UPDATES:
Recent paper: Boyd, P. (2022c) Teachers developing research-informed practice in the post-truth world. Research in Teacher Education 12(1): 47-52. Available here: https://www.uel.ac.uk/sites/default/files/rite-may-2022-guest-author-pete-boyd.pdf
Recent Chapter: Boyd, P. (2022a) Teachers’ Research Literacy as Research-Informed Professional Judgment. In Pete Boyd, Agnieszka Szplit and Zuzanna Zbrog (Eds.) Developing Teachers’ Research Literacy: International Perspectives. Krakow: Libron. Pages: 17-43. Available here: https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6368/
BLOG POST: ‘Post Truth Teachers’ published on the BERA blog at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/post-truth-teachers
‘Becoming a Teacher Educator’ has been an ongoing research and development project over the last twenty years. An initial research paper ‘Rose-Tinted Reflection’ (Boyd, 2002) concluded with a challenging claim: ‘This study… raises some doubts about the value of ITE partnership for the school.’ My view is that we should raise the expectations of teachers invovled in teacher education so that they become ‘research literate’ and I would argue that much stronger and better resourced university-schools partnerships are needed to support that ambition.
A study of university-based teacher educators focused on their seeking of ‘credibility’. These colleagues were under pressure to be credible as ‘school teachers’ when they should have been concentrating on being credible as academics (Boyd & Harris, 2010). This cuts to the issue in England where confused policy makers, unaware of their own position of privilege and arrogant about the contribution of ‘experts’, have relied on their personal educational experiences (as learners) and think that being a great teacher is a god-given natural trait that can be learned simply by observing and copying experienced colleagues. There is a tension in a university-schools partnership around the value placed on public knowledge (published theory, research) and the practical wisdom of expert teachers, but that tension can be a driver for expansive learning. We analysed similar but distinctive data on new lecturers in Nursing where professional values of controlling risk and of caring appear to strongly influence academic identity and pedagogy (Boyd & Lawley, 2009).
A focus for all of this work is that academic induction in universities has been weak and that higher education needs to develop more expansive workplace learning environments, but with individual autonomy to choose pathways and so avoid overload (Boyd, 2010; Boyd, Smith & Beyatzas, 2015). A funded national survey-based study of lecturers in nursing and allied health professions (Boyd, Smith, Lee & McDonald, 2009) produced three subsequent research journal papers focused on academic identity and work (Smith & Boyd, 2012; Boyd, Smith & Beyatzas, 2015; Boyd & Smith, 2016). Caroline Smith and I entitled our 2016 paper ‘The Contemporary Academic’ with the intention to be provocative, we argued that lecturers in nursing were juggling teaching, research AND consultancy in their boundary-crossing roles.
Meanwhile, to address in a practical way the issue of weak academic induction in universities, with my colleagues Jean Murray and Kim Harris we were running academic induction workshops for teacher educators. To accompany the workshops we published the ‘Becoming a Teacher Educator’ guidelines, the 3rd edition were published by Advance HE (Boyd, Murray & White, 2021). Over the last ten years or so we have provided some academic induction for about 40% of newly appointed university-based teacher educators in the UK. In recent years the annual ‘Becoming a Teacher Educator’ workshops become an online course hosted by the Teacher Education Advancement Network (TEAN). As policy in England fragmented teacher education provision into multiple small providers, with my colleague Jon Tibke we investigated his experience as a ‘school-based’ teacher educator and, perhaps not surprisingly, found evidence of excellence but that was difficult to maintain due to other priorities in the setting (Boyd & Tibke, 2012). With colleagues Simon Allen and Paolo Reale we investigated the experiences of teacher educators based in college settings who teach higher education programmes in workplace settings that do not generally support their professional learning through advanced scholarship (Boyd, Allen & Reale, 2010).
A partnership with the University of Porto provided insight to European approaches to professional education, which generally value theory and research much more highly than in England. Working with my colleague Prof. Amelia Lopes supported my learning (Lopes, Boyd, Andrew & Pereira, 2014) and involved me in co-supervision of a doctoral student at the University of Porto. With three published papers along the way, Doctora Rita Sousa successfully completed her thesis and viva in February 2021. Collaborating with colleagues at University of Porto helped us to see beyond the work of colleagues focused on traditional UK universities around the ‘research-teaching (RT) nexus’ to propose a wider view of the ‘research-teaching knowledge exchange (RTKE) nexus’ (Boyd & Smith, 2016).
I am pleased to be co-author with my nurse educator colleagues Sue Harness of a paper on the university tutorial within the context of professional education (Harness & Boyd, 2021). This study is important because it follows ten lecturers in nursing from ten different UK universities, to investigate their academic identities and then, using video analysis, reveal how they deploy those identities within the hidden world of the university tutorial. Making this link between identities and pedagogy is a significant contribution.
My recent focus has been on teacher educators and teacher education, and I have epxerