations as part of teacher education.

‘Arriving by Accident’: Developing My Professional Identity Like many others (especially in post-compulsory teacher education), I became a TEd by accident. The Area Adult Education Officer job came at a time (the mid-80 s) when adult education was cheap, subsidised and offered students a great range of learning opportunities. It also offered teachers chances to teach their beloved subjects to highly engaged and motivated adults, and organisers like myself, almost unlimited development opportunities. For a thirtyish young man who wanted to do something which helped others, this job was perfect. In addition to organising an adult education programme each year there were opportunities to take advantage of funding for programmes such as women returners courses and in time Access to HE courses. These provided real steps forward for second chance education and helped many people get back into learning and improve their lives. It was a boom time for adult and continuing education and for almost the only time in my career, there was good funding for provision, both existing and new and developmental. The funding and the developmental dynamic slowed considerably during the early 1990s (the

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incorporation of colleges in 1993 being the main brake lever), and never really came back again. The teacher education part of the job involved contributing to City and Guilds 730 Stages One and Two Further and Adult Education Certificate (FAETC) courses which were completely new to me, but which straight away I found interesting, engaging, and rewarding. To help prospective teachers prepare for and get used to teaching their subjects was, and still is, an honour. I also found it particularly surprising how seasoned professionals froze when they had to do a microteach in front of the others in their stage one group. As time moved on, the adult education part of the job declined alongside the sad overall decline of adult education, but I had the opportunity to develop a fuller teacher education dimension within the job, including running programmes up to the Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PCET) in partnership with a local university. Progression for me to teach a level 3 course (FAETC stage 1) to a postgraduate course (PGCE at Masters’ level) was scary, but not as challenging as could have been the case without my existing 10 years of experience as a TEd and higher-level study of my own having by then completed an MA. As is often the way for TEds, the work focussed on helping my students to function at that level, rather than doing it myself! In 2003, I moved to a job at the partner university to head up their postcompulsory teacher education programme, where teacher education was almost all my job (but still not all). As the seas of teacher education became stormier (a permanent situation in the early twenty-first century), running PCET teacher education in a small university became much more difficult. At my suggestion, in 2012, the university stopped running post-compulsory teacher education, as we agreed maintaining the quality of the programme with several retirements from the programme team, and a particularly challenging inspection framework, would be very difficult. I wanted to finish running a programme with it still at the top of its game, and so did the rest of the team. I was still involved in activity related to teacher education after that point but was not actually involved in running a programme myself. By September 2012, I had moved sideways into teaching and personal tutoring first, second and third year undergraduates Education Studies, and some Community Work modules. In comparison with some of (but by no means all) the recalcitrant college staff I trained this was bliss. Teaching young, enthusiastic, aspirational undergraduates who almost all wanted to be teachers and were going to change the world (they hoped) was an absolute pleasure. The teacher education curriculum was very helpful for some parts of Education Studies, but no help at all for many others, so a good deal of new learning on my part was also involved. Interestingly, to be part of an undergraduate teaching team immediately made me feel like I was a central and important part of the university professionally, whereas, as a PCET TEd, I always felt somewhat outside the mainstream. That alone says much about the professional identity of teacher educators. Being a TEd is something of a hybrid role, and it is difficult to maintain and balance all aspects of it at once. But it is always a field where you can genuinely help adults from a wide range of backgrounds understand and apply how to teach learners

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from a wide range of backgrounds through the amazingly important and creative art of teaching. As I progressed through what was often accidental career changes as a teacher educator starting with a small contribution to a team teaching the City and Guilds FAETC stages one and two to finishing with externally examining PhDs by other teacher educators, the work remained absorbing, always fulfilling and on many occasions, genuinely exciting. For a considerable time, professional visibility did not really come into it. However, as I started to research my field and education more broadly in a structured way, and at higher levels, and particularly after the move from a further education college to a university to work and research, I did start to reflect on why no-one in places of authority, especially governments and often other researchers from different fields seemed to take any notice of us TEds. I also considered why we didn’t seem to have a great deal of confidence as a professional group, when we were generally very confident individuals.

The Professional Identity of TEds. . . What Professional Identity? Teacher education is regularly described as of central importance to the task of helping to ensure a supply of well-qualified and very competent teachers (BERA, 2014; Kasemsap, 2021). Mayer and Oancea (2021: 1) argue that ‘teaching quality and teacher education quality are seen as key levers to improving a country’s economic development and global competitiveness’. You would imagine that these assertions would help to give TEds the basis of a strong professional identity and status, as their work can be argued to be essential for all sectors and all phases of education. Training teachers is at the heart of education. Far from having status and displaying a strong professional identity however TEds have regularly been shown to be overlooked, underappreciated, and given little value. They have been described more than once as ‘invisible educators’ (Høydalsvik, 2019; Thurston, 2010) and ‘second order teachers’ (Swennen et al., 2010). Kelly (2022: 40) argues that ‘there is evidence that the professional identity is confused amongst teacher educators themselves.’ Firstly, what is a teacher educator? Ang and Arnott (2020: 1) provide a suitably clear definition. ‘An education professional working to support the professional learning of teachers, whether that be student teachers, newly qualified teachers or experienced teachers.’ Sounds nice and straightforward, doesn’t it? Kelly (2022: 36) also helps us with a notion of identity as ‘formed through an on-going relationship with our environment. This also enables a particular connection to a professional sense of identity in terms of career, namely how we are perceived within our work environment.’ As teacher education operates in multiple environments, because of the aspects of workplace training, connecting to a professional identity can be particularly challenging. Davey argues that TEd professional identity is constructed by considering five elements, which are the processes and practices of ‘becoming a

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teacher educator. . .doing teacher education. . .knowing teacher education . . . being a teacher educator. . .and belonging as a teacher educator’ (Davey, 2013: 7). My experience as a TEd largely followed the becoming-doing-knowing-beingbelonging pattern, but I don’t think I realised it at the time. On reflection, my identity seemed to contain an important awareness that teaching itself has multiple characteristics and the role of the TEd is to act often as a ‘multiple professional’ (EC, 2010; Tryggvason, 2012 and Wood and Borg, 2010). Your work includes teaching, administering, meeting standards, setting standards, researching, and leading. Modelling is also a central feature of the work, and in their literature review of teacher education, Swennen et al. (2010: 140) found that the ‘notion of teachers as models and modelling’ was ‘present in almost all articles we analysed’. As professionals seeking to combine these different aspects of the job TEds often must go the extra mile for their trainees. Azumah Dennis et al. (2016: 8) have somewhat aptly described this as the ‘even more quality’. There are elements of consistency in TEds’ job descriptions, teaching situations, organising situations, responsibilities, and their environment, but building that into a coherent professional identity over time does need a strong body of research to help bring greater definition to and understanding of the TEd professional identity. Overall teacher education research is seen as ‘a relatively young field of study that draws on many different disciplines and responds to an evolving policy context’ (Murray et al., 2009). Teacher educators are seen as an ill-defined, under researched and sometimes beleaguered occupational group within higher education (Menter and Flores, 2020). Much of the research on teacher education is also generated by the teacher educator practitioners or managers themselves as self-study (Menter et al., 2010; NRDC, 2004). Sleeter (2014: 146) draws this problem into sharp focus. ‘An analysis of 196 articles published in 2012 in four leading teacher education journals internationally found only 1% to report large-scale mixed-methods studies, only 6% to examine the impact of teacher education on teaching practice and/or student learning, and most of the rest to be conducted within rather than across silos.’ There have been large studies including the Modes of Teacher Education (MOTE) study (1999), and more recently the TEDS-M study (2007–2009). These studies mapped the development of structures in ITE and provided ways of analysing them, but the first two stopped short of making claims about quality of ITE provision, except in relation to student and employer satisfaction. The TEDS-M (Teacher Education and Development Study in Maths) was a large study which generated a very large amount of data from 17 countries about ‘teacher education policy, programmes, opportunities to learn and teacher learning outcomes’ (Tatto, 2021: 32). The data from the study has been widely used and analysed but has not provided a convincing enough basis to persuade UNESCO to feature teacher education in their global development targets. As Tatto (2021: 36) asserts, UNESCOs Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG G4), which is about ‘inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all’, does not include teacher education ‘as a target’. It continues to be disappointing that teacher education has so limited a profile in global education goals.

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‘The Underminers’: Ofsted Pressure, Changing Policy and Further Education Inferiority Syndrome As my work within a further education college moved into the early twenty-first century, I experienced a growing series of challenges, undermining influences and pressures which made having a confident professional identity progressively more difficult. PCET was described as a sector which was (and by the way, still is), messy, difficult to define, fast changing, and even ‘swampy’ (Iredale et al., 2013; Lucas et al., 2012; Orr, 2012; Schön, 1983). Policy was fluid, funding tight, Ofsted inspections involved huge amounts of work for all, and curriculum requirements changed on a regular basis. Within the overall UK education sector, PCET was described as ‘the filling in the educational sandwich’ (Orr, 2016: 16). At times even this image did not address just how far behind schools and universities PCET was (and again, still is), in terms of funding, influence and status. We all faced a situation where successive governments exerted an ever-growing influence on the sector to the point where it has been described as ‘the most highly-regulated and centrallydirected education system in Europe’ (Orr & Simmons, 2010: 78). The policymakers ‘rarely had direct experience of PCE as they and their children were most likely to have followed the more general and conventional academic routes through school sixth forms, many in private schools’ (Orr, 2016: 17). The level of change in ministerial responsibility over time is astonishing. ‘There have now been 65 Secretaries of State responsible for skills and employment policy in the past three decades’ (City & Guilds, 2016: 5). At the time of writing, this is now more than 70. The sector has been consistently changed and over-managed at least partly due to the lack of knowledge and exceptionally frequent changes of ministerial responsibility. Keep (2006: 47) has aptly described policymaking on postcompulsory education and training in Britain as Playing with the Biggest Trainset in the World’. All teacher education is to some degree embedded in the part of the education sector where it takes place, because much of the work experience and training involved happens in sector organisations and educational establishments. This includes university partnership provision and colleges, schools and others running their own provision. All the challenges and undermining influences of the education sector surround the training programmes themselves, so they naturally affect teacher education. Whether you are a member of staff undertaking teacher education in-service or working in a PCET organisation as part of your pre-service teacher education programme, you have your coursework deadlines to manage in addition to the ‘normal’ everyday tasks of your teaching. This gives already overworked teachers and trainees extra work to do if they are going to become qualified to teach! When I first arrived in my university role, I was delighted that I appeared to have escaped Ofsted inspections, as inspections of initial teacher education in universities was not yet taking place. This was 2003. In 2004, Ofsted started inspecting teacher education in universities. It had followed me in and caught me up! As a team of university and college TEds, and after considerable discussion, we took an approach

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which demonstrated and asserted our localised professional competence. We felt very strongly that we were organising and providing high quality teacher education from an experienced team with approximately 100 years of combined experience between them. We also felt our systems provided good evidence of that. The only way to deal with Ofsted, was the same way our team dealt with everything. We would do things as near to the way we wanted to do them, but do them very, very well, bearing Ofsted in mind. That would, with any luck and a lot of work, mean we would be OK with Ofsted. As it turned out that was correct, and I’m delighted to say that our postcompulsory teacher education programme gained a grade 1 from Ofsted in both 2008 and 2011 after a mammoth partnership effort from the partner colleges (and, if I do say so, myself!). This certainly enhanced the university (and my) professional standing in the field of teacher education. Despite the result however, I never felt it was worth the enormous mountain of work which went into evidence how good we were, rather than working on trying to be even better. During this period, my work was solely as a TEd. As can be seen from the reflections in this part of the chapter, one constant during my work as a TEd was an increase in the amount external influence and intervention, especially by governments. This is usually in the name of accountability. CochranSmith has written extensively about teacher education globally, and argues that: Over more than two decades, accountability has come to be regarded as a powerful policy tool for improving initial teacher education. In many developed countries, this is reflected in the emergence of new standards, new monitoring systems, new course and fieldwork requirements for teacher candidates, new accreditation criteria, and/or new auditing procedures for colleges and universities (and, in some countries, for non-university organisations) that offer initial teacher preparation programmes. (Cochran-Smith, 2021: 8)

There is not however an international coalescence of these accountability measures, but ‘enormous variation across countries among accountability policies, initiatives, and approaches as well as an array of competing claims about their efficacy and impact in teacher preparation’ (ibid: 8). In terms of the value of these measures, there is the ‘accountability is the great improver’ group on the one hand, and accountability as ‘meaningless hoops and hurdles’ (ibid: 8) on the other hand. Wherever you stand as a TEd professional, this issue faces you. I found the requirements for evidence of the programme’s elements and their quality produced an “accountability mountain” with multiple files, documents, communications, and meetings, which could be both extremely tiresome and extremely tiring for all concerned. This is not to argue against good quality evidence of quality from strong evaluative methods, but the degree of formal documentation which is the result of these accountabilities measures is just absurd. Cochran-Smith proposes a way forward for TEds and their professional identity called intelligent professional responsibility’ (ibid: 11). She explains this as follows: The notion of intelligent professional responsibility turns the dominant approach to teacher education accountability on its head by braiding together three ideas, the first of which is overarching – intelligent accountability, evaluation based on inclusion and dialogue, and a

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supportive relationship between external and internal accountability. Woven together, these three ideas suggest new possibilities (ibid: 12).

Cochran-Smith draws in examples from the USA, Norway, and Wales in illustrating intelligent professional responsibility from TEds within different teacher education programmes and argues that they have generally worked well. Overall, she suggests there are reasons for both pessimism and optimism stating that the examples considered show: . . .efforts in teacher education to reclaim accountability with more intelligent approaches through local community-based programmes, scaled-up programmes with different notions of what counts in accountability, consortia of institutions committed to focusing on local needs, and country-wide efforts to rethink accountability. (Cochran-Smith, 2021: 21)

I have found in my research and professional experience that it is possible to build some of these characteristics within UK PCET teacher education. The next section of the chapter provides examples of collaboration, development, and joint responsibility amongst TEds from my own experiences, and explains an aspirational model of TEd professional identity. It will suggest that more collaborative, inclusive professional approaches for TEds do exist, and that they can considerably help improve feelings of a positive professional identity.

Connecting Professionals When undertaking my doctoral research (which took so long that I nearly missed the final submission deadline), I analysed models of teacher professional identity and teacher educator professional identity. Part of the study considered the professional identity of teachers and TEds. After analysing the data from the online questionnaires from my 161 participating TEds and comparing this analysis with other models, it was possible to propose a new model of teacher professionalism, called the ‘Connected Professional’ and of TEd professionalism, called the ‘Connecting Professional’. These models both demonstrate alignment with Cochran-Smith’s ‘intelligent professional responsibility’ (2021), but I believe go further in the range of aspects of identity they address. Crawley (2015: 488–9) explains. ‘The model has four different aspects each called ‘connections’ which combine to form the working model of the connected professional. They are the practical connection, the democratic connection, the civic connection, and the networked connection.’ • The practical connection is the teaching skills, knowledge, understanding and application which all teachers need to acquire. • The democratic connection is the active involvement in democratic action. • The civic connection involves society and community engagement to improve both • The networked connection involves actively engaging with other teaching professionals and the wider community.

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I argue that this model should and could be applied to all teachers in all contexts, and that TEds should and could be the professionals who help those connections take place in the early careers of their students. For TEds, becoming connected professionals is therefore extremely important, as they are working to help the teachers they train become them too. The model of the connected professional and the professional situation of TEds has distinct synergy with ‘intelligent professional responsibility’. By modelling behaviour, supporting teacher trainees, developing, and organising programmes and curricula which meet national standards, TEds are connecting professionals who link together all these things for the benefit of their trainees, and the trainees’ organisation. It is a highly positive professional identity.

Getting Connected as Connecting Professionals This penultimate section of the chapter provides two examples of projects where it was possible to include principles of the connected professional in their design, execution, and evaluation, and, like Cochran-Smith (2021), find some hope for an enhanced professional identity.

The ‘Sharing Innovations in Teacher Education’ (SITE) Project The first project is the ‘Sharing Innovations in Teacher Education’ (SITE) project, which was designed specifically to grow connections between TEds and their programmes and trainees and was supported by the ‘South-West Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training’ (SWCETT). A panel of South- West ‘expert teacher educators’ assembled an agreed upon a catalogue of what they considered ‘innovatory teacher education activities’ which they had successfully used and evaluated in their own programmes. The key objective was to share these with other programmes and practitioners via the online catalogue. Two items each from the catalogue were selected to trial by teacher education teams from one university, two FE colleges, one private provider and one regional infrastructure support organisation. 16 TEds and over 150 teacher trainees were involved in the project, over an eight-month period, and the findings were that: • • • •

a significant majority of the innovations were evaluated as having worked well the activities added value to and improved the quality of teacher education programmes participants would use the activities again the supportive facilitation of project networking and evaluation helped participants actively engage (Crawley, 2016b: 63)

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When mapping these findings against the different connections of the connected professional, three of the four connections (practical, democratic and networked) are clearly addressed, but the civic connection more weakly addressed. This suggests the connected professional model can be applied in practice, and that the TEds were genuinely connecting with other TEds and trainees.

Teacher Educators in Lifelong Learning (TELL) The Teacher Educators in Lifelong Learning (TELL) research network is our second example. As has already been discussed research into teacher education and research by TEds has a low profile to the degree where it has been called a ‘scholarly silence’ (Azumah-Dennis et al., 2016: 14). By 2011, I had both encountered this scholarly silence in my career and tried to reduce it. When the opportunity arose in my university to bid for a small amount of money for professional development activity, I discussed an idea with several my TEd colleagues, and we agreed to put on a conference to consider establishing a research network for teacher education in the Lifelong Learning sector (PCET as we are calling it here). Over 50 participants arrived for the one-day conference, and the TELL research network was established, with objectives to: • • • • • • •

capture the passion and distinctive vision which permeates PCE teacher education praise the profile of and celebrate PCE teacher education build capacity, support and provide opportunities for practitioner researchers and research in the field of PCE teacher education connect researchers across the UK with each other promote the achievements and debate the challenges of PCE teacher education make appropriate use of technology to connect and inform members, publish research information, updates and results; share issues, news and ideas and enable participation in the network, independent of geography curate and collate PCE teacher education research, history and information including compiling a bank of ideas, publications and resources relating to teacher education and build a legacy of the work undertaken. (Crawley, 2016a: 5)

Over the next 7–8 years, TELL built its network to over 220 members, ran approximately 30 network meetings around the country in colleges, universities, and other venues. Over 100 practitioners presented their research at meetings, including wellknown professors, new and experienced researchers, and teachers from the host organisations. TELL also published the first (and still only) book only about PCET teacher education. Some 200 participants each year attended the events, which had one crucial and key characteristic. They were free, with volunteer hosts and all participants from all areas of education were welcome. This was not a competitive research centre, constantly seeking funding, but a relaxed, enthusiastic coming together of professionals to encourage, support and examine practitioner research. Mapping TELL’s activity across all four connections of the connected professional is very straightforward, and although TELL has never been evaluated, the levels of academic research, collaborative effort and shared ideas were all very

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strong. At the time I was involved as the convenor, it enhanced the scholarly visibility and volume for a good number of practitioners in the field.

