Confidence, risk, and the journey into praxis: work-based learning and the teacher education curriculum

Alison IredaleWayne BaileyDr Kevin OrrJane Wormald

Overview

• Professional knowledge and practice

• Policy discourses

• The inculcation of confidence

• Accommodation of risk

• Eukairia

Professional knowledge and practice

• Initial teacher training in the lifelong learning sector

• Legitimate professional knowledge

• Technical expertise

• Pedagogic content knowledge

• Praxis and phronesis

Dominant discourses and confidence

• Use of confidence in regularity documents

• Standards as qualifications

• Power relations and surveillance

Confidence and the accommodation of risk

• “What is missing from such discourses is the acknowledgement of unpredictability and non-calculability (true risk, that is) as an inherent, disruptive and creative force of teaching and learning, as many educational philosophers have convincingly pointed out”

(Papastephanou 2006: p50)

Inculcating confidence in trainee teachers. Are trainee teachers different from other learners?

• Self-belief

• Feeling secure

• Positive feedback• Being treated well• Support, encouragement and

reassurance

“some educators preserve their confidence in "competency-testing" by ignoring the kinds of competence that competency-testing fails to detect”. (Schön in Raven and Johnson 2001:8)

Eukairia – the journey into praxis

“Beyond a narrow treatment of the pressures of production, performance, problem-solving and decision-making as well as beyond the space of distant study viewed as protected and sanitized, there always lies eukairia (good, appropriate time) for the learning that corresponds to the desire for various ways of knowing and to a reconciled theory and practice”.

(Papastephanou 2006:p50)

Tensions and imperatives

From:• Dominant policy and

regulatory discourses • Professional knowledge

and practice as experiential, reflective, distinct and separate

• Higher education as elitist/conceptual/distant from practice

To• Formal education as

dialogue, as time and space

• Initial teacher training as pause for thought

• Confidence through risk-taking

• Praxis inculcated through Eukairia

References

• Illeris, K. (2011) The fundamentals of workplace learning, Oxon, Routledge• Iredale, A. (forthcoming) Down the rabbit-hole: Routinised Practices, Dewey and

Teacher Training in the Lifelong Learning Sector. Journal of Higher Education, Skills and Work Based Learning

• Papastephanou, Marianna (2006). Education, risk and ethics. Ethics and Education 1 (1):47-63

• Papastephanou, Marianna (forthcoming). Aristotelian Gnoseology and Work-Based Learning. Journal of Higher Education, Skills and Work Based Learning

• Schön, D (2001) The Crisis of Professional Knowledge and the Pursuit of an Epistemology of Practice in Raven, J. and Stephenson, J. (2001) Eds. Competence in the Learning Society, New York, Peter Lang

• Wain, K. (2006-03-01). Contingency, Education, and the Need for Reassurance. Studies in philosophy and education, 25(1), 37-45.doi:10.1007/s11217-006-0001-4