module specification

This module introduces students to teaching and how to acquire Qualified Teacher Status.  It examines practices and career and organisational norms across a range of sectors as well as lines of career development.  It examines the place of education and teachers in inter-professional networks as well as some of the challenges that attend this.

The module situates these discussions within a critical setting and offers an introduction to historical and sociological accounts of teachers’ lives and to meanings attaching to professionalism as both practice and social status and, thereby, to begin to understand the character of teaching as a community of practice.

• To prepare students with a fund of knowledge and critical understanding in advance of making important career decisions;
• To introduce the structures and career development pathways for teachers working across a range of educational sectors and institutions;
• To introduce historical and sociological readings of teachers’ lives, beliefs and aspirations and to examine how teachers narrate and lend meaning to their careers;
• To explore teaching as a community of practice;
• To examine competing notions of professionalism and their implications for institutional and workplace realities.

This module is offered as an Extension of Knowledge and it is anticipated that it will have wide appeal to students from across the University.  Routes to QTS; employment structure and character of education; goals, values and professionalism; understanding teachers’ lives, teaching as a community of practice and studentship as legitimate peripheral participation.  Visiting educational institutions.

The module will be taught through lectures, workshops and work visits.  These sessions will be led by members of the Education Studies’ team but will be supplemented by visiting speakers from the careers’ service, teachers, union officials and other academics.

Students successfully completing the module will be able to:

• Make informed decisions about their career development and the options available to them if they want to become teachers;
• Articulate an understanding of why teaching attracts and interests them (or not);
• Situate their incipient professional identities within the goals, values and mores of teaching as a community of practice and be able to express their relationship to this;
• Interpret working lives within a specific educational institution.

Students will need to write an essay (2500 words) on how to plan and deliver an effective lesson. They will be thinking about varies aspects of planning and delivery. e.g. clear lesson objectives, age group, differentiation, national curriculum requirements etc.

Armour, K., (ed.)(2011),  Sport Pedagogy: an introduction for teaching and coaching, London: Prentice Hall

Day, C. and Gu, Q., (2010), The New Lives of Teachers, London: Routledge

Goodson, I. and Sikes, P., (2001), Life History Research in Educational Settings: learning from lives, Buckingham: Open University Press

Lave, J. and Wenger, E., (1991), Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: Cambridge UP

Leach, J. and Moon, B., (1999), Learners and Pedagogy, London: PCP

Maguire, M. and Dillon, J., (eds.) (2007), Becoming a Teacher: Issues in Secondary Teaching, Buckingham: Open University

Osler, A., (1997), The Education and Careers of Black Teachers: changing identities, changing lives, Buckingham: Open University