‘Invisibility or Visibility’: Further Thoughts on the Professional Identity of TEds In their recent publication, ‘Being a Teacher Educator’, Swennen and White (2020: 3) are optimistic about the ‘knowledge of the work of teacher educators and the professional development of teacher educators, which are expanding as a result of both research and the growing voice of teacher educators.’ They also call on teacher educators ‘to be ‘braver’ in their choice of research topic, research design, and research partners.’ (ibid: 8) and to ‘bravely focus their research towards social justice and transformation of practices and systems’ (ibid: 8). It is argued this will give TEds both a clearer and more positive professional identity, and give them greater visibility within the research community, and education in general. From my experience and research, I would agree that there is indeed hope for greater connectivity and visibility between professionals in the education sector, and indeed beyond in the wider community, but that I have not seen a great deal of enhanced recognition from those who are the most to blame for making us invisible, governments. Before concluding this chapter, I shall reflect on the notion of what it is like to be ‘Below the Radar’ (BTR). In her research about small community groups, Crawley (2016b) considered the fact that very small community groups virtually never featured in research studies, or in consideration for funding rounds, or were involved at all in government policy decisions. ‘Despite being the hidden part of the VCS [Voluntary and Community Sector], small VCS groups are often the centre of community life particularly in rural areas such as the South-West, but do not have the voice and visibility that the larger charities occupy’ (Crawley, 2016b: 48). This is described as ‘Below the Radar’. This can also be an advantage however, as it can allow greater freedom and independence than being visible and more recognised. The BTR characteristics of small VCS groups can also be seen in the discussion in this chapter about teacher education and TEds. They also find it difficult to gain visibility through research, tend to lose out to other parts of the education sector in consideration for funding rounds, and are rarely anywhere near decisions relating to government policy. In terms of the advantages of being BTR, some of those are present for TEds. Although under constant scrutiny, working directly with trainee communities still offers a more connected relationship, and although it is difficult to argue for the ‘transformative’ value of teacher education, as research evidence is not strong, TEds still demonstrate a similarly open, empathetic and powerfully committed approach to their work (Crawley, 2014) where their own values and approaches find space despite the unhelpful external influences discussed in this chapter.

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Conclusion: Moving Out of Invisibility and the Scholarly Silence? The future for professional identity in teacher education and for TEds looks mixed. There are signs that positive models, such as ‘intelligent professional responsibility’ (Cochran-Smith, 2021) and the ‘Connecting Professional’ (Crawley, 2015) are aspired to, and show their value through local, national, and international collaborative projects and research. There is evidence of progress towards connected professionality, and I certainly both enjoyed and helped develop progress towards what felt like a good level of professional identity. What I would advise is to follow every opportunity to be connected and connecting particularly with local networks, but don’t let the glow and rewards of visibility divert you from the notion that being Below the Radar can help you to avoid considerable stress and control, at the same time as following your own path to professional identity. All Teacher Educators should make time for connecting with others, as those connections make us stronger individually and collaboratively.

References Ang, L., & Amott, P. (2020). (Re)thinking teacher educator professional identity. Springer. Azumah Dennis, C., Ballans, J., Bowie, M., Humphries, S., & Stones, S. (2016). Post compulsory teacher educators: The ‘even more’ quality. In J. Crawley (Ed.), Post compulsory teacher educators. Connecting professionals (pp. 8–15). Critical Publishing. BERA-RSA. (2014). Research and the teaching profession – Building capacity for a self- improving education system. British Education Research Association. City and Guilds of London Institute. (2016). Sense and instability 2016. City and Guilds. Cochran-Smith, M. (2021). Rethinking teacher education: The trouble with accountability. Oxford Review of Education, 47(1), 8–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2020.1842181 Crawley, J. (2014). How can a deeper understanding of the professional situation of LLS teacher educators enhance their future support, professional development and working context? PhD thesis. Bath Spa University. Crawley, J. (2015). Growing connections – The connected professional. Research in PostCompulsory Education, 20(4), 476–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2015.1081758 Crawley, J. (2016a). Introducing the ‘invisible educators’. In J. Crawley (Ed.), Post compulsory teacher educators. Connecting professionals (pp. 1–7). Critical Publishing. Crawley, J. E. (2016b). An investigation into the contribution that women are making to communities through their involvement in small Voluntary and Community Sector Organisations (VCSOs) operating in the South West Region. PhD thesis. Bath Spa University. Davey, R. (2013). The professional identity of teacher educators. Career on the cusp? Routledge. European Commission. (2010). The profession of teacher educator in Europe. Report of a Peer Learning Activity in Reykjavik, Iceland 21–24 June 2010. EC. Høydalsvik, T. E. L. (2019). The hidden professionals? An interview study of higher educationbased teacher educators professional identity. Nordisk tidsskrift for utdanning og praksis, 13(2), 93–113. https://doi.org/10.23865/up.v13.1974 Iredale, A., Bailey, W., Orr, K., & Wormald, J. (2013). Confidence, risk, and the journey into praxis: Work-based learning and teacher development. Journal of Education for Teaching: International research and pedagogy, 39(2), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2013. 765192

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Kasemsap, K. (2021). The importance of teacher education in global education. In Research anthology on instilling social justice in the classroom (pp. 1332–1358). IGI Global. Keep, E. (2006). What does skills policy look like now the money has run out? Association of Colleges. Kelly, B. K. (2022). The disappearing identity of the teacher educator? Buckingham Journal of Education, 3, 35–45. Lucas, N., Nasta, A., & Rogers, L. (2012). From fragmentation to chaos? The regulation of initial teacher training in further education. British Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 677–695. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23263910 Mayer, D., & Oancea, A. (2021). Teacher education research, policy and practice: Finding future research directions. Oxford Review of Education, 47(1), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985. 2021.1853934 Menter, I., & Flores, A. M. (2020). Connecting research and professionalism in teacher education. European Journal of Teacher Education., 44(1), 115–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768. 2020.1856811 Menter, I., Hulme, M., Elliott, D., & Lewin, J. (2010). Literature review on teacher education in the 21st century. University of Glasgow. Murray, J., Campbell, A., Hextall, I., Hulme, M., Jones, M., Mahony, P., Menter, I., Procter, R., & Wall, K. (2009). Research and teacher education in the UK: Building capacity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25(7), 944–950. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2009.01.011 NRDC. (2004). New initial teacher education programmes for teachers of literacy, numeracy and ESOL 2002/03: An exploratory study. National research centre for the development for adult literacy and numeracy. Orr, K. (2012). Coping, confidence and alienation: The early experience of trainee teachers in English FE. Journal of Education for Teaching, 38(1), 51–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02607476.2012.643656 Orr, K., & Simmons, R. (2010). Dual identities: The in-service teacher trainee experience in the English further education sector. Journal of vocational education and training, 62(1), 75–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820903452650 Orr, K. (2016). The filling in the educational sandwich: Post compulsory education. In J. Crawley (Ed.), Post compulsory teacher educators. Connecting professionals (pp. 16–23). Critical Publishing. Schon, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books. Sleeter, C. (2014). Toward teacher education research that informs policy. Educational Researcher, 43(3), 146–153. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X14528752 Swennen, A., Jones, K., & Volman, M. (2010). Teacher educators: Their identities, sub-identities and implications for professional development. Professional Development in Education, 36(1–2), 131–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415250903457893 Swennen, A., & White, E. (Eds.). (2020). Being a teacher educator: Research-informed methods for improving practice. Routledge. Tatto, A. M. (2021). Comparative research on teachers and teacher education: Global perspectives to inform UNESCO’s SDG 4 agenda. Oxford Review of Education, 47(1), 25–44. https://doi. org/10.1080/03054985.2020.1842183 Thurston, D. (2010). The invisible educators: Exploring the development of teacher educators in the further education system. Teaching in Lifelong Learning, 2(1), 47–55. ISSN:2040-0993. Tryggvason, M. (2012). Perceptions of identity among Finnish university-based subject teacher educators. European Journal of Teacher Education, 35(3), 289–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02619768.2011.633998 Wood, D., & Borg, T. (2010). The rocky road: The journey from classroom teacher to teacher educator. Studying Teacher Education, 6(1), 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1742596100366891

Some Thoughts and Reflections on Identity, Teaching, and Writing, and How They Might Affect One Another Oli Belas

With thanks to Neil Hopkins – for many things, but, in this instance, because this piece was finished in light of a session we cotaught, but which he planned and led. This piece is dedicated to Neil, who has shaped me and my work more than he realizes.

Background While studying for and writing my PhD, I taught university English Literature and worked as a Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) classroom assistant in a secondary school. I continued to work as a classroom assistant for around 2 years after completing my PhD, then trained as an English teacher. After teaching English for around 8 years, I moved back to the higher education sector. Since January 2018, I’ve worked in a widening participation university, where I’m now a senior lecturer in both English and Education. My academic writing sits, no doubt a little awkwardly, at the intersection of Philosophy, Education, and English. I’ve written for blogs (I’m founding editor of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Blog), literary journals, and academic journals. My monograph, A Philosophical Inquiry into Subject English and Creative Writing, was published by Routledge in late 2022. This chapter moves through a series of loosely linked reflections on (in no particular order, because the following are not separate from one another) politics, teaching, and writing, and it attempts to think through the ways in which each shapes the other and produces something we might be tempted to call and identity. The main ideas are: that the writer’s sense of self is, at least in part, forged in his writing; and that his teaching shapes his writing just as his writing shapes his teaching.

O. Belas (✉) University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_10

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Key Questions How are writing and teaching related? How have writing and teaching shaped the author’s sense of self?

The Sorts of Things That Make You (Want to) Write Writing is a way of knowing, of placing and finding yourself on one or several cultural matrices or maps. Individuality is the hollow in the nest of shared identities. A sort of semi-automatic or -conscious writing in negative space. An old saw: writing is always rewriting (reimagining familiar plotlines). It is also attempted voice artistry (paraphrase, mimicry, channelling, ventriloquizing, voice-throwing).

There was a year, almost, between proposing and writing this piece. I started writing, September 2022, in a mixed state of anger, sadness, hope, and excitement. The first three-hundred-or-so words were put down quickly and carelessly, days after the Runnymede Trust’s We Move Summit on race equality (hosted by Leeds University, 2–4 September 2022), but have since been worked over many times. (Peter Elbow: ‘for most of my career, I’ve known how useful it is to invite wrong writing on the way to right writing. [. . .] freewritten language tends to be lively and even clear (though often not usable as it comes out) (2012: 3).) One of the We Move sessions was hosted by human rights organisation Liberty, whose representatives talked us through several of the government’s recent attempts to chip away at, by legally reframing, our civil liberties and human rights. Liberty focussed on the Policing Act; the Human Rights Bill (better understood, as Liberty insists, as a Rights Removal Bill); the Judicial Review Bill (which stands to weaken judicial independence and the ability of citizens and courts to challenge government decision); the Electoral Integrity Bill (which, if passed, will further disenfranchise voters from already marginalized communities); and the Public Order Bill (which, among other things, threatens to curb protest rights). The government is making other anti-democracy, anti-civil liberties moves: publicly mocking and repudiating identity politics as left-wing conspiracy; effectively outlawing critical race theory from schools (by re-branding it as ‘extremist,’ a ‘dangerous and divisive ideology’); trying to constrain meaningful discussion of empire, colonialism, and race in educational spaces.1 At the same time I was working up and out ideas for this piece, I wrote a short post for the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain’s Blog (Belas, 2022). That post was simple in its aims (remind readers of the government’s anti-democratic, authoritarian impulses and projects) and in its arguments

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Peter Elbow (2012: 3); Belas (2021, 2022).

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(we don’t yet have to look over our shoulders while criticising our so-called leaders; while we have the freedom to shout, we should). What little challenge there was in writing that piece lay in having very few words with which to draw lines of connection that could be followed easily by readers, and which would give a clear outline, a sense of shape, to the government’s machinations. That sense of shape was crucial, because the point was (and still is) that the government is doing what it’s doing systematically, deliberately. Erosion of rights is not the accidental byproduct of other governmental aims; it is the aim. The closing thought of the blog post had to do with the relative academic freedoms we enjoy in British universities, relative freedoms that are by no means guaranteed. ‘While we still can,’ I wrote, ‘we should preserve the university as a space of political, intellectual, and aesthetic challenge, resistance, and risk. We should teach anger, in the tradition of Cherry and of Audre Lorde’ (Belas, 2022). Cherry is Myisha Cherry, an African American philosopher from the south of the USA, whose recent book, The Case for Rage, grows a theory of ethically justified political anger from seeds sewn by Audre Lorde and her essay ‘The Uses of Anger’ (Cherry, 2021; Lorde, 1984). There’s nothing original in my post’s closing call, nor in its desire to tie politics, aesthetics, and education together. Correction: politics and aesthetics are always-already tied to one another. The desire, then, to put their interconnectedness front and centre of classroom discussion. Not original, no, but the call and the desire that spurred it were felt with an urgency the pressure of which had been increasing steadily for a year or more. At the time I was pulling together the blog on freedom and anger, which was also, as I’ve said, when I was trying to map out this chapter, by chance I caught a headline about Chris Kaba, the twenty-four-year-old Black man shot to death by police. Kaba was killed September 5, 2022. I caught the headline September 6. September 7, I expected the story to be the whole of the news cycle. Nothing, or close to, on the BBC’s televised news; certainly, Chris Kaba wasn’t part of the main cycle. September 8, I asked a couple of friends, often more plugged into breaking news than me, if they’d heard about the shooting. They’d not. Most of that day, mainstream news was softening the nation for the official announcement of the Queen’s death. The media attention was entirely predictable and predictably mawkish, bland, and repetitive. Certainly, it produced a deal of spoken and written waste matter. (Nicholas Witchell, for example, told the nation that, ‘of course, the corgis don’t realise Her Majesty is unwell’ – intended, presumably as a salve but as vapid as it was almost certainly wrong: dogs can smell sickness; they know about it long before we do). Saturday September 10, when the United Kingdom and Commonwealth Regions were ‘given’ a new King, there was a march, attended by thousands, in protest of the Kaba shooting. Sky News broadcast TV footage of the march, and reported it as a demonstration in honour of the dead Queen and the new King. Sky News first issued a correction, then an apology. Second half of September, and some mainstream news outlets had begun to report more regularly and fully on Chris Kaba. Before September 10, though, few if any of the news outlets that might be considered mainstream national news organizations of record mentioned the march. The Voice, a Black interest online newspaper, was, as far as I could tell at the time

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(a day before the march was due to start), one of the few news agencies to publicize the march.2 It’s events like these make you want to write, make you hope writing might matter (if in no other way than to help you work out what you think you think and why and why the things that matter matter as they do), and which make you feel like writingand-teaching, like aesthetics-and-politics, might not be separate but intersecting axes. It’s events like these which you think you should be writing about instead of about yourself. Because your backstory is a well-worn formula piece, and because the autobiographical trace will always, ineluctably, be there anyhow (Derrida, 1992; Derrida & Cixous, 2006).

Some Theories of Identity. Or: Why We Still Need to Read Donna Haraway There’s a tradition in contemporary philosophy that proposes an essential link between narration and identity. The idea, roughly, is that you can’t have one without the other, because your sense of self consists of the stories you’re able to tell about who you think you are. Narration is an act or expression of selfhood, and selfhood is narratively constituted.3 For Alasdair MacIntyre, narrative is central to our shared moral identities. Humankind, he claims, is an ‘essentially story-telling animal’ (1985: 216). Against the moral fragmentations of modernity, MacIntyre seeks to recuperate ‘a concept of self whose unity resides in the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end’ (1985: 205). In the spirit of the truism that language speaks us as much as we speak it, MacIntyre recognizes that we are never the sole authors, but only the co-authors, of our own life stories: we are shaped by the sociopolitical and discursive contexts into which we are thrust, and these set limits to our agency.4 Another example, earlier than MacIntyre though still a modern invention: Freudian psychoanalysis naturalizes and biologizes our psychical structures and our psychopathologies (Freud, 1977). The former are dehistoricized (they are, for Freud, our essence); the latter are contextualized, to the extent that they’re functions of our social situations and life-stories. Freud is all about story – stories nested within and intersecting with other stories, stories as psychical energies in need of cathectic transformation; narrative gaffs or missteps pointing the way to ‘true’ stories

2

See White (2022); Richmond and Charnley (2022) Taylor (2022); The Voice (2022). E.g., Appiah (2005); Fuss (1989); Glaude, Jr. (2001); MacIntyre (1985); Rorty (1989). Page references to Appiah and MacIntyre in text. 4 Nietzsche is one obvious reference point for the linguistic turn. Something like this turn can be found in Cassirer – unfairly supplanted by Heidegger, whose own linguistic turn takes him closer to Cassirer. See, e.g., Cassirer (1953). 3

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(parapraxes or slips). Analysands narrate their traumas, and the analyst – the authoritative reader-interpreter – reinscribes them and maps them to mythic, primal narrative arcs. In Freudian analysis, narrative is used to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible. It gives shape to the amorphous and makes fragments cohere into something like a whole. While MacIntyre and Freud tend, in their different ways, towards totalization or wholeness, and while both assume the authority of the exegete (the one who knows how to read the signs), Kwame Anthony Appiah is more strategically partial (though he does draw on MacIntyre). He, too, sees narrative as playing an essential role in the articulation of identity – articulation in the dual sense of expression and joint or joining. Our personal identities are always articulated with, and shaped by, the collective identities (some optional, some not) to which we have access and by which we’re shaped. ‘Collective identities,’ writes Appiah, ‘provide what we might call scripts: narratives that people can use [. . .] in telling their life stories’ (2005: 22). Like MacIntyre, Appiah is thinking both of those shared, often un- or but halfspoken narratives that govern our lives (normativizing stories that tell us what it is and how to be a good member of this or that group); and of shared popular narrative types: the latter, he suggests ‘provide models for telling our lives’ (2005: 22). But where MacIntyre pins his hopes for moral coherence on the idea of narrative unity, Appiah is more circumspect, and more alert to the constraining, as well as potentially liberating, potential of identity scripts. A gay man of colour, Appiah is ‘sympathetic,’ for example, to certain ‘stories of gay and black identity,’ while also believing that ‘we need [. . .] to ask whether the identities’ currently in the mainstream of public life and discourse ‘are ones we can be happy with in the longer run.’ Appiah is worried that as demands for recognition gain traction, so too do normativizing stories about how to be a member of this or that group: We know that acts of recognition [. . .] can sometimes ossify the identities that are their object. [. . .] we can call this the Medusa Syndrome. [. . .] Even though my race and my sexuality may be elements of my individuality, someone who demands that I organize my life around these things is not an ally of individuality. Because identities are constituted in part by social conceptions and by treatment-as, in the realm of identity there is no bright line between recognition and imposition. (2005: 110)

Appiah’s suspicion of (a certain kind of) multiculturalism is a suspicion of (certain kinds of) totalizing discourse (of the ‘good’ citizen, immigrant, person of colour, queer person, and so on). Though he agrees that narrative is essential to identity, he is sensitive to the dangers of narrative imposition and normativity, and his articulation of cosmopolitanism is, in part, advocacy of a certain kind of intellectual and geopolitical borderlessness (Appiah, 2006). His insistence on cosmopolitanism is timely given the rise of right-wing populism, which tries to leverage an Us/Them identity politics (even as it publicly repudiates ‘left-wing’ identity politics), and seeks everywhere to set up walls, literal and moral. Appiah has an unobvious precursor and ally in Donna Haraway, who, one guesses, must be dismayed that her landmark essay, ‘A Cyberborg Manifesto,’ is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1985, and reads now as eerily

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prescient. Listen to Haraway describing the ways in which the school and schooling have already been transformed in the nascence of the digital technoscientific age: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public education at all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender; managerial classes involved in educational reform and refunding at the cost of remaining progressive educational democratic structures for children and teachers; education for mass ignorance and repression in technocratic and militarized culture; growing anti-science mystery cults in dissenting and radical political movements; continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of colour; growing industrial direction of education (especially higher education) by science-based multinationals (particularly in electronics- and biotechnology-dependent companies); highly educated, numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society. (Haraway, 1985: 48–49)

Haraway’s list captures the tenor of so much of the liberal-to-left oppositional educational studies that will come after her essay. On the ways in which digital technoscientific modernity is rewriting not only our social milieux but our selves, Haraway is the most perspicacious of critics. In England, we have seen in recent years and months that government policymakers will wax at once lyrical and-or derogatory, whichever is momentarily expedient, about the arts and the sciences. We have seen how anti-intellectual is the government’s attitude towards education; and how dismissive government is of identity politics while relying on its pull. Yes, the government promulgates education for mass ignorance, though so many teachers continuously subvert that credo. Against the totalizing narratives of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and earlier feminisms, Haraway argues for a socialist feminism of ‘affinity, not identity’ (1985: 17). Affinity is ‘coalition’ and ‘political kinship’ without need of identity (which she uses to mean totalizing narratives, stories with a single magnetic pole) (1985: 18). Unity without uniformity. The cyborg is the image of this feminism, and cyborgism its politics, because the cyborg is the image, par excellence, of a cohesion of parts and fragments, of a boundary-crossing and liminal being that frustrates the divisions between human and non-human animal, animal and machine, the visible-material and the invisible-immaterial.... The emergent (as they were in 1985) digital technosciences, Haraway foresees, are changing our world, our bodies, our selves. They have changed our sociopolitical relations. They are the means of capitalist exploitation – late capitalism is the age of cybernetics, of information flows, of knowledge reduced to commodified bits – but they can also be turned to emancipatory projects. While Appiah, years after Haraway, will worry about the very real geopolitical borders that in- and ex-clude us, he forgets that digital technologies know relatively few boundaries (and where borders are encountered, the issue is, precisely, a matter of information and knowledge control, what Haraway calls ‘the informatics of domination’). Digital technologies may be means for subversion as well as oppression; certainly, they have allowed for the more partial, coalitional politics Haraway hoped for: witness, for example, the protests in Iran – triggered by the murder of Mahsa Amini by the morality police (so-called) – led by schoolgirls, a

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number of whom have been killed, and the role of digital social media in raising awareness and forging global coalition.5 What makes Haraway’s text so powerful is its refusal of the artificial separation (mentioned above) of the aesthetic and the political. Cyborgism is a politics because it is also a poetics. And because, for Haraway, language and writing are not abstracted from lived lives, are not immaterial or ‘merely’ intellectual, to say that cyborgism is a politics and a poetics is also to say it’s a bodily aesthetics: ‘Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle,’ she says (1985: 55); ‘Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century,’ she says (1985: 57); ‘who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneutics is a major feminist issue’, she says (1985: 43). Discourse is a technology: it writes and rewrites the political significances of our bodies (our collective and individual selves) in myriad ways.6 Bodies are both political (they are mechanisms of political violence, both uprisings and oppressions) and politicized (we can say, beyond Haraway, that who controls the meanings and possessive rights of Others’ bodies is a major political, because feminist, issue). (Example: a year or so before this writing got written, police violently broke up a group of women and allied demonstrators who had gathered in remembrance of Sarah Everard and in protest of her murder by a police officer. The Met’s violent response to the demonstrators revived criticism of the Policing Act (then still a Bill).) That cyborgism is a political poetics and a poetic politics is not insignificant. The political use of the styles of common sense, plain speaking, factuality, and the like is an aesthetic gesture the fulcrum of which is the denial of its own aestheticism: the Truth is not stylistic, the lie goes, it simply is. Nothing, though, could be further from the truth. Subjectivity is an objective truth. We perceive; the world is to us this or that way. Perception stylizes. To discover where one stands in relation to others’ philosophical stories takes a bit of writing: build a course grid from the fragments of others’ stories, plot yourself against it.

The Autobiographical Bit I’d Hoped to Avoid When I started as a secondary English teacher, I’d not long finished a PhD. A lot of work, a lot of heartache, a great deal of disappointment. Whatever it was, the thesis was not the piece of work it might or should have been. Year-and-a-half or so on, I 5

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard claimed in October 2022 that the protestors’ average age was 15 (Van Esveld & Sajadi, 2022). The state’s response to the protests was an attempted clamp-down on social media access. Nevertheless, protest footage continues to appear online. At the time of writing, Iran Human Rights reports that a minimum of 304 peaceful protestors, of which 24 are women and 41 children, have been killed (IRH, 2022). around 25 children are reported to have been killed during the protests. 6 As well as Haraway, see Davis (1981), Hooks (1992), Lorde (1984).

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was sure I wanted to carry on writing and teaching. I was less sure I wanted to work in academia; and, in any case, there were few jobs going, I’d not published much (and I kept swerving trying to turn the PhD into a book). After my teacher-training years, I managed to fit regular reading-and-writing time around my job. Few more years in, still unsure whether I wanted to stay in school or attempt to move back into university education, and with a very supportive wife nudging me, I dropped to 4 days a week teaching and tried to spend as many ‘Day Fives’ as possible readingand-writing. This was at a time when the secondary English curriculum was becoming ever more restrictive, the fault, in large but not sole part, of the government. For many who were teaching in England in the twenty-teens, Michael Gove (his public persona, that is; who knows what private citizen Gove is like?) remains the villain of the piece. The curriculum reforms, widely challenged by educators and educationalists, that were forced through while Gove was Education Secretary were regressive in the extreme. Couple narrow and, for English at least, generally dull GCSE curricula with increasingly punitive accountability measures for schools, and the effect was rearguard, risk averse behaviours from many schools, mine included, that were on the back foot and running scared from government policy and its enforcement wing, Ofsted. The leadership group where I worked had elected to turn the school into an academy; and though neither an absolutely good nor bad thing in itself, academy status did confer a degree of autonomy when it came to, among other things, curricula. Our leadership never used that autonomy. It was always chasing an Ofsted judgement of ‘outstanding’ (though how you chase when you’re on the back foot and-or running away is anyone’s guess), and it tried to fulfil that wish by being rollover compliant. In a neatly crystalline way, just as government was drawing curricular control more and more to its centre, so did our school centralize and narrow curricular design and choice. The best version of English available in the mid-to-late twenty-teens was A Level Creative Writing. With clearly articulated aims and learning outcomes geared towards critical-creative outputs, it was a cogent course with no set texts (possibly, for some policymakers, one of the problems). It lasted 4 years (2014–2018), or three cohorts’ worth, though the decision to cancel it came in 2015, before the first national cohort had completed the course (so student outcomes can’t have informed the decision-making) (Belas, 2015, 2017). Around the time A Level Creative Writing got canned, my school decided that A Level English Literature teachers would no longer choose the texts they taught. A departmental decision would be made, and all teachers would teach the same novels and plays. That loss of autonomy at institutional level coupled with the loss nationally of Creative Writing (and the curricular freedom that course had offered) left me feeling disillusioned with my school as well as with educational policymakers. It felt like Haraway’s education for mass ignorance was making subtle yet significant advances. A little sadness but no bitterness shapes these reflections. I wonder, though, at the point of setting this down: the feelings are so commonplace, if a recent survey of English teachers is anything to go by, that, to come full circle, this bit of backstory

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can only come off as a well-worn formula piece. But in a piece about the relationship between writing and teacher identity, it’s hard, perhaps impossible, not to write something about the lived contexts in and because of which some of my writing has come about. Before concerns over subject- and autonomy-loss had really kicked in, readingwriting one day a week seemed, in a selfish way, important. It was a way of carving out some space, of which there seemed to be less and less in state-maintained and academised educational spaces, for free exploration. Most of my writing from the mid to late twenty-teens was pitched to academic journals, and most of it reflected a series of frustrations and incorrigible, or near incorrigible, beliefs: • Frustration at governmental interference in curriculum scope and design. • Frustration at the entirely bankrupt and nonsensical, though seemingly widespread (nearly hegemonic), views around knowledge – usually pitched in opposition to skills – that were doing the rounds. Remains a bugbear. • Near-incorrigible belief that academic prose can be creative; certainly playful; sometimes beautiful. I don’t count my writing as any of those; but it was, is, and likely will always try to ride on the coattails of other writers whose works I did, do, or will. • Incorrigible belief that writing is neither the only nor preeminent mode, but a mode, nonetheless, and one that matters, of thinking. Writing practice need not be subjected to the formalizing stranglehold of methodology; but it can, and should be allowed to, occupy the same logical space as does method in the social sciences. • Incorrigible belief in the importance of poetics and aesthetics, though both need to be carefully qualified. A dirty poetics, please and thanks. Aesthetics: not a ‘content.’ That is, the aesthetic is not a quality ‘in’ the work. Works have their qualities, of course, but aesthetics is spatiotemporal (it happens in the space between reader-listener-watcher-maker and work, against the backdrop of your life; it emerges in that encounter). Those early essays were written by someone who fancied himself stuck on the fringe of academia, a Scrappy-Doo trying to show he could run with the big dogs. They also emerged from an attempt to complicate taken-for-granted ideas (about creativity, knowledge and skill, the nature and purpose of academic and other traditions of non-fiction writing). It’s easy enough, then, to understand why and how they came about in the ways they did, but the same pieces wouldn’t get written today (a redundant thing to say: of course they wouldn’t). What I mean: over the last four or so years, I’ve been first drifting, then deliberately turning, away from some of the gestures towards complexity and academic convention (so-called) in my early work. There have been several contributing factors. (1) A shift, after leaving secondary teaching and re-entering higher education, from a Scrappy-Doo to a Groucho Marx attitude: deep suspicion of any club that would have me as a member. (2) Being introduced to the work of Lucy Sante: that’s how you essay. (3) Reading academic work, my own and others’, aloud. Regarding (3): Some readers will know the story of Harrison Ford saying to George Lucas, of his Star Wars script, ‘You can type this shit, George, but you sure

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can’t say it. Move your mouth when you’re typing.’ Call it Ford’s Law. Ford’s Law was brought home to me in class. I’d set an essay for an undergraduate philosophy of education class. I’d thought it would be challenging as far as its position and arguments went, but a relatively easy read. I shared a paragraph on the projector screen, then asked the class to read it to themselves and to feed back their responses. There were no responses. A little more reading and thinking time. Again, nothing. A few students admitted they weren’t quite sure what the paragraph was arguing. I read the paragraph aloud, and hearing it attuned me to its failure as prose. Not ugliness: there are types of ‘ugliness’ that are a disquieting beauty. Style can be – should be – a mode of resistance. There was nothing disruptive, nothing ludic, about this. If anything, it seemed to reassert the authority of Philosophy as final arbiter of reason. Possibly, I’m being unfair. Possibly, the piece was written not with students but other academic philosophers in mind. But whatever the author’s intentions, reading the passage aloud you could feel the wedge being driven between the student readers and the text. More recently, I set a Cornel West (2009) piece – the transcript of his interview for the documentary film Examined Life – and the opposite seemed to happen: the initial confusion that many students felt when reading the piece was eased, if not quite dissolved, when it was heard aloud. The experience of hearing a text fail was transformative. That’s when I actively turned in the direction I was being pulled, away from certain received notion of academic convention. But a note of caution here: there’s a danger in making a virtue of ‘plain prose’ and clarity. It’s hard to tell which side of the faint and fuzzy line between obscurantism and innovation one is standing, and it’s too easy to police others’ style through rejection, too easy to use charges of obscurantism and difficulty as a defence against challenge or any demand that the reader do some work. Again, politics and aesthetics – the one always implies the other; no text is ever styleless or neutral or innocent.7 Why did I reject the piece mentioned above on the grounds of Ford’s Law, but not Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’? Part of the answer lies in Richard Rorty’s essay piece, ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing’ (1978), in which Rorty transplants Thomas Kuhn’s idea of scientific paradigm shifts to a philosophy of language. Rorty distinguishes between writing that does and does not want to be writing – by which he means writing that is and is not innovative, or that is, in Kuhn’s terms, paradigmatic (groundbreaking) or normal (normal). Language which deforms itself and rubs up against the bounds of sense wants to be writing, Rorty says, while writing that uses purely conventional forms – so as not to draw attention to itself as writing, so as to seem a clear and undistorting window onto the world – does not. Maybe the piece that, as I saw it retrospectively, failed as prose was simply philosophical writing that didn’t want to be writing and took shelter in the linguistic bunker of normal moral philosophy, while Haraway’s writing still reads like writing that wants to be writing as much now as nearly 40 years ago. (To say that a piece doesn’t want to be writing is to say nothing about the aims or mentality of the writer. Language is always in excess of our

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E.g. DuBois (1916); Hebdige (1979); Rancière (2004).

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intentions (to repeat an earlier truism, language speaks us). Signification is never a closed circuit). There’s nothing essentially wrong with writing that doesn’t strain its own limits. None of us wants everything we write to be writing in Rorty’s radical sense. Sometimes, though. . . More’s the point, I’m just trying to figure out what went wrong, from the students’ side of things, with that piece, and I could be way off. Maybe it was the writing, maybe it was them, maybe it was me, maybe it was all or none of these. Trying, too, to explain how and why my own relationship with writing has shifted. These are the things that keep you up at night and – sometimes – make you want to write, want to replot the grid.

Conclusion? It’s likely true that without some kind of symbol or sign system, be it the language of speech or writing, of music, photography, sports and athletics, you couldn’t have a sense of self. Certainly, you couldn’t share your sense of self with others without some such system. The very idea of individual identity probably only matters against a presumption of sociality: what need of a sense of self, other than to position that self relative to other individuals, groups, or communities? It’s certainly not true that one need undertake this sort of writing – the kind performed by this chapter: planned, shaped, revised, edited, prepared – in order to articulate one’s identity (or identities (or affinities)). Narration doesn’t require scripted permanent record; figuring who you are needn’t be a manifesto. Nevertheless, it is to planned, if not scripted, language we turn for any kind of secondary gloss on identity. Identity theorizing is to identity performance as sports punditry to the match, or, perhaps, a director’s commentary to their own film. This chapter has been pieced together out of fragments of fragments: a poor attempt to make good the insights of Haraway and others in affinity with her. One would like to write about (one’s) self without resorting to the first person: expression only through negation, aversion, diversion. Because the autobiographical trace will always be there – in our public-facing writing, but also in emails, teaching notes and slides, tuition videos, announcements posted to virtual learning environments, and so on. (That autobiographical trace: one reason why first-person personalization in academic writing is often avoidable, sometimes unnecessary; but why, equally, pedagogical bans on its use are, at best, misguided.) I’ve long had a sense of the interrelation of teaching and writing – they are yet another cyborg assemblage, each a technology-politics-aesthetics machine – but it’s only recently that I’ve come to see that interrelationship as something like a method worth claiming as such.8 The episodes with which this chapter opened are not linked thematically or logically to

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This feeling was reaffirmed when I read Buurma and Heffernen (2021).

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the later sections. But, once more: they are the sorts of things that, sometimes, push you to writing-and-teaching. If writing is a form of thought, then perhaps in writing we might. . . I don’t (for several reasons) want to say ‘find ourselves.’ So if not that, then perhaps this: in writing we might, if even briefly, reorient ourselves – in a similar way that we reorient ourselves on walks and, in doing so, change our relationship to the spaces we inhabit (de Certeau, 1984). I think that’s about as close, for now, as I can get to saying how writing shapes me, particularly as The Writer of the Present Chapter isn’t convinced there’s an ‘inner’ Cartesian self controlling all this. Writing sits at and frustrates the boundary between in- and out-side, in- and ex-teriority. Certainly it doesn’t give voice to ‘inner’ thoughts already had. Again: writing is always rewriting, a way of knowing, a way of locating oneself on the multiple axes of the cultural grid. Self is the hollow in the nest of group affinities, what seeps through the gaps of the discursive net.

References Appiah, K. A. (2005). The ethics of identity. Princeton University Press. Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers. Penguin. Belas, O. (2015). If the government is serious about the study of our literary canon, why abolish creative writing a level? TES. 5 April. https://www.tes.com/news/if-government-serious-aboutstudy-our-literary-canon-why-abolish-creative-writing-level. Accessed 7 Oct 2022. Belas, O. (2017). Creative writing: Mapping the subject. Use of English, 69(1), 45–53. Belas, O. (2021). The government’s creeping authoritarianism. PESGB Blog (22 March). https://www. philosophy-of-education.org/the-governments-creeping-authoritarianism/. Accessed 10 Oct 2022. Belas, O. (2022). Civil liberties & the need for Lordean rage. PESGB Blog (10 October). https://www. philosophy-of-education.org/civil-liberties-the-need-for-lordean-rage/. Accessed 10 Oct 2022. Buurma, R. S., & Heffernen, L. (2021). The teaching archive: A new history for literary study. University of Chicago Press. Cassirer, E. (1953). Language and myth (S. K. Langer, Trans., 1946). Dover. Cherry, M. (2021). The case for rage: Why anger is essential to anti-racist struggle. Oxford University Press. Davis, A. (1981). Women, race and class. Women’s Press. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Randall, Trans.). University of California Press. Derrida, J. (1992). Acts of literature (D. Attridge, Ed.). Routledge. Derrida, J., & Cixous, H. (2006). From the word to life: A dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. Interviewed, Armel, A., trans. Thompson, A. New Literary History, 37(1), 1–13. DuBois, W. E. B. (1995) [1916]. Criteria of Negro Art. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (D. Levering Lewis, Ed.). Penguin. Elbow, P. (2012). Vernacular eloquence: What speech can bring to writing. Oxford University Press. Freud, S. (1977). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Norton. Fuss, D. (1989). Essentially speaking: Feminism, nature & difference. Routledge. Glaude, E., Jr. (2001). Pragmatism and black identity: An alternative approach. Neplanta: Views from South, 2(2), 295–316. Haraway, D. (2016) [1985]. ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century.’ Manifestly Haraway. : University of Minnesota Press.

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Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. Routledge. Hooks, B. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Routledge. Iran Human Rights [IRH]. (2022). Iran: Stop sentencing peaceful protestors to death, say un experts. 11 November. https://iranhr.net/en/articles/5582/. Accessed 11 Nov 2022. Lorde, A. (1984). The uses of anger: Women respond to racism. In Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press. MacIntyre, A. (1985). After virtue: A study of moral theory (2nd ed.). Duckworth. Rancière, J. (2004) The politics of aesthetics (G. Rockhill, Ed. and Trans.). Bloomsbury. Richmond, M., & Charnley, A. (2022). Hard stop: On seeking justice for Chris Kaba. Pluto Press: Blog (16 September). https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/hard-stop-on-seeking-justice-forchris-kaba/. Accessed 3 Oct 2022. Rorty, R. (1978). Philosophy as a kind of writing: An essay on Derrida. New Literary History, 10(1), 141–160. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge University Press. Runnymede Trust. (2022). We move: A race equality and migrants rights summit (2–4 September). https://www.runnymedetrust.org/partnership-projects/we-move-race-equality-migrants-rightssummit. Accessed 7 Oct 2022. Taylor, H. (2022). Sky News apologises for report mistaking protest for royal crowds. Guardian (11 September). https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/11/sky-news-apologises-forreport-mistaking-chris-kaba-protest-for-royal-crowds. Accessed 3 Oct 2022. [The] Voice. (2022). Demo for Chris Kaba to call for gun cops to be suspended (09 September). https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/uk-news/2022/09/09/demo-for-chris-kaba-to-call-forgun-cops-to-be-suspended/. Accessed 3 Oct 2022. Van Esveld, B., & Sajadi, E. (2022). In Iran, schoolgirls leading protests for freedom. Human Rights Watch. 12 October. https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/10/12/iran-schoolgirls-leading-protestsfreedom. Accessed 11 Nov 2022. West, C. (2009). Truth. Examined life: Excursions with contemporary thinkers (A. Taylor, Ed., pp. 1–24). The New Press. White, N. (2022). Chris Kaba: Black people ‘terrified’ after fatal shooting of unarmed rapper by police. The Independent (09 September). https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ armed-police-patrol-on-the-rise-people-are-terrified-black-communities-b2162596.html?r=11 757. Accessed 3 Oct 2022.

Reinterpreting the ‘Professional’-isation of Outdoor Education in the Context of Higher Education Lewis Stockwell

Background I have been a senior lecturer in philosophy of education in a self-described ‘entrepreneurial’ university on the Hertfordshire-London border (UK) since 2014. In the early stages of my career, my main work focussed on philosophy of education, within a school of education that prioritised teacher education as its main work and source of ‘income’. My main teaching area focussed on philosophical studies in education, not initial teacher training. Subsequently my interests broadened and I started a part-time PhD alongside full-time work in environmental aesthetics and educational journeying at a university in Edinburgh. More recently, I have undertaken strategic roles in curriculum development. In 2021 I led a degree validation for a set of postgraduate programmes for inclusive outdoor environmental education in urban and peri-urban environments in the East and South-East of England. The programmes are designed using socio-ecological justice principles and enable students to undertake authentic learning experiences by making social contributions inside and outside of the university. My research and practice-based enquiries have focussed on student-staff partnership in higher education (HE), HE and engaged democratic citizenship, and the neglect of attending to the body in learning.

L. Stockwell (✉) School of Education, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_11

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Key Questions What is an outdoor environmental educator? How do conceptions of professional identity affect learning and teaching communities in outdoor education? How could place, community and language influence conceptualisations of your professional identity?

Introduction When we turn our gaze to the subject and experiences of professional identity, I argue that educators draw on a range of aesthetic tools to consider professional values and behaviours. Yet we rarely attend to the perceptual frameworks in use, as sensuous perception is generally undervalued when attending to educational issues – it is often associated with the arts and subjectivity (D’Olimpio, 2021; Koopman, 2013). Aesthetics is concerned with making meaning by attending to sensory experiences and interrogating their significance, such as the responses we might have walking through a woodland or depreciating a building as ugly. In this chapter I address a range of experiences through this extensively used and almost exclusively ignored discipline and reconsider my professional identity. I do so by inviting you into the ways I have attempted to make sense of being and becoming an outdoor environmental educator at a UK post-1992 university, in the home counties of England. To move beyond any accusation of naval gazing, and considering your own position as reader, I draw on the inspiration I have found in the work of Ronald W. Hepburn. During his life and since his death, his work has been described as being responsible for the resurgence of the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments (Brady, 2009; Hepburn, 1963). His thinking has inspired contemporary modes of aesthetic inquiry, such as the aesthetics of the built environment and the aesthetics of everyday life (Berleant, 1992; Saito, 2017). Hepburn’s work is helpful in this context, even though he never discussed professional identity, because he valued the ways in which objects, ideas, arguments, and language relate to a wide range of human experiences. I have structured this discussion on three touchstones: place, community, and expression by drawing on Hepburn’s notion of, ‘serious aesthetic appraisal’. This tasks me – the educator – to become conscious of my experiences of phenomena and to find the appropriate thought-components to give voice to the phenomena’s significance. Place is focused on as a way of highlighting the cultural and geographical locations that ground and sometimes disturb my professional identity. Places, whether my local landscape, the classroom or the canoe (as examples of many), have communal practices – ways of seeing and acting that are sensitive (or not!) to the authority or affordances of these places; such practices often emerge from

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communally recognised acts (Waite, 2011). Professional identity is not developed alone; being an outdoor educator is no different. Deepening my understanding of the power and potential of my community enables me to appraise aspects of my practice in the context of others, which here includes humans and more-than-humans i.e. the natural environment and cultures connected with it. Attending to places and communities requires, ‘sensible sounding language’ in order to articulate the sensuous qualities and their meaning (Hepburn, 1984a). Stories and descriptions of professional identity give voice to the experiences, which enable educators to express meanings that can lead to conscious and critical action for, and on behalf, of the places and their communities (Bruner, 1990; Mezirow, 1981). Acknowledging the influence of these components on my professional identity, I aim to challenge idealised and entrenched views of professionalism. I consider the strong forces influencing where and how a professional should operate, and who indeed can consider themselves a ‘professional outdoor educator’. This chapter aims, if for nothing else, to disrupt ready-made ways of seeing and acting – even if for a moment. The outdoor sector, like other business and educational sectors, tends to thrive on nurturing a specialist identity – this might be through the cultivation of knowledge or through the recognition of specialist skills. In some respects, an outdoor educator is only seen as a professional when working in, and submitting to, the authority of professional standards’ frameworks. A good example in a UK context is the ‘professional’ status of a forest school educator bestowed by the Forest School Association (Leather, 2018). Another example, in the UK, is the Institute for Outdoor Learning, which provides outdoor educators from across a varied range of sectors, the opportunity for ‘professional recognition’, which they bestow by reference to an external framework (Institute of Outdoor Learning, n.d.). Professionalism of this kind has recently been described as ‘professional capital’ (Polley, 2021). Under the guises of these status-bestowing organisations, one has the exchangeable goods to practice competently in a range of settings, as a ‘professional’. Yet, none of these are legally binding in the UK education sector. They are ‘nice to haves’ rather than ‘must-haves’ and there are plenty of outdoor educators and courses out there, myself and the MSc in outdoor environmental education that I lead included in part, that do not have such ‘recognitions’ and therefore could be evaluated as lacking professionalism somehow.

What Do I Do? Why on earth, then, am I turning to aesthetics of nature and environment to understand the qualities of professional identity as an outdoor environmental educator in HE? In an often-ignored area of knowledge – that of the aesthetics of nature and environment – I have been able to attend to different qualities of my professional identity that are outside the boundaries of such frameworks, which are often applied with little critical sensitivity. This is not to say that such frameworks should be

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ignored entirely; it is to say that the place these hold come at the cost of other ways of thinking about professional identity. Instead, in aesthetics of nature, one is concerned with aspects of the environment within us and outside of us (Berleant, 1992), appraising its qualities, its value, its meaning. As an outdoor environmental educator, I am continually confronted with the ‘co-dependent’ or ‘inter-relational’ aspects of my professional identity and the professional and environmental contexts; I see myself as a relational professional, observing, acting and being acted-upon in the physical, living, and material-cultural world.

Ronald W. Hepburn and Aesthetics of Nature Hepburn promoted the view of reciprocal aesthetic engagement, where one is ‘an actor’ and is ‘acted upon’ when moving through, and aesthetically attending to, natural landscapes and objects (Hepburn, 1984a, 12–13). Here I present a vignette in the style of Hepburn (1990, 2001b) to illustrate this point: ‘Imagine that you’re walking through woodland. You see the vibrant autumnal colours on the leaves. The crunching of leaves underfoot, quelled by a slight morning dew. You stroke some of the tree trunks, their dark cold bark catching your eye, catching your fingertips. The sun’s dappled rays shine vibrantly through the canopy, leaving both lightness and darkness on the woodland floor. You take it all in. This is a full-bodied sensory experience. You are not just an observer, though, like you might be in an art gallery. No, you are acted-up by the environment. It influences your thinking, your direction, your attention to different qualities in the woodland. Birds call, warning of your presence. Yet, your presence there, and your movement, creates the experience, too. You are both actor in the woodland, creating the experience; you are acted-upon, with the woodland experience making you, if only in-part, in this unfolding moment’. There are many ways one could interpret the description above – it could be taken literally, as in, ‘this is where and how some outdoor learning may happen’. It could be read as a metaphor: ‘we are not as in control of ourselves as we would like to think’ and that, ‘we are subconsciously influenced by our environments’, and so on. One important aspect I take away here is that the outdoor educator ought to operate with an awareness of the qualities of their environment. As Hepburn says, to rejoice in its ‘multifariousness, playing actively with nature, and letting nature, as it were, play with me and my sense of myself’ (Hepburn, 1984a, 11–12). The authority and autonomy that often comes with leading outdoor education activities requires a healthy engagement with the ‘unpredictable perceptual surprises; and their mere possibility’ which, ‘imparts to the contemplation of nature a sense of adventurous openness’ (Hepburn, 1984a, 15). Educators in the outdoors are able, if not required, to employ courageous perception, which refuses to see in only readily available patterns and responses with ‘generalised emotional qualities’ (Hepburn, 1984a, 18). I am not looking for ‘ready-made patterns’ of professionalism. I am concerned with what the environment is demanding of me and those I’m teaching. I am attending to

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the influence of the environment, which includes fellow human and more-thanhuman beings (Abram, 1996).

How the Environment Invites Responses The affordances of an environment emerge to our perception by the previous framing – education and socialisation – that one receives (Gallagher, 2017). Affordances are the personal and positional opportunities one has, whether they can be seen or not at the time by the person, in that particular environment (Gibson, 1986). There is a sense in which receiving the environmental invitations, of which many are often lost in a single moment because we cannot attend to all of them, are deeply influenced by the framing of the experience. In adult transformative learning, Mezirow (1997) discusses this perceptual influence as one’s frame of reference. These are previous experiences assimilated with learned knowledge and skills that influence our present engagement with the task at hand. In the work of Dewey (1986), this can be explained through his transaction principle, which relies on the concepts of situation, interaction and continuity between a learner and their environment. A learning experience takes place between, ‘the individual, and what at the time constitutes their environment’ (Ord & Leather, 2011, 44). This means that the individual’s intentions, which are informed by previous experiences and learning, interact with the outer world. It is a dynamic transaction, whereby the educator both acts and undergoes in this situation (Hildebrand, 2018). This is echoed in Hepburn’s conception of being actor and acted-upon. As the experiences continue, they can build into future experiences by influencing actions, nurturing different inquiry questions, and can lead to the personal growth of the learner. In these moments, Dewey (1986) might be happy to say a learning experience has taken place. This relies on the continuity principle, where previous learning feeds into the current situation and transactions, which leads to future learning situations and transactions. Such processes take previous learning and experiences and transform that thinking so that one’s understanding of their world is lastingly changed or reframed. My practice and professional identity have developed through a range of situations, interactions and transformations. At its centre it has an educational requirement – I cannot become complacent when developing outdoor learning experiences; I am conscious of many environmental conditions that other educators are not exposed to. Perceptual ‘intrusions’ from plants, birds and mammals – such as otters on an urban river trip in 2021 with a cohort of students – become a multidisciplinary learning opportunity rather than a ‘distraction’ from the real learning (that which was planned and linked to learning objectives). Yet the invitations from the environment are not always positive, especially if one’s skills are being challenged – ignoring weather forecasts or not keeping up to date with land-access issues, for instance, and taking learners across Dartmoor (UK) could lead to serious and unnecessary risks for the learner, educator and

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university. Attending to the environment, however, listening to its invitations for learning within, and challenging, our frames of reference and building on our previous learning, enables me to educate while learning, too.

Place Defining ‘place’ is no easy task, and I shall attempt to save you from the jostling for the pride of place definitions and indicate some of its central qualities. Places are the product of meanings that humans (and likely other animals) attach to geographical spaces (Tuan, 1977). Attached to the geospatial element is the feature of temporal embeddedness; places change, come and go; they may not always lift the heart or spirit on revisitation (Shannon & Galle, 2017). This means that places are constructed and are bounded, and even ‘locations’ between places can in themselves be full of meaning (MacFarlane, 2016). When I devise activities that focus on developing learners’ understanding of place, I am often asking the learner to disrupt their normalising patterns of thought. I am enabling them, if all goes to plan, to adopt the practice of noticing; identifying patterns in the world outside of themselves and to notice their inner world (Mason, 2002). I am aiming for them to find ways to connect with local geography, the people, sustainability ideas, and environmental thought and action. In cases of younger learners, the educator may have in mind an attempt to contextualise an otherwise abstract and universal curriculum into the concrete reality of the world outside of their otherwise impermeable, and sometimes alienating, classroom walls (Beames & Ross, 2010; Shannon & Galle, 2017). In the academy, even now with significant financial strains and significant government intervention on who can do what in a university (Collini, 2012), there is, I believe, a sense in which academics still have some freedom to keep their learning spaces connected to the world outside. In my own practice, I explicitly position the teaching in the postgraduate courses in such a way that learners make a social contribution to their communities through the organised learning opportunities and to capitalise on collateral learning – unplanned and spontaneous learning emerging from interactions (Dewey, 1958). I had serious doubts that the university, its culture and systems, would be able to cope with an outdoor learning programme. The programme was first mooted in 2016, with initial excitement. After a few years of mis/non-communications with management about the programme, a situation emerged that meant the time was right to start serious work on the programme design. Leading the design of the programme and its pedagogy, the completion of the documentation with the team and defending the documentation through the validation process incorporated the programme into part of my identity. It made the programme a part of the school; it meant that my professional identity changed from ‘Lewis the philosopher of education’ (something I had attempted to self-style over a 5 or 6 years) to ‘Lewis the outdoor educator’. It became ‘my’ programme. . . although it wasn’t, of course, it was a joint effort. Yet the place of the programme

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meant that my professional identity was, for the first time, firmly situated in the school, in the local area and region and for a more clearly visible ethical endeavour, which was, is at the time of writing, to improve and increase opportunities for outdoor education for all learners. The process meant that the university as a place had changed for me, and as a result I was changing, too. The meanings of the physical spaces of the university had changed; I and my team had to reinterpret the otherwise concrete and seemingly inhospitable campus. It meant that the spaces students and colleagues almost entirely ignored were to become our ‘stomping grounds’ and regular environments for everyday outdoor learning. The processes of imagining and reimagining influenced the framing of not only the programme, but its connections with my emerging professional identity – I was still me; the university was still the university, but it and I were both our former selves and places, and yet both not them anymore. To summarise this in a Hepburnian and placed-based way: I was acting upon a pre-existing geospatial and cultural environment and through these various experiences of programme design, creativity, and leadership in and for the more-thanhuman-world, the place was acting upon me as an educational professional. As MacIntyre (2007) proposed, being a member of a practice entails working as part of a community toward common goals. Yet the best exemplification of this was neither on the concrete campus nor directly focussing on myself.

Community In discussion about natural aesthetic experience, Hepburn (1984a) informs us of the ways in which one might experience unity with nature. Unity, or preferably unities, with nature are not just about humans attending to nature for their own purposes, as a kind of anthropocentrism (Cocks & Simpson, 2015). Rather the human can be ‘naturised’, too (Hepburn, 1984a, 21). One discussion of unity with nature, Hepburn proposes, can lead to a range of emotional experiences that are evoked by attending to the aesthetic qualities that raise questions about connectedness and foreignness. As Hepburn states, ‘Aesthetic experience of nature may be the experience of a range of emotions that the human scene, by itself, untutored and unsupplemented could not evoke’ – We allow the feeling of otherness and foreignness to influence our everyday sense of one’s being (Hepburn, 1984a, 20). While Hepburn discusses other types of unity experience such as humanising/ spiritualising nature, in my context there has been a sense in which working in a range of environments (the concrete campus being one, and the university’s field studies campus being the other) has disrupted, deeply, where I locate myself in a range of educational communities. This exposure to different nature-based and education-based scenes, as it were, has unsettled the moral purposes and actions of my professional identity as an outdoor environmental educator in a university. One way is through the unifying of the structured learning activities of the programme – the teaching and learning with the students – with the world outside of their

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programme and university. One important way was during May 2022, where the team, including the students, hosted a day of outdoor learning for local schools and learning organisations. As a result of this disruption and momentary foreignness (and others like it leading up to this point), I gained a feeling of oneness, a feeling of being part of the unfolding and enfolding environment. The day of outdoor learning involved preparing and delivering a carousel of outdoor activities for learners in the region. The programme was designed with social justice principles, which meant the entire event was free for participants. The schools joined us at our field station campus, which is adorned with a number of woodlands, ponds, and green spaces. It is a gently managed and sensorially rich site, often used for environmental management programmes. With over 130 children and school staff, nine MSc students and 20 academic staff leading activities – from ponddipping, planting food, to making natural paints and a bioblitz – the place came alive as one community aiming toward a common good. At its core, a community is a distinguishable group of people and more-thanhuman entities brought together and made distinguishable by its relationship towards particular goods, distinct from other communities and organisations (Bowers, 2017; Oxford English Dictionary, 2008). For me, building a learning community among a self-confessed group of disparate and diverse learners is a challenge, familiar to many educators reading this. It is, quite frankly, part of the educator’s job to work toward social cohesion in the framework of our learning environments (Healy, 2013), whether indoors or outdoors. Yet, when I articulated the need to the MSc students to make a social contribution as part of their programme, there were points in the aspects of student preparation where unity was apparent between themselves and environment and other times in which I despaired and lost a good few nights’ sleep at the sometimes lack of communal engagement and responsibility. This spilled over also in the lack of communal responsibility from the wider university, who for instance, provided no funding for the activity – education on a shoestring. Yet despite these challenges, there was something about constantly reframing and re-emphasising the outdoor education students, staff, and myself as members of the community of educators that enabled subsequent learning to be of significant richness. Hepburn reminds us that in the contexts of art and nature, that nature is not art (Hepburn, 1984a). Nature is not bounded in the same way as human-created objects are – many artworks are literally framed or set-aside to be appraised as works of arts (Carlson, 2009). Nature is not and therefore should not be treated as something it isn’t; i.e. art (Budd, 2009). Hepburn reminds us of the need for nuanced and appropriate engagement with art and with nature; art should be treated as art, nature should be treated as nature. If we fail to attend appropriately to this ‘framing’, we are then left open to misinterpretation (an aesthetic issue) and mistreatment (an ethical issue). Synonymously in education, if we want to build learning communities, we need to recognise and frame ourselves as a collective group of educators. We need to become the aesthetic subjects framed in these ways. To return to our day of outdoor learning: in this environment, with its educational affordances, and in this publicfacing activity, we were all educators. To the pupils and school staff, we were all

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educators and were relied on as such. In some sense, too (with a hope to not overclaim or naively romanticise), the unfolding of the day’s activities led pupils to become committed to the common cause of raising their own awareness of their behaviours and thought processes in, for and advocating on behalf of, the more-thanhuman entities of their communities. It is through this kind of reframing or reimagining of myself as an academic – as a communal subject – I was able to become less familiar with myself and more relational with nature and fellow learners (Hepburn, 1972). This ‘seeing as’ enabled a range of rich opportunities for professional development through community – even through frustrations of others – that produced a sense of being dedicated to a project of meaning (Cooper, 2017; Wolf, 1997). The embodied and emotional responses, such as frustration and conversely, pride toward the teams of educators and pupils and their collective achievements, were not necessarily emotional states that I had previously experienced in my work. Of course, I had been proud of many of my students and valued the learning gained from them; there was something, so difficult to describe, that emerged from appraising my professional identity as the ‘framer’ of learning experiences for the outdoor education students and the pupils.

Expression There is much about the everyday discussion of professional identity that is systematic. It deals with solving one set of problems, which leads to the solving of further problems beyond those initially engaged with (Smith, 2009). Here I want to think about ways in which expressions of professionalism can be edifying. Smith (2009) describes edification as an opening up of conversations and possibilities for education rather that its systematised counterpart. In the discussion of aesthetic appraisal of nature experiences, something which is a central feature of my professional practice, Hepburn argued that aesthetic philosophy had predominantly neglected a significant area of human experience (Hepburn, 1984a). As such there was (and to some extent still is) a severe limitation in language that could otherwise be put to work in the descriptions, metaphors, and similes enabling one to give voice to felt but inexpressible experiences (Hepburn, 1984b). The previous reliance on the conceptual resources prevalent in the realm of art and in philosophy of art, rendered a whole set of human experiences as, ‘off-the-map; and since off the map, seldom visited’ (Hepburn, 1984a: 11–12). Since Hepburn’s paper, much more work has been carried out to aid the aesthetic appraisal of nature-based experiences (Berleant, 2010; Carlson, 2009; Saito, 2017). Yet there is still limited engagement with aesthetics of nature in education; even where aesthetics is engaged with more generally in education, it is primarily in its reduced state as the philosophy of art (Koopman, 2013), negating a range of other sensorially rich and potentially aesthetically educative experiences (D’Olimpio, 2021).

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The lack of aesthetic engagement with education, of which developing a professional identity is a part, does not mean it is beyond appraisal. I believe that we may not have the language, yet. It requires purposeful, yet humble, movement from a kind of anaesthesia to a form of alert perception (Hepburn, 1984a), a dance from already known ready-made concepts and clichés to emerging sensible sounding language and edifying serious aesthetic appraisal (Hepburn, 2001a; Smith, 2009). Here, ‘serious’ means drawing on appropriate knowledge to do justice to the subject or object in focus. It provides the cognitive aspect for appraisal of the sensuous surface (Saito, 2007), moving it beyond sensory experience alone (Hepburn, 2001a). It enables me to be open to the possibility of there being something different to see, to learn from its invitations and gestures. In this case it could be the educational experience or even the key parts of my personal identity as evoked in any given situation; anything can be appraised aesthetically (Carlson, 1979). It is to attend to the aesthetic experience first and not some human-made, overly academicized conceptual framework haphazardly overlain to the object of focus, which may well come at the cost of its truthful and meaningful appraisal. When in the systematic mode, there is little place for one to sit with the discomfort of aspects of professional life that many recognise but do not express. Here is an excerpt from my PhD journal while recovering from a flare of chronic fatigue syndrome, a disability I have had since 2018 (entry written 22/03/2021): No one passes me. I pass them. Fast flow. Ducks paddle against, remaining stationary. Every step forward I take, I wish for some reason that I was stationary. Why? I don’t know. A knotted feeling inside. A rumbling against my will. A mind ill-at-ease with the day. What a privilege it is to feel as though one has a place to be and know. I don’t feel located at all. I feel present, but separated from place. This place. That Place. There is no place here. It doesn’t feel like something I can belong to, or call ‘mine’. Just like the river, I am flooded. That kind of spate where all the action is taken out of it, where all there is, is sheer unbridled power and flow. All that lays is dragged along with it. I look but do not see. I hear but do not listen. I touch but do not feel. I feel of no place, yet I am here, and like the water it evaporates or drips away. Right before me. Right before my eyes. Unseen.

In this circumstance, at this time and place, the appropriate way for me to engage with, and express, this part of my identity was a form of nature writing; perhaps it could be charitably described as a poetics of person-and-place? Expressing these qualities of the interactions of my outer-world and inner-world is something that I have often found lacking in other areas of my academic work, yet vitally necessary in aspects of my outdoor education identity. For instance, in one kind of expression – disclosure – I feel a responsibility to share with my students that I have a disability. Such expressions are necessary i.e. I get tired; sometimes I’ll need to direct and instruct rather than model, etc. There are no expectations for students to disclose

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their own challenges aloud in the group (only with their educator in confidential health and wellbeing declarations). My disclosure is an act of advocacy on behalf of those in the outdoor community who have disabilities; a gesture to invite conversation, understanding and humanity from the learners and staff. To some reading this, alarm bells might ring. This may be seen as an act of ‘trespass’ into unprofessionalism. In the classroom it may not be necessary; no need for disclosure. In circumstances where the directedness of education cannot be separated between body and mind, i.e., the outdoors, there is a need to let the ‘swollen river’ flow. Instead of being ‘flooded’ by sentiments of ‘what I should do’ or ‘what I should say’, the centredness of my professionalism requires me to think in terms of, ‘what is right for this moment?’, ‘what is required of me?’ and ‘what will bring about the educational good in this place, for these people?’ In reframing acts of professional expression in sensible sounding language beyond the ready-made expressions and silences, bringing these and other kinds of experiences back onto the conceptual map, there is a sense of genuine clarity in acts of self-appraisal of my professional identity informed by aesthetic thought. I hope that other members of educational communities will be able to do the same, aiding their own necessary expressions as a member of a community and a member of a place. Thus, clarity is further nurtured through an aesthetic sensitivity; a clarity that can be appraised and improved through a sensitive attention to perceptual qualities emanating from self and others and their sometimes literal and metaphorical conversations.

Conversations Rather Than Conclusions In this chapter I’ve shared a selected set of insights from reading professional identity through place, community, and expression. I have tried to invite you, the reader, to see these readings through a range of experiences and modes of expression, including reflective accounts and place-based nature writing. All of which have aimed to open-up further thought in considering professionalism as generated by, or deeply influenced by, aesthetic knowledge. From my own narratives, I have shown how aesthetic insights enable discussions of a range of experiences that may otherwise be left off the conceptual map and inexpressible. I have tried to write something that would have helped me in the earlier stages of my career, to give voice to complex relationships and influences on my being and becoming. In the three discussions centring on place, community and expression, I have attempted to show how an invitational and edifying reading of my professionalism could speak to you. In sitting at the openings for aesthetic appraisal of professional identity, I have aimed to aid a different mode of expression and gesturing for personal-professional growth. Learning from (and to keep learning from) these features, rather than systematically solving problems in relation to them invites conversations and opportunities to meaningfully reflect on professionalism. As such, there may be other

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opportunities, beyond those engaged with here, for meaningful reinterpretations of professionalisation of outdoor education in a higher education context. It may just require reconsidering the conceptual tools we are working with and taking the opportunity to see it as something other than the ready-made concepts that we so regularly turn to. I offer this as an opportunity to reflect on these invitations in your own way.

References Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. Pantheon Books. Beames, S., & Ross, H. (2010). Journeys outside the classroom. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 10(2), 95–109. Berleant, A. (1992). The Aesthetics of Environment. Temple University Press. Berleant, A. (2010). Sensibility and sense: The aesthetic transformation of the human world. Imprint Academic. Bowers, C. A. (2017). An ecojustice approach to educational reform in adult education. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 153, 53–64. Brady, E. (2009). Ronald W. Hepburn – The British Society of Aesthetics. Available at: https:// british-aesthetics.org/resources/obituaries/ronald-w-hepburn/. Accessed 28 June 2019. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Harvard University Press. Budd, M. (2009). Aesthetics of nature. In J. Levinson (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of aesthetics (pp. 118–134). University Press. Carlson, A. (1979). Appreciation and the natural environment. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37(3), 267–275. Carlson, A. (2009). Nature & landscape: An introduction to environmental aesthetics. Columbia University Press. Cocks, S., & Simpson, S. (2015). Anthropocentric and ecocentric: An application of environmental philosophy to outdoor recreation and environmental education. Journal of Experiential Education, 38(3), 216–227. Collini, S. (2012). What are universities for? Penguin. Cooper, D. E. (2017). Senses of mystery: Engaging with nature and the meaning of life. Routledge. D’Olimpio, L. (2021). Defending aesthetic education. British Journal of Educational Studies, 70(3), 263–279. Dewey, J. (1958). Experience and nature (2nd ed.). Dover Publications. Dewey, J. (1986). Experience and education. Educational Forum, 50(3), 242–252. Gallagher, S. (2017). Pragmatic resources for enactive and extended minds. In Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (pp. 49–65). Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Healy, M. (2013). Philosophical perspectives on social cohesion: New directions for educational policy. Bloomsbury. Hepburn, R. W. (1963). Aesthetic appreciation of nature. British Journal of Aesthetics, 3(3), 195–209. Hepburn, R. W. (1972). Poetry and ‘concrete imagination’: Problems of truth and illusion. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 12(1), 3–18. Hepburn, R. W. (1984a). Contemporary aesthetics and the neglect of natural beauty. In Wonder and other essays (pp. 9–35). Edinburgh University Press.

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Hepburn, R. W. (1984b). Wonder. In Wonder and other essays (pp. 131–154). Edinburgh University Press. Hepburn, R. W. (1990). Art, truth and the education of subjectivity. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 24(2), 185–198. Hepburn, R. W. (2001a). Trivial and serious in the aesthetic appreciation of nature. In The reach of the aesthetic: Collected essays on art and nature (pp. 1–15). Routledge. Hepburn, R. W. (2001b). Truth, subjectivity and the aesthetic. In The reach of the aesthetic: Collected essays on art and nature (pp. 16–37). Routledge. Hildebrand, D. L. (2018). Experience is not the whole story: The integral role of the situation in Dewey’s democracy and education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 52(2), 287–300. Institute of Outdoor Learning. (n.d.). Professional Recognition. Professional recognition in outdoor learning. Available at: outdoor-learning.org. Accessed 18 July 2023. Koopman, C. (2013). Art and aesthetic education. In R. Bailey, R. Barrow, D. Carr, & C. McCarthy (Eds.), The Sage handbook of philosophy of education (pp. 435–450). Sage. Leather, M. (2018). A critique of ‘forest school’ or something lost in translation. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 21(1), 5–18. MacFarlane, R. (2016). Landmarks. Penguin. MacIntyre, A. (2007). After virtue (3rd ed.). Bloomsbury. Mason, J. (2002). Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing. Routledge. Mezirow, J. (1981). A critical theory of adult learning and education. Adult Education, 32(3), 3–24. Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1997(74), 5–12. Ord, J., & Leather, M. (2011). The substance beneath the labels of experiential learning: The importance of John Dewey for outdoor educators. Australian Journal of Outdoor Education, 15(2), 13–23. Oxford English Dictionary. (2008). Community. Oxford English Dictionary, 99(3), 586. Polley, S. (2021). Professionalism, professionalisation and professional currency in outdoor environmental education. In Outdoor environmental education in higher education: International perspectives, international explorations in outdoor and environmental education (pp. 363–373). Springer. Saito, Y. (2007). Everyday aesthetics. Oxford University Press. Saito, Y. (2017). Aesthetics of the familiar: Everyday life and world making. Oxford University Press. Shannon, D., & Galle, J. (2017). Where we are: Place, pedagogy, and the outer limits. In Interdisciplinary approaches to pedagogy and place-based education: Fron abstract to quotidian (pp. 1–7). Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, R. (2009). Between the lines: Philosophy, text and conversation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43(3), 437–449. Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and place: The pespective of experience. University of Minnesota Press. Waite, S. (2011). Teaching and learning outside the classroom: Personal values, alternative pedagogies and standards. Education 3–13, 39(1), 65–82. Wolf, S. (1997). Happiness and meaning: Two aspects of the good life. Social Philosophy and Policy, 14(01), 207–225.

Beyond “Paraprofessional”: Empowering and Equipping Teaching Assistants to Develop a Sense of Identity Allyson Goodchild

Background I am a senior tutor in Education Studies and hold the responsibility of course co-ordinating a part-time applied education studies degree. Over the last 10 years I have specialised in working with mature students. Many of them are highly experienced teaching assistants and support staff working within education who are now seeking future career development by undertaking a degree that links closely to their current and future career. Some will apply for initial teacher training after they have graduated, others will undertake more advanced or specialist support roles within their settings. Prior to working in higher education, I had a full, professional career as a primary school teacher and headteacher over a period of 20 years. My leadership experiences have enabled me to understand the complexity of the roles that teaching assistants and support staff undertake and what they require from continued professional development through degree level study to develop themselves and prepare for a future, graduate – led career. I have focused my own research on how we can support part-time, mature students to successfully transition into higher education. Teaching Assistants (TAs) can often experience tension in trying to fulfil their assigned roles, especially when those roles are not always clearly defined or are changed at short notice to meet unforeseen needs in a school. In trying to utilise agency, TAs will often feel torn between competing professional identities and will seek to ‘know their place’ (Watson et al., 2013: 115). This is particularly challenging when expectations placed on them are sometimes inferred rather than made explicit thus further constraining their capacity to exercise agency. This chapter will explore my personal reflections on the challenges that teaching assistants face when trying to develop a sense of identity in the workplace. I will do A. Goodchild (✉) University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_12

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this through considering my own identity, as their academic tutor, and the responsibilities I hold towards their professional development but also as an experienced school leader who can relate to their experiences on a more personal level. Moreover, I will demonstrate how I will often move between these two identities to support students seeking solutions to work-based dilemmas. Finally, the chapter will consider the role that professional development can play to help support staff become empowered professionals.

Key Questions How do teaching assistants develop their professional identity within the workplace when role boundaries become unclear? To what extent does professional development empower TAs to meet evolving and changing expectations of their role?

School Workforce Remodelling The remodelling of the school workforce has been a central pillar of successive governments’ strategies to modernise and reform the English education system. At the turn of the century, the ‘Time for Standards’ consultation (DfES, 2002) led to the introduction of a national agreement (DfES, 2003) to improve pupil performance and standards and ease teacher workload. Guaranteed planning, preparation and assessment time (PPA) and the removal of selected administrative tasks from teachers led to the expansion of support roles in schools with greater responsibilities placed on support staff. New roles were established including the introduction of learning mentors, cover supervisors, sports coaches and attendance officers to undertake specific tasks to release the burden placed on teachers. In fact, government policy at that time cited support staff as a vital professional resource. It was made clear that support staff should be recognised for the professional contribution they would make to teaching and learning through the proposed reforms and should be supported with training and new career pathways (DfES, 2002). Further expansion to the support staff role came in 2005 with the introduction of the higher-level teaching assistant (HLTA). HLTA status could be achieved by a TA evidencing professional knowledge acquired in the workplace using a work-based competency model (Training and Development Agency, 2006a). This then allowed a TA to take on a greater teaching responsibility. Two decades have elapsed since the modernisation commenced. The latest statistics from the DFE (2022) show that over 968,000 staff work in schools. While half of that figure represents teachers, a number which has remained relatively steady over the last decade, over 275,000 are Teaching Assistants. This represents a trebling of full-time equivalent TAs since 2002 (Sharples et al., 2015). This

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exponential increase has, to a greater extent, been driven by policy with many TAs having ‘policy careers’ (Ball et al., 2012) in that their roles have evolved through the wider education agenda to support schools in meeting the expectations placed upon them. Furthermore, this continued expansion of the workforce has created opportunities for TAs, with their varying titles and job descriptions, to take on an increasingly pedagogical role to improve learning outcomes for pupils. This development has not been without contradictions and tensions. The demarcation of role boundaries between teacher and TA have increasingly blurred and a decentralised approach to professionalising the TA workforce has resulted in inconsistent deployment decisions and role expectations across schools. Additionally, ‘para-professional’, a term often used to describe TAs, is now seen to hold negative connotations suggesting that even a highly trained TA, carrying a high burden of responsibility, is still somehow less competent and unqualified than their ‘professional’ counterpart (Watson et al., 2013). As a headteacher, I witnessed first-hand the initial introduction of the ‘Time for Standards’ agenda and remember well the pressure I faced in my role to ensure that all staff received their correct PPA time and that administrative tasks were removed. Teachers were the priority, and on reflection, TAs and their training needs were given little thought in the process other than how they would fill gaps in the timetable. Moving forward 20 years, as an academic tutor, I can see how the roles and responsibilities of students undertaking the degree have become increasingly specialist. To be effective and successful, TAs require deeper pedagogical knowledge and theoretical understanding of teaching and learning processes as well as being able to multi-task and change roles when required, often at short notice. In many cases, the decision to enrol on the degree has been led by a desire to take charge of their own professional development and alleviate the confusion they often feel and to help reconcile the following question: Am I a teaching assistant or a teacher?

The Deployment of Teaching Assistants The latest research undertaken by the DFE (2019) into the deployment of teaching assistants shows a similar deployment pattern as in previous studies (Blatchford et al., 2009, 2012; Sharples et al., 2015). TAs are typically being used to provide general or targeted in-class support or are tasked with delivering specific intervention programmes outside the classroom. HLTAs are given much greater level of responsibility for teaching and learning including teaching whole classes. In all cases, there is a much greater accountability attached to the role for the learning outcomes of the pupils they work with. Approaches vary widely across schools with the DFE (2019) citing little evidence on what is informing schools’ decision making on how and where TAs are deployed and how effective is their deployment. Sharples et al. (2015) make it abundantly clear that it is the decisions that senior leaders make

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about TAs not those that are made by a TA that can explain the impact of TA support on pupil learning and progress.

In-class Support A general class support model deploys a TA within the classroom context under the direction of the teacher. This is a common approach in primary schools where the TA provides support to aid the teacher in meeting the needs of learners. It incorporates a hierarchical relationship between the teacher, TA and learner (Slater & Gazeley, 2019) with the teacher remaining accountable for learning and outcomes. In this scenario, the TA works in collaboration with the teacher to identify how they can best be utilised to support learning depending on need and will target learners accordingly. In contrast, a targeted in-class support model deploys a TA as a specific resource to support pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) including those with Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCP). While carrying out similar tasks to that of a general TA, a targeted TA will also provide additional support. This may include adapting lesson content for a specific pupil, meet specific requirements of an EHCP and/or managing a pupil’s behaviour and emotional regulation. Students undertaking the degree talk of their concerns that general in-class support is becoming increasingly rare as school leaders seek to balance budgets post – pandemic which is leading to a further reduction in this type of support. Moreover, they feel increasingly concerned that their jobs are under threat, and they need to be seen to be doing more to justify their role. Diminishing numbers of general TAs creates further challenges as TAs speak of being tasked to target a child with an EHCP but find that they are more likely to be undertaking a dual role of offering more general support to children with SEND within a class alongside ensuring their ‘named’ child meets their agreed targets. This creates not only a sense of frustration as they know that they cannot do either very well but concern as to whether they are fulfilling their responsibilities to the child they are legally contracted to support.

Delivering Interventions This mode of deployment requires the TA to deliver intervention programmes to targeted pupils. The DFE (2019) notes that these interventions take place either in addition to or instead of taught lessons. They predominantly involve pupils requiring SEND or EAL (English as an Additional Language) support and those that attract pupil premium funding. Interventions are either designed to prepare pupils for learning in the classroom or to reinforce learning that has been completed already. In some cases, specific interventions such as those that support literacy and numeracy, social and emotional aspects of learning and speech and language are used.

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Such a model requires the teacher to maintain overall responsibility while delegating the specific teaching responsibility to the TA who will provide additional, not alternative, support to that which is provided in the classroom. TAs studying on the degree programme feel that their learning really supports them in carrying out such interventions as it enables them to understand the theory behind the practice, particularly in the core subjects, which are taught as separate units. Developing a more refined understanding of pedagogical practice enables then to better support pupil progress by identifying misconceptions and gaps in understanding and addressing them. While the expectation is that teachers oversee interventions, it appears though that, in many cases, TAs are expected to plan and teach them independently. Unlike teachers, PPA time is not often provided, and TAs cite spending their lunchtime (if they are not undertaking a lunchtime duty) or taking planning home to prepare in their own unpaid time.

Higher Level Teaching Assistants Against the backdrop of workforce reform, the creation of the HLTA role in England in 2005 provided important recognition that some TAs were working at a higher level. A set of national standards against which potential HLTAs could be assessed were introduced (Training and Development Agency, 2006b) and the award of HLTA status has enabled TAs to take on primary teaching roles. HLTAs are mainly deployed to teach whole classes while teachers engage in planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) time equating to 10 percent of the timetabled week. The HLTA is expected to deliver teacher planned content while working independently, undertaking full responsibility for all aspects of the learning environment. Over time, as schools and academies have taken full ownership of their staff, the job description has become increasingly blurred and role creep has occurred. Ten years ago, a high number of HLTAs would start the degree each year and would receive 30 prior learning credits as they had undertaken specialised training and had received HLTA status from the HLTA National Partnership. This year, no student has this award although many had undertaken independently short, online HLTA courses without an awarding body to oversee standards. At the same time, those given this role are more likely to be teaching classes on a regular basis to cover staff absence as well as PPA time as they know the children better than an external supply teacher. This means that many are having to take on the role of unqualified teacher rather than HLTA but are not necessarily being awarded the same status and pay. From a leadership perspective, I can see the level of importance each of these typical TA deployment approaches have in meeting school priorities for pupil progress. Unfortunately, competing priorities such as managing the school budget, recruitment and retention and staff absence has meant that difficult decisions have to be made with regards how support staff are deployed. Many TAs are expected to undertake multiple roles during the course of a typical week and, in more challenging weeks, may be called upon to move at short notice to support or teach in different

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key stages or classes or to take on a one-to-one role with a child with needs. This often leads to frustration as little notice is often given to prepare for a change of role and little support is offered.

Support Staff Deployment Challenges In order to provide evidence-based recommendations to help schools best utilise their support staff, Sharples et al. (2015) examined existing research into the deployment of TAs. This included the highly influential Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS), a longitudinal study over 5 years (2003–2008) which explored the relationship between TA support and the academic progress of pupils (Blatchford et al., 2012). Despite the age of the original research, it still provides a suitable evidence base upon which to draw recommendations and more recent research (Sharples et al., 2015; DFE, 2019) would suggest that little has changed in the deployment of TAs since then. Sharples et al. (2015) maintain that there is still significant ambiguity and variation in the way TAs are allocated roles. While they believe that TAs can enhance learning within a school by assisting teachers, many have a direct teaching role, often with those children who have the highest level of need academically, emotionally and/or behaviourally. While this gives attention and support to the child and enables the teacher to focus on teaching the rest of the class, it deploys the TA as the child’s primary educator. Furthermore, the evidence from all the studies shows that quality of the teaching from the TA tends to be lower than that provided by the teacher with TAs more concerned with task completion than deepening learning and understanding. Most worrying is the lack of preparedness TAs feel for undertaking their assigned role both with regards their professional training and meeting daily expectations. Little time is provided for joint planning or feedback with teachers with communication seemingly ad hoc. As their academic tutor, this point particularly resonates as TAs regularly cite their experiences of going into lessons unprepared, having to pick up subject and pedagogical knowledge ‘on the hoof’ from the teacher and then being held to account for some children’s lack of progress. This leaves them disheartened and powerless as they have no control over the decisions made about their deployment. On a more positive note, Sharples et al. (2015) suggest that, when a TA’s role involves delivering structured interventions for which they have received training and support, there is a positive impact on pupil progress. A good example of this is in the teaching of a phonics programme. When TAs have been trained alongside teachers, they feel that they are more equipped to effectively intervene and enhance individual progress and feel that they can make a more positive contribution rather than having to effectively ‘teach’ themselves. Furthermore, TAs say that knowledge gained on the degree programme has boosted their confidence and performance even further by providing a solid theoretical understanding that can be applied in practice.

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The effective deployment of HLTAs has also been problematic. While the role of the teacher is governed by a set of professional standards, the development of the HLTA role has evolved with minimal centralised direction. Despite assurances that HLTAs are not replacement teachers (Slater & Gazeley, 2019), local deployment decisions and variable professional development opportunities has left the HLTA betwixt and between the role of a teacher and that of a teaching assistant (Graves, 2012). The blurring of boundaries between the two (Graves, 2012; Hancock et al., 2010) has meant that a HLTA has to incorporate both aspects of the role as part of their professional identity while demonstrating a far greater level of ‘flexibility, adaptation and compliance’ (Graves & Williams, 2017:266) to meet local expectations than their teacher counterparts. A frequently cited example of this by students on the degree is when they are asked to cover a class at short notice. While happy to oblige, it is often the case that their TA role is not replaced by another member of support staff and they are expected to teach without the same level of support afforded a class teacher. Furthermore, while the HLTA role demonstrates recognition of the higher-level skills afforded the teaching assistant and acknowledges the significant role they play in teaching and learning, it is not necessarily reflected in higher professional status within a setting, higher pay and further training to meet the advanced level of pedagogical understanding required to not only teach whole classes but effectively ensure children progress in their learning. In many cases, it appears that professional recognition of HLTAs rests ‘solely with senior managers in individual schools who can decide, seemingly arbitrarily, on the relative value of HLTA and academic qualifications’ (Graves & Williams, 2017:271). Incorporating an academic identity within an already existing professional identity has afforded me the opportunity to question what I believe is of value in education. Teaching experienced support staff, engaging in research within this area and hearing firsthand accounts from TAs has strengthened my resolve to ensure that they, at the very least, can see the value of the degree in developing their professional practice and giving them a voice to share and discuss their experiences.

The Paraprofessional in the Workplace Professionalising staff as part of a workforce remodelling agenda is ultimately designed to create a more highly skilled workforce. It can be seen in the above section that TAs have undergone a rapid transformation from that of general classroom helper to that of para-professional specifically designed to support learning. Paraprofessionals have long been an integral part of public sector organisations. Often holding lesser qualifications, paraprofessionals have been actively promoted by governments to ease the working conditions of professionals by the delegation of low-level tasks to them. The intention is to allow the professional to get on with the job they are qualified to do (Hancock et al., 2010). In many professions, such as in law, the role of a paraprofessional (a paralegal) has a clearly defined role and salary structure. In education, it appears that issues surrounding the demarcation of

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professional boundaries and the potential loss of the professional status of teachers surface when policy becomes practice. This can pose a threat to a teacher’s professional identity and confusion to a TA’s identity. Blatchford et al. (2012) note that historically in education, factors such as professional knowledge gained through training to a higher level, strict entry requirements and regulated practice have all contributed to the status awarded to members of the teaching profession. They argue that the rise of the skilled paraprofessional, tasked with undertaking more of a pedagogical role under the direction of the teacher, has started to erode these distinct elements. It has made the demarcation between paraprofessional and professional harder to delineate. It has also begun to change the role of the professional who previously enjoyed greater autonomy in the classroom and who now must work collaboratively with other adults in support of children’s learning. Furthermore, greater expectations are placed on the teaching professional to take responsibility for the supervision and mentoring of the paraprofessional assigned to them. This role is often undertaken with little regard to the management skills required or indeed any training (Basford et al., 2017). As an academic tutor, I often have to adopt a mentoring role when TAs talk of their experiences of working with teachers who refuse to relinquish control or utilise the TA effectively. By asking objective questions and getting them to see the wider context within which the teacher is working, it is usually possible for TAs to start to view the situation through the lens of the teacher and understand why the teacher may be appearing hostile towards them. It also helps strengthen their resolve in how they will make best use of teaching assistants when they qualify as teachers. Negotiating blurred boundaries can give rise to a zone of uncertainty (Moran & Abbot, 2002) or ‘role creep’ (Clarke & Visser, 2019) whereby the paraprofessional, namely the TA, experiences difficulty in understanding their role. This is exacerbated when there is little opportunity to discuss expectations with the class teacher with an understanding gained through inference and assumption. Expectations of the paraprofessional can also differ widely depending on the teacher. For some TAs, this has meant being tasked with working with the most challenging children, who would test the most experienced professional, with little training. Other TAs drift into a teaching role and are expected to teach whole classes with limited pedagogic and subject knowledge compared to the professionally trained educator. TAs are also frequent boundary crossers, moving between assigned roles and working across several classrooms. This requires a TA to work with several members of staff who may hold different expectations of the role assigned to the TA. This will ultimately impact on how the TA defines their role and the level of agency they can utilise to successfully fulfil it. When teaching the degree, I have been able to share with students my own experiences of being a professional boundary crosser, particularly when entering higher education. It has taken time to position my identity as an academic as opposed to a professional teacher, but I have learnt that being prepared to move fluidly between them has enabled me to view professional situations that

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students share more objectively and from an evidence-informed standpoint. This has enhanced and improved my teaching. Furthermore, coaching students to develop a similar approach in their own practice, helps them to take greater ownership of their own professional development. With the paraprofessional now sharing the professional space in which a teacher resides, (Hammersley-Fletcher & Lowe, 2011) ethical and moral questions arise. These include the level of responsibility afforded the TA to teach the curriculum, the extent to which the class teacher maintains overall responsibility for the teaching and learning undertaken in their classroom as well as the thorny issue of remuneration. The gap between the pay of a qualified teaching professional and a teaching assistant with lesser qualifications is wide. A competent and confident TA is often a preferred option to employing a supply teacher to cover a teacher absence or to take PPA time as they can provide continuity and less disruption for learners. These TAs already have relations with pupils and are well positioned to utilise familiar classroom routines and wider school level expectations. While TAs on the degree are often happy to take on this level of responsibility, particularly as their confidence grows over the 4 years of study, this is not necessarily reflected in the pay they receive. This presents a dilemma for senior staff, who on the one hand, want to make decisions in the best interests of the children, but on the other, could be seen as employing cheap labour. Most recently, the DFE (2019:45) has acknowledged that senior leaders are aware of the competing demands associated with deciding how best to deploy TAs with many ‘having to work across different age ranges, with different teachers and on different or competing tasks’. While this recognition is an important first step towards a better understanding of the difficulties often placed on a TA, the DFE do not offer any immediate solutions. Watson et al. (2013:114) suggests that paraprofessionals are sometimes viewed as a ‘be-coming or not-quite a professional’. This positions the TA in a subordinate role with limited power to affect change and restricted opportunities to seek further professional development without the support of the professional who hold the power. The TAs who took part in their research describe the perception of TAs within a school as being ‘pond life that know their place’ (2013:105). This controversial statement suggests that, at times, TAs can feel invisible and lack the capacity to challenge the positioning of their place within the school hierarchy. While the research represented a minority of experiences, it is powerful in the sense that it raises important questions about the challenges TAs can face when trying to gain a sense of identity and agency in their assigned roles. It should be noted though that, in many cases, my students say how they enjoy their roles and the extra responsibilities afforded to them and take pride in what they do. This matches the participants in Hammersley-Fletcher and Lowe’s (2011) research who reported high job satisfaction despite the lack of recognition through their pay. The researchers also comment that many TAs are willing and enthusiastic and gain personally from their work with children.

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Developing Identity and Agency as a TA Identity has been described as ‘the way of making sense of ourselves and the image we present to others’ (Day, 2011:48 in Trent, 2014). It is regarded as a dynamic process, socially-constructed and shaped by personal and contextual influences (Martin, 2020). Wenger (1998) argues that identity construction happens in the ‘doing’ through three modes of belonging. Firstly, mutual engagement with others leads to the negotiation of meaning and subsequent construction of identity. Secondly, the use of imagination enables the individual to extrapolate their identity through time and space. Finally, alignment synchronises an individual’s activities within broader institutional structures enabling the identity of the organisation to be incorporated within the individual’s identity. The development of a professional identity helps us to feel self-assured and confident in in our role and accepted within the community of practice. Full membership in the community offers familiarity. We know how to engage with others, we experience competence and are viewed by others as being competent. This process takes time though. Entering higher education as an experienced leader did not prepare me for the subsequent identity shift away from a leadership role in which I was both effective and experienced to one which was unfamiliar, despite still being in a teaching capacity. This certainly evoked initial feelings about my agentic capacity and worth as an educator and as an academic. The growth of a teacher identity is supported by a set of professional standards that are nationally recognised (DFE, 2011) with clarity provided on the skills and knowledge required to undertake the role across all settings. Early career teachers are mentored by more experienced teachers and are expected to engage in reflective practice and professional dialogue designed to develop their teaching. Engagement within the community of practice and experience both help to shape the teacher identity and will enable the teacher to exercise greater control and autonomy over their practice. In my early HE career, I was lucky enough to work alongside two highly experienced colleagues, one of whom was also previously a headteacher and one had worked as an education advisor. Both had successfully made the transition from teacher to lecturer. Developing a close, collaborative partnership with them both enabled me to understand my new role and utilise effectively my existing knowledge and skills. This enabled me to start to ‘find my place’ within a much larger organisation. Likewise, for TAs, the multiplicity of their roles and the variability of responsibilities undertaken are also often negotiated through custom and practice at a local level. Furthermore, the interactions they experience with the teachers they work with and their personal reflection on these experiences creates a sense of who they think they are. Role confusion and the requirement to engage with multiple teachers in different classrooms can impact on how long it takes an individual TA to feel comfortable within their role (Martin, 2020). This can lead to the TA experiencing a sense of disassociation or ‘otherness’ in the workplace (Basford et al., 2017:291). It

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positions them on the periphery of the community of practice unable to exercise personal agency sufficiently to exert influence over their assigned roles. Many TAs have become adept at managing competing identities emanating from their roles rather than forming one distinct identity. For those who regularly traverse the gap between TA and teacher, a hybrid identity is required (Graves, 2012) to allow them to undertake the ‘quasi’ teaching role expected of them during a typical week. Graves argues that a HLTA has just two choices. They can be a chameleon, adapting to local circumstances or chimera, taking elements from both the teacher and TA role and fashioning them into a new, albeit slightly ambiguous, hybrid identity. This can be really problematic for a HLTA who is often acutely aware that they are not the teacher and do not possess the same level of qualifications as a teacher but is expected to undertake a similar role. It is interesting to note that the policy rhetoric surrounding the original workforce reform agenda made it abundantly clear that the HLTA should not be replacing the teacher but failed to provide clarity on what they actually should do. Hancock et al. (2010:108) argue that many HLTAs are viewed by teachers as team teaching colleagues, sharing some of the class teaching rather than as supervised paraprofessionals. While novice teachers are afforded a mentor, a newly appointed HLTA is more likely to be learning ‘on the job’ often without formal support mechanisms. This will often require a degree of improvisation as well as proactiveness and selfmotivation. On a positive note, while TAs and HLTAs may face certain barriers to their acceptance within the community of practice and the school hierarchy, there are ways they can successfully exercise agency over their roles. The greater freedoms they are afforded, compared to teachers, through localised deployment decisions means they have some leeway to shape their roles and become architects of their own identity (Graves, 2012). This might be through developing their specialist knowledge, expertise and interests in particular areas of SEND or through leading specific intervention programmes. Such freedoms allow them to legitimise their professional practice by holding ‘expert’ knowledge and builds capacity to exert agency to evolve their roles. There are challenges to this though. Each TA is different and local interpretations of the role might make it more difficult for a TA to change workplaces and find a comparable job in another setting. Furthermore, workforce changes implemented at a national and local policy level including funding levels may leave the TA vulnerable in their role.

The Professional Development of TAs My decision to write this chapter was based firmly on my belief that TAs deserve to have their story told. My experience of working with TAs, who have committed to their own professional development by taking on the added burden of studying for a degree part-time, has always been positive. In my role as their educator, I feel a sense of responsibility towards them to share their experiences, to be their advocate and to

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seek opportunities for their voices to be heard. Unfortunately, while I hope the chapter demonstrates the multitude of challenges a TA can face when trying to undertake their assigned roles, it does not offer any immediate, concrete solutions as these are often dependent on decisions taken at a local level. Where I can exercise some influence is with the students that I work with. Equipping them with a secure, theoretical understanding of the teaching and learning they are tasked with supporting in their settings builds their confidence and in turn their capacity to exercise agency in their roles. Students talk of engaging in more professional conversations with teaching staff, asking pertinent questions, offering better quality feedback on the progress of learners, and making suggestions to support future learning. Their increased engagement is often noticed by other staff, including senior leaders, and creates an opening into the established teaching community that may previously have been difficult to enter. This can create opportunities for career advancement as they are often asked to take on further responsibilities but can also lead to further challenges as outlined in this chapter. In my capacity as their tutor, it is also my responsibility to ‘hold a mirror up’ to them so they can see their potential by acting as an informal coach or mentor. This includes helping them to understand that they have the professional capacity and skills to cross role boundaries and juggle their professional identities to suit the situation. While this may evoke insecurity and uncomfortable feelings initially, it is a process that they become adept in doing over time. I will often remind them how they have been able to accommodate and embrace a further identity as an undergraduate while still maintaining other professional and personal identities; they are also excellent multi taskers. Giving them opportunity to talk openly with other TAs on the degree about their roles and to share their experiences in a safe, non-judgemental place, creates the space for them to reflect on situations objectively and find practical solutions that they can enact in the workplace.

Conclusion This chapter highlights that more needs to be done at both a national and local level to raise the status of TAs and to provide them with a more coherent, professional framework within which they can confidently work. Current policies, structures and practices in many settings still fail to provide support staff with clearly defined roles and the expectations placed on TAs will often fluctuate at a moment’s notice depending on school priorities. A lack of investment in clear professional development has meant that many highly – skilled and experienced TAs have independently sought opportunities through degree – level study. It is through their commitment and engagement to the degree programme that many TAs start to realise their future capability and seek to further their career and become a teacher. My hope is that these TAs will change the narrative and will ensure that the TAs they are privileged to work alongside, in their capacity as a teacher or future school leader, are given

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opportunities to professionally develop and become skilled and capable in their roles.

References Ball, S., McGuire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy. Routledge. Basford, E., Butt, G., & Newton, R. (2017). To what extent are teaching assistants really managed?: ‘I was thrown in the deep end, really; I just had to more or less get on with it’. School Leadership & Management, 37(3), 288–310. Blatchford, P., et al. (2009). Deployment and impact of support staff project. DCSF. Blatchford, P., Russell, A., & Webster, R. (2012). Reassessing the impact of teaching assistants. Routledge. Clarke, E., & Visser, J. (2019). Teaching assistants managing behaviour – Who knows how they do it? Agency is the answer. Support for Learning, 34(4), 372–338. DFE. (2011). Teachers’ standards guidance for school leaders, school staff and governing bodies. Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/1040274/Teachers__Standards_Dec_2021.pdf. Accessed 14 Jan 2023. DFE. (2019). Deployment of teaching assistants in schools. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/ government/publications/the-deployment-of-teaching-assistants-in-schools. Accessed 14 Jan 2023. DFE. (2022). School workforce in England. Available at: https://explore-education-statistics. service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england. Accessed 14 Jan 2023. DfES. (2002). Time for standards. HMSO. DfES. (2003). Remodelling the workforce. HMSO. Graves, S. (2012). Chameleon or chimera? The role of the higher level teaching assistant in a remodelled workforce in English schools. Educational Management, Administration and Leadership, 41(1), 94–103. Graves, S., & Williams, K. (2017). Investigating the role of the HLTA in supporting learning in English schools. Cambridge Journal of Education, 47(2), 265–276. Hammersley-Fletcher, L., & Lowe, M. (2011). From general dogsbody to whole-class delivery – The role of the primary school teaching assistant within a moral maze. Management in Education, 25(2), 78–81. Hancock, R., et al. (2010). They call me wonder woman’: The job jurisdictions and work-related learning of higher level teaching assistants. Cambridge Journal of Education, 40(2), 97–112. Martin, C. (2020). From LSA to teacher: The value of classroom experience in shaping a ‘teacher’ identity. Support for Learning, 35(1), 23–42. Moran, A., & Abbott, L. (2002). Developing inclusive schools: The pivotal role of teaching assistants in promoting inclusion in special and mainstream schools in Northern Ireland. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 17(2), 161–173. Sharples, J., Webster, R., & Blatchford, P. (2015). Making the best use of teaching assistants: Guidance report. The Education Endowment Foundation. Slater, E., & Gazeley, L. (2019). Deploying teaching assistants to support learning: From models to typologies. Educational Review, 71(5), 547–563. Training and Development Agency. (2006a). Developing people to support learning. A skills strategy for the wider workforce 2006–09. Available at: https://webarchive.nationalarchives. gov.uk/ukgwa/20080620113116mp_/http://www.tda.gov.uk/upload/resources/pdf/s/swdb_3ys. pdf. Accessed 14 Jan 2023. Training and Development Agency. (2006b). Professional standards for higher level teaching assistants. HMSO. Trent, J. (2014). ‘I’m teaching, but I’m not really a teacher’, teaching assistants and the construction of professional identities in Hong Kong schools. Educational Research, 56(1), 28–47.

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Watson, D., Bayliss, P., & Pratchett, G. (2013). Pond life that ‘know their place’: Exploring teaching and learning support assistants’ experiences through positioning theory. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(1), 100–117. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Identity in the ‘Impossible Professions’ David Mathew

if I don’t put our memories into words, I’ll lose touch with them, and something will die in me. –John Kotre (1995), White Gloves

Background I started work as a teacher in 1994, when I moved to Cairo to teach O and A Level English in a private school. Between those early days and now, I have worked in many different fields of education, including language schools, a nursing college, a maximum security prison and community education. I have also worked extensively in Further Education and most recently in Higher Education. Since 2018, I have been an educator and researcher in the National Health Service (England). I am responsible for developing leaders in a wide variety of NHS settings and am proud to be a Mental Health First Aid Instructor. In 2022 my fourth academic book, Learning and Long-Term Illness (written with Susan Sapsed) was published. My other academic books are Fragile Learning: The Influence of Anxiety, The Care Factory and Psychic River: Storms and Safe Harbours in Lifelong Learning. My most recent journal paper acceptances are both at Modern Psychoanalysis.

Key Questions Is identity a matter of recognising what an educator is already, or does an element of wish fulfilment exist? Is identity a destiny; a place that an educator wants to visit and end up occupying?

D. Mathew (✉) NHS Arden & GEM CSU, Milton Keynes, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_13

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Introduction This chapter brings together two of the fields that Sigmund Freud deemed ‘impossible’ – namely, education and psychoanalysis. The issue of unconscious motives and reactions is held up for consideration, and the subject of changes to practitioner identity is explored. Two examples from the author’s experience as an educator in National Health Service settings are offered as case studies. One involves an aggressive online encounter with a group whose members had commissioned his professional support. The first occurred when the author was among a group of peerlearners, as part of a face-to-face training programme. One of the author’s classmates told a tragic and violent story which, although believed at the time, was later adjudged as untrue, because it was physically impossible. The chapter investigates issues that influence identity, such as resistances, group formation and Wilfred Bion’s ‘basic assumptions’.

Putting the Eye into Identity In the novel Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov poses a philosophical question that seems earnest and worth considering as a starting point for a discussion on identity. ‘What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?’ (Nabokov, 1962: 289). For many people (and possibly for readers of these very words) the implications are frightening. Who am I, if I no longer possess a gift (or talent, skill or attribute) that has formed and framed my identity since childhood? Without the ability to read, would I be the same person? One appreciation of our identity, therefore, might be the agglomeration of those gifts (or talents, skills or attributes) that are deployed on a daily basis, the better for us to get through an average day. (Can we even imagine a day without reading something?) Naturally, we can go further: into the area of professional identity. As an educator, the ability to read and a fondness for reading would seem to be reasonable prerequisites. (In my entire career I can only recall one teacher – and a teacher of English no less – who claimed to hate reading, apart from a certain lowbrow tabloid.) Reading is something I do, which in turn becomes something I make: the professional service that I deliver. Robbed of the ability to read, I become lessened, weakened. . . altered. We might conclude that being able to read is part of my identity. Let us take a moment, however, to re-read (while we still can!) Nabokov’s provocation: what we had previously labelled a ‘philosophical question’ – and which now seems like a threat – was not directed at me. It was directed at all of us. We have all had this gift snatched away from us.

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Does this reduce us all by the same quantifiable measure? Do we all, in effect, start again with new expectations? Perhaps we would react with terror; perhaps with initial disbelief. When drastic change enters a life, it is likely that the person affected will experience the various stages of grief that were suggested by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In On Death and Dying (1969), Kübler-Ross proposed a now-famous five-stage process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Would society recover from losing its ability to read by following this process? Would I? One lens, therefore, through which we might analyse our own notion of identity is that which shows clearly what we would most hate to lose. If we fear the removal of a certain trait or quality – if in fact we would only combat its disappearance through the stages of grief – then we might conclude that this certain trait or quality is an important part of our identity.

The Simple Question (Is Never Simple) In Abandoned Dental Clinics, a work of fiction of my own that was recently published (Mathew, 2023), an analysand asks her psychoanalyst to contemplate a world without questions. Getting in (as it were) before it is too late – before last calls for questions is operational – the analysand wants to know: ‘What if we couldn’t ask them? What if they were banned?’ The notion is preposterous, of course – it is used as a plot device to delineate a professional relationship between two working women, in a milieu in which notions of care and power are both structural necessities and performances. In addition to this, we must say that the field of psychoanalysis (as with education) is entirely dependent on the Question. Wherever we might find ourselves in these overlapping dynamics, we ask questions routinely, all the time. We ask questions in order to invite responses. We depend on discourse; and we foster inter-reliabilities. The relationship between the analyst and the analysand, and the educator and the learner, is symbiotic; the workplace identities in both cases might feel slippery from time to time, but nonetheless they are crucial. The fact that I mention these fields here (and allude to them in this chapter’s title) will surely provide a clue as to my own workplace identity. Or perhaps I should be more specific: will surely provide a clue to my own workplace identity. . . as I see it. As someone who leans on the gift of reading and the use of the Question, I work as a Learning & Development Manager in the National Health Service (NHS). For 15 years, I have been an ardent student of psychoanalysis (though never a practising analyst), and I use psychoanalytic frameworks and examples in my development work often. It might be said, therefore, that I work within what Sigmund Freud referred to as the ‘impossible’ professions – or at least within two of them. In ‘Analysis

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Terminable and Interminable’, Freud asserts that government, education and psychoanalysis are three impossible professions, ‘in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results’ (Freud, 1937: 248). Freud propounds that conflict cannot be resolved permanently, and that there must exist important aspects of the human constitution, such as instinctive reactions, psychic fluidity and rigidity – and unchained aggression. (It is hoped that these aspects will be borne in mind when we reach the case studies below.) Workplace identity being also the cumulative summation of professional experience, I should add that I have worked as an educator and researcher since 1994, in a variety of pedagogic environments – mostly in the Higher Education sector. I identify as an educator; also as a researcher and as a writer; I am part of their discrete subsets and collective number. But inevitably, there must be more. To the so-called ‘simple’ question: ‘What is your workplace identity?’ (a question that I have posed many times, to various audiences and learners), I would answer: ‘That’s not such a simple question! Here is my business card – perhaps this will help.’

A Fork Called Discourse The so-called simple question is rarely simple to answer, of course. Even closed questions – where the response is likely to be affirmation or denial, or a date, a time, a fact – are chewy with possibilities and alternatives, pregnant as we are with a fightor-flight suspicion of being tied down to a first response or a final answer. Interpretation might not be instantaneous; we pause and flutter. And this is before we have considered the open question, the purpose of which is to invite an expansive reply of full (or near-full) disclosure.

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We are speaking beings aboard a whirligig of infinite spinning chambers; we bellow well-intentioned questions into the windy din, sometimes struggling to be heard. We are hot-faced mussels in a linguini of (what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls) méconnaissance (or misrecognition) – trying to probe beneath each other’s shells with a clumsy fork called discourse. In the words of the Lacanian scholar Paul Verhaeghe, ‘communication is always a failure’ (Verhaeghe, 1999: 100). Moreover. . . . . .it has to be a failure, and that is the reason why we go on talking. If we could understand each other we would all remain silent, and the perfect, dreamt-of communio would take place within an appropriate silence and with hands in front of closed eyes. Luckily people don’t understand each other, so they have to speak to one another. (Verhaeghe, ibid, italics in the original.)

Given that Lacan’s contribution to psychoanalysis (and education) involved lengthy seminars on the subject of language, it is no surprise that Lacanian scholars talk much about talking much. ‘Speaking beings,’ writes Bruce Fink (Fink, 1995: 14), ‘far from simply using language as a tool, are also used by language; they are the playthings of language, and are duped by language.’ Fink affirms that ‘Language has a life of its own.’ In a book called Television, the transcript of an appearance that he made via this named medium, Lacan himself is on the record thus: ‘I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there’s no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail’ (Lacan, 1990: 3). But it is to a different psychoanalyst – not a rival of Lacan’s, but instead, a contemporary: a comparably influential and difficult long-standing practitioner, who also taught and wrote until shortly before he died – that I will turn to close this sub-chapter. Seeming to agree with Lacan, Wilfred Bion offers: ‘. . .language is extremely misleading – it appears to be precise and exact, but in fact it is no more exact than painting or drawing’ (Bion, 2018: 54). Furthermore, later in the same text, he proffers an explanation of identity, explicitly (now) from the psychoanalyst’s point of view. Seeing patients many times as we usually do, it is difficult to achieve that degree of naivete in which we can see them each time as if we have never seen them before. It is easy to think, ‘Oh, here’s the same old stuff again – yesterday, the day before that, for weeks, months, years.’ It cannot in fact be so because tomorrow the patient we saw yesterday, or last week, month, or year, will not be the same person. We should get as near as possible to feeling that it is the first time we have ever seen that patient. It is difficult because we always feel that we ought to know his history (Bion, 2018: 53). Approaching the end of his life, Wilfred Bion published three volumes of creative ‘fiction’ about identity and his field, in which Psychoanalysis appears occasionally as a character. ‘The proper approach to confusion is to ‘begin’ in the middle,’ Bion writes in A Memoir of the Future (1990: 197) – the collection of the aforementioned three volumes. While attempting to glimpse through the smokescreen of words on a page is one way of affirming or denying one’s identity, I would like to think about

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what Bion had to say about groups as I move into a new area. I would like to introduce two case studies. . . in which your author appears as a character, as if in a work of fiction. My professional identity was challenged in the following case studies.

Workplace Identity, 1: The Liar The second bullet point on my business card (above) is ‘Mental Health First Aider’. It was while in training for this identity of mine that I experienced the material that led to this first study. I had been offered a place to train to be a Mental Health First Aider, as accredited by Mental Health First Aid England. In a room in Luton, Bedfordshire, I joined my classmates for the first of two intense days. While some of my companions were NHS colleagues, two other workplaces were also represented: one of them being the local branch of a nationwide bus company. It is the male representative from the Bus Company that I refer to the following. Visually, he was indistinct: an average-height, chunky-not-fat man of approximately 50 years, in casual dress for the training, with tidy short white hair. His demeanour was taciturn with infrequent twinkles of humour. This pen portrait might become useful to the reader in due course. Midway through the first afternoon, after a challenging morning that had seen one attendee withdraw from the course, this classmate of mine told the group a story. He talked about a conversation he had had with a paramedic. A paramedic’s working life can be grim, our narrator explained, thereby sowing the seed of something unpleasant that was likely to follow. Paramedics sometimes attend such awful scenes that one way to cope with the darkness is to joke about it. Paramedic camaraderie inculcates and invites a variety of gallows humour that those undertaking the work will deploy as a system of protection against individual or team anxiety. Up to this point, nothing seemed out-of-place (to me) or inconsistent with my fantasised perception of the everyday strife of a shift-working paramedic. Surely no one present could have doubted that the occupation in question takes place among scenes of blood-loss and confusion, in which Death walks the boards alongside the other players. Why, then, did our narrator stretch our credibility with the example that he chose to illustrate his point? There was one occasion (the distant narrator relayed to us via our local narrator) when we attended the scene of a suicide: a young man had fallen to his death. The strange thing was, he had hit the ground with such force that one of his ears had been dislodged from the side of his head. One of the team found the ear by itself, a metre from the rest of the body. Apparently, she picked up the ear and held it close to her mouth. ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Is anyone home? Can you hear me?’ The professionals at the scene thought the joke was hilarious!

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Rendered suitably startled, the Bus Man’s audience said nothing at first. Most of a day passed before I spoke to one of my NHS colleagues, at which point we concluded that he had lied to us. In a spirit of full disclosure, however, I must add that it was several days later before I called declarative ‘Nonsense!’ on this shaggy dog tale. What took me so long? Seriously, David, what took you so long. . .to conclude that it was simply unbelievable that a man’s ear could become detached from his head when the body hit the ground in a completed suicide? The idea is ludicrous. . . and yet. . . the group of which I was a part either believed (in the way that I did) or showed good poker faces through their amalgamated disbelief. Did we want to believe him? What ‘group madness’ was afoot? Although I recall no actual laughter at the end of the narrative, perhaps a lightening of the mood in the room had been my classmate’s ambition. On something of a meta level, had he aimed to produce among his audience the very same reaction that he’d described as having lifted the spirits of those on hand to process the young man’s death? What had the narrator experienced from us, his attendants? The question of why he had set the scene up still dangles in its original place, unanswered. Another aspect of identity includes power. How do we respond to the power of others and how do others respond to mine? Via any examination of the case study imaginable, Bus Man had deployed the tool of artfulness. As the saying goes, he had us in the palm of his hand. How? We had learned that morning of the benefits of active listening, and we had willingly taken on the roles of his Scouts around the campfire. Although we had not lost the gift of reading, we had not needed it, so it might as well have been robbed of us. Nor had anyone asked a single question, and we might conclude that this was absent as well. We were not so much under Bus Man’s spell, as unconsciously aligning with Wilfred Bion’s basic assumption dependency (baD) mentality. In Experiences in Groups (1961), Bion had claimed that within a group of people there might actually be two groups of people. One group of people is engaged in the task that has been provided. This he labelled the work group. Existing simultaneously, however, is the basic assumption group, which lives on an unconscious plain; its purpose, in essence, is to disrupt the intentions of the work group. There are three categories of basic assumption. The basic assumption pairing (baP) group pins its unconscious hopes on two people, of either gender, who will deliver the group out of its doldrums or predicament; the rest of the group can be lazy or apathetic. The basic assumption fight or flight (baF) group fears the task at hand and will gossip, argue, joke – do anything but work. However, it is the first of Bion’s groups that I think is the most apt: the basic assumption dependency (baD) group loves its leader so much that blind faith becomes a demotivating factor, paradoxically. We, the members of the group, were united by shared feelings of inadequacy and neediness. On an unconscious level, we sought a charismatic leader to relieve us of our anxiety, who would protect us. It is true to say that we cherished the horror in Bus Man’s tale. Temporarily, our identities were altered – structurally compromised. What would have happened if

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someone had said, ‘Don’t lie! That never happened!’? The spell having been broken, what would our narrator have done? Laugh along? Say ‘I nearly got you though!’ – in the way that children will when evaluating near-successes in the arena of competitive practical jokes (a place where ridiculing one-upmanship is invited to thrive)? Naturally, it is impossible to know; but speculation is one of the fine evolutionary gifts that distinguishes human beings from other animals – so speculate, surely, we must; it is no more or less than our duty. Groups will form systems of defences against anxiety (Lyth, 1989), and it seems reasonable, perhaps, that falling for an ‘unbelievable’ story was a way of escaping the difficult material into which the course had ushered us.1 Moreover, there is cinematic history behind the image of a separated ear being held up, as if for inspection. In an early scene in David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet, a young man returning to his (American) hometown finds an ear on a lawn, crawling with ants. In Quentin Tarantino’s film Reservoir Dogs, a gangster (again, American) hacks off a policeman’s ear in a torture scene – and even holds it up and talks into it, a la the putative paramedic. Might we read anything into my fellow student’s choice of filmic source material? While we oscillate between the visual echoes conjured up by the two films, we unconsciously attempt to hear what is heard in the moments directly before its (necessarily) forceful removal. Lynch’s ear is an instrument of discovery, and thereby plot progression. Tarantino’s ear – and the thug who speaks into it – is the engine that drives a surreal comparison between the pseudo-farce of the words addressed into the organ, and the horror of the screaming cop who has been relieved of it. It is not too much of a stretch (I hope) to claim that the ability to listen and hear is another part of a professional identity in the fields mentioned thus far. If reading is expunged from our body of knowledge, and the question is placed under house arrest, we must rely on the frequently baffling clish-ma-claver of discourse – and on the ear that has yet to be violently uncoupled.

Workplace Identity, 2: The Co-design Team In a world that can never be ideal but is at least fair, the function of a co-design team should be perfectly plain; axiomatic, even. The co-design team works together to create a brand-new piece or adaptation. When it materialises that the co-design team had been unable to bond as a team or to design anything together, we might appreciate some of the internal irony.

Isabel Menzies Lyth also stated: ‘It is obvious that people do not say what they really mean even when they honestly and sincerely say what they consciously think, let alone when they do not’ (Lyth, 1989: 28).

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A large NHS Trust had approached my employer to forge a Leadership Development Programme for a most specific market and audience. A colleague of mine had invited me to join the co-design team, which included members of our organisation and members of theirs. I had been asked to devise a first draft plan, based on my expertise and experience at having achieved similar goals on behalf of other organisations. The meeting was online; I was in my dining room. Suggesting very much (as it were) that home is where the hurt is, the strangers who had been invited into my domestic space voiced protests to my workplan. I was comprehensively beaten up by puffed-out chests and joined-up antagonism. As the assault continued, a strong sense of persecution came upon me in the countertransference (of which, more below). It took further work on the material (over the subsequent 4 days) for me to understand that I was experiencing the same reaction that was normal when, as a child, I would visit Dunstable Library and find, near the building’s entrance, three or four National Front supporters, silently protesting against immigration (in general) and ethnic mixing in the geographical area. In a chapter entitled ‘Nostalgia’s Engine’, I wrote about these encounters in The Care Factory (Mathew, 2016: 93–94). I grew up in the market town of Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Born as I was in 1971, I was precisely the right age to be terrified by both the explosion of punk rock and by the appearance of National Front skinheads, who protested against foreign immigration – notably Pakistani at that time (and in that place) – even in a town possessed of negligible political clout. Had I been comfortable with either of these groups – each a tiny fraction of a nationwide wave of energy and enthusiasm, unrelated to one another’s outputs – no doubt I would have felt no need to mention the fact here in these pages. The truth, however, was that both punks and skinheads truly terrified me in the mid- to late-seventies. If England was not showing signs of panic, then I certainly was, and I was making this panic seem palpable to my childish sensibilities. With malice aforethought, as it were, I made sure that I was good and scared by punks and skinheads, every time I walked into town to visit Dunstable Library to borrow books or records on vinyl. What was I so scared of, I wonder? ‘Madness is something rare in individuals – but in groups. . . it is the rule,’ as Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us in Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche, 1990: 103). Perhaps I was scared of succumbing to a collective insanity, a hive-mind oblivion; or perhaps (more pragmatically) I was simply petrified of getting beaten up, as the result of a rampant anti-child agenda that simply did not exist in either camp.

Nearly four decades later, I could hardly believe what had happened. My register rattled for weeks; and for several days, I shook – first with fear and then with rage. The most realistic interpretation of the riptide of anger I was obliged to surf, would seem to be that it represented the participants’ own guilt and frustration . . . at themselves. A deadline was approaching, and my submission of work that they (incorrectly) deemed unsuitable had been a reminder that the project had lingered and sulked for 1 year, with no one having done much about it up to that point. A straightforward decoding might be that I had become the leader in their basic assumption dependency fantasy.

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My first attempt at encrusting the experience inside a metaphor was as follows (from the notebook that I keep): As a stray dog, I had walked onto a yard that they were guarding, and they barked at me until I left with my tail between my legs. In retrospect, the canine comparison seems inadequate. Among my attackers, a sense of regression was palpable: before my very eyes, the faces turned hostile – but childishly so – as their owners walked onto the school playground to find a victim to bully. When I mentioned to one participant that she should feel free to be ‘constructively destructive’, the expression of joy on her face was truly alarming: it catapulted her back in time, to the age I was when I regularly encountered the National Front skinheads. As the other participants took turns to criticise the work I had prepared for them, it was easy to see the same toxic behaviours of which their own leaders had been accused, mirrored in every example of resistance to change and poorly-argued negativity. One rare moment of self-reflective awareness was shown when a different participant (also a woman) asked me if she was being ‘brutal’. I answered that she was indeed being brutal, which she mistook (somehow) as an invitation to continue with identical abuse. The day after the meeting, the participant who had exhibited her glee at my mention of her freedom to be ‘constructively destructive’ contacted a colleague of mine who had also been present. Apparently her first words to my colleague were: ‘How is David?’ She was asking after my wellbeing. Should we interpret this question as an admission of guilt? As a candid acceptance of her culpability? If so, does it not remain odd that her correspondence directly to me read like a justification of everything that had been said and done? An alternative interpretation gives us call to consult the literature on group psychology. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud explores group formation and the giving-up of individual ego ideals in favour of the group ideal, with a group being ‘a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego’ (Freud, 1921: 116). Forty years later, again in Experiences in Groups (1961), Bion expands on this and others of Freud’s theories with a characteristically enlightening précis: ‘Freud chose the development of language as an instance of group activity of high mental order’ (Bion, 1961: 187). Bion also notes that ‘there is no way in which the individual can, in a group, ‘do nothing’ – not even by doing nothing’ (ibid: 118), which goes some way to explaining the virus-like nature of the pack’s aggression – the way it spread and the manner in which so few of the assailants remained totally uninfected. In case study, 1: The liar, I had been part of the group, unconsciously willing to give up my identity in order to fall in with a horrified group. But in Case Study, 2: The co-design team, I was very much up at the blackboard, with the learners throwing paper at me. Figuratively speaking, they had forgotten how to read; they had also banned questions from their lexica. More than anything else, however, they had stopped listening: they had taken sharp tools to their own ears. A third interpretation involves the countertransference.

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Adrift in the Countertransference In The Infinite Question, Christopher Bollas, asks: What about the analyst’s countertransference – that complex density of emotion, memory, received pressure from the patient’s assumptions, and coercion by the patient’s speech acts: does this not also reveal itself gradually as time goes on? Doesn’t emotion – a ‘moving experience’ of affects, ideas, memories, desires, relational assumptions and situational states – only become understandable if and when its logic is progressively revealed? (Bollas, 2009: 26)

Eric Miller also offers a useful contribution: ‘...the way in which the consultant is used and experienced, and also the feelings evoked in him, may offer evidence of underlying and unstated issues and feelings in the client system: that which is repressed by the client may be expressed by the consultant’ (Miller, 1990: 171). Strictly speaking, the countertransference represents the manner in which the psychoanalyst acts and feels toward the analysand. Used respectfully, with professional caution, it can be a powerful tool in the analysis. By extension, and used on the level of metaphor, countertransference might also describe the educator’s response to the learner – or indeed, the leader’s response to the client(s). Perhaps one ‘easy’ way of deciding whether or not the countertransference proved useful is to ask myself what I learned from these two experiences. Certainly, I interpreted enough to have wanted to go through the internalised files (the ones housed in a library somewhere between the memory and the face-value sensory response of the moment), with the ambition to write it down. In fact, I felt stronger having written the experiences down in my hardback notebook, at the time(s). What would happen if something similar to either case study happened again? Towards the end of In Defense of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek writes: Freud’s famous motto “what we do not remember, we are compelled to repeat” should thus be turned upside down: what we are unable to repeat, we are haunted by and are compelled to remember. The way to get rid of past trauma is not to remember it, but to fully repeat it. (Žižek, 2008: 321)

Perhaps the writing of this chapter is one way of repeating the ‘past trauma’, though I suspect Žižek is hereby endorsing a more literal re-enactment. After all, psychoanalysis is (in part) the study of repetition and return; it is no less than a passport into the past – an encouragement to revisit, and to learn from the treasure that we have left behind but never abandoned. In other words, these are our days of farewell, in many ways; but a farewell to what remains unclear. This paragraph might even qualify as something of a therapeutic space. At the end of Stephen King’s early novel Rage (in King, 1986), the narrator has been incarcerated for his own protection and for the protection of others. An American high school student, he has shot two teachers, tormented many others, and has kept the students in his Algebra class hostage for a morning that is nerveracking for some and salacious for others. The narrator’s miniscule moment of victory over his jailers is on the subject (of all things) of custard. He tells them

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that he likes it when custard is on the menu, when in fact he dislikes custard. He tells the reader that it is good to have a secret again. Having re-read King’s novel (with pleasure) during the first of England’s Covid Lockdowns, I wondered if the concept of secrecy was important to our identity. During exposure to a period of increased external scrutiny – while in a group, being lied to, for instance; or while being assaulted online; or for that matter, avoiding the attention of racist skinheads – we might feel robbed of a sense of individual identity. In a figurative and literal sense, we will try to resist becoming one of the crowd: one to humiliate or bully. By decoding the experience through the use of reading, writing and critical thinking, we are able to re-establish some of that lost sense of identity. Like the murderer in King’s novel, it is good to have a secret again: a secret that The Liar and the Co-Design Team will never learn.

Identity During Workplace Change In common between these two examples of workplace aggression, of course, is the primary task of the organisation (and industry) in question: namely, healthcare. We might consider an organisation – any organisation – as possessing different faces, conflicting personae. But I cannot help but wonder if the material under discussion was felt more acutely because of the industry in which the examples took place is meant to protect and heal people. What else do the two case studies (and any examples of workplace discomfort that the reader might draw to mind) have in common? At least two expositions swim into clarity. One: they represented tremors in the foundations of my identity. And two: they were workplace changes so influential to my way of thinking that my self-preservatory instinct was to translate the discomfort into the written word.2 ‘We can cope with being ourselves,’ writes Anton Obholzer in Workplace Intelligence. Uncomfortable as that might, at times, be, at least we know where we stand. With change, we enter an area of uncertainty; a new, different, and not previously managed uncomfortableness. Hence our resistance. Change means having to cope with the experience of confusion, of giving up the certainty, or, more accurately, the pseudo-certainty of the past. It means unlearning: giving up ideas of the past and taking onboard new ideas about which we are unsure. (Obholzer, 2021: 33) ‘Who is my ideal self? Who do I want to be?’

These questions are written on a post-it note (in my own handwriting). I was summarising a workshop participant’s response to a task, in September of 2022.

2

Some of the lines from the hardback notebook have been transcribed verbatim in the Case Studies sections; I had turned the experience into prose and did not embellish a single word in the transcription from notebook to this chapter.

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Perhaps because I was thinking about the writing of this chapter, or perhaps because the subject of identity is rarely far from my mind, it seemed that everyone I encountered had something to add to the colloquium. A question that might be raised at this point is this. Is identity a matter of recognising what I am already, or does an element of wish fulfilment exist? Is Identity my destiny; the place that I want to visit and end up? Is Identity the final stop on the train line? When Elizabeth Roudinesco informs us that ‘. . .each subject [is] different (or other) in his or her way of relating to another or to his own identity,’ she clarifies the claim in the following pertinent way: ‘Every human being proceeds with a mask on in relation to his fellow humans, since he is shot through with the desire to make himself liked or recognized. So there is an infinity of differences that, taken together, constitute what is universal in the human race.’ (Roudinesco, 2001: 125)

Conclusion This leads us to one final question that I would like to pose. How might we use this psychic material in our work with our learners, some of whom may well be fragile in the specific learning environments that they occupy?

Postscript At the moment of its conclusion, the author dedicates this chapter to Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge, of whose passing he was notified late in August 2022; and to Peter Straub, a more distant authorial inspiration, who left us in September of this same year. Let us leave on an admonitory note in Michael Eigen’s The Electrified Tightrope: Actually, there can be no last word. I am hopeful my words enter a stream of dialogue that quickens our sense of what it means to be a person. (Eigen, 1993: xi)

References Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups. Routledge. Bion, W. R. (1990). A memoir of the future. Karnac Books. Bion, W. R. (2018). Four discussions with W.R. Bion. The Harris Meltzer Trust. Bollas, C. (2009). The infinite question. Routledge. Eigen, M. (1993). The electrified tightrope. Jason Aronson Inc. Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian subject. Princeton University Press. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego (pp. 67–144). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVIII. Ed. J. Strachey. Hogarth Press.

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Freud, S. (1937). Analysis terminable and interminable (pp. 216–253). Standard Edition. Volume 23. Ed. J. Stracey, 1964. Hogarth Press. King, S. (1986). Rage. In S. King (Ed.), The Bachman Books (pp. 1–149). New English Library. Kotre, J. (1995). White gloves: How we create ourselves through memory. The Free Press. Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. Simon & Schuster/Touchstone. Lacan, J. (1990). Television. W. W. Norton & Company. Lyth, I. M. (1989). A psychoanalytical perspective on social institutions. In The dynamics of the social (pp. 26–44). Free Association Books. Mathew, D. (2016). The care factory. Cambridge Scholars. Mathew, D. (2023). Abandoned dental clinics. Montag Press. Miller, E. J. (1990). Experiential learning in groups I: The development of the Leicester model. In E. Trist & H. Murray (Eds.), The social engagement of social science, volume 1: The sociopsychological perspective (pp. 165–185). Free Association Books. Nabokov, V. (1962). Pale Fire. Vintage International. Nietzsche, F. (1990). Beyond good and evil. Penguin Books. Obholzer, A. (2021). Workplace intelligence. Routledge. Roudinesco, E. (2001). Why psychoanalysis? Columbia University Press. Verhaeghe, P. (1999). Does the woman exist?: From freud’s hysteric to lacan’s feminine. Rebus Press. Žižek, S. (2008). In defense of lost causes. Verso.

Final Thoughts Neil Hopkins

and Carol Thompson

At the beginning of this book we began a conversation on the issue of professional identity in education. In each of the chapters authors have reflected on their experiences and through these reflections some key themes have arisen.

How Is Identity Defined? In the first chapter, Andy Goodwyn discusses the idea of professional recognition for teachers, and the difficulties associated with such programmes, especially when teachers themselves are often self-deprecating and modest about the work they do. A similar picture is presented by Allyson Goodchild when she highlights the struggles Teaching Assistants have in establishing any form of role recognition, let alone daring to explore a professional identity, despite being an integral part of every school. In slightly different settings, Lewis Stockwell and David Mathew explore the importance of relationship within groups and with nature, whilst Oli Belas suggests the act of writing is part of the multi-faceted process of identity formation.

N. Hopkins (✉) · C. Thompson University of Bedfordshire, Bedford, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 N. Hopkins, C. Thompson (eds.), Reflections on Identity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46794-3_14

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Is Context Important? Carol Thompson and Elaine Battams discuss the journey taken by trainee teachers towards becoming a teacher and in Jim Crawley’s chapter this theme is continued from the perspective of the teacher educator. Jim highlights the vital role of Communities of Practice in providing a sense of collective identity. This was also evident in the chapters by Neil Hopkins and Steve Connolly who explore professional identity from different viewpoints: Neil from the perspective of interdisciplinary research in HE and Steve in terms of how working with a particular set of students forms classroom teachers’ identities.

Can Tensions Between Individuals and Organisations Be Resolved? In investigating the impact of managing education provision during the Covid pandemic, Darren Bourne highlights some of the tensions between organisation requirements and teachers’ needs. In a similar vein, David Pike considers how implementing online learning across an organisation can create conflict between change makers and recipients and explores how these can be overcome by adopting a more collaborative approach. This message is reinforced by Jon Rainford in his analysis of continuing professional development for academic staff in Higher Education. As stated at the beginning of this book, our aim was to capture a range of stories from education professionals in order to illustrate real experiences of identity formation. Through the use of reflection and narrative, these ‘insider’ views were captured in ways which provided an opportunity to generate a ‘conversation’ and it is acknowledged that this communication takes place both internally and with other people. Identity is complex and fluid and it influences all aspects of our work – there is nothing more important. Therefore, opening up a conversation about this key topic is crucial to the enhancement of professional practice and what it means to be a professional in all education settings. We hope that this book inspires readers to reflect on their own sense of identity as well as generating conversations with others. We need to talk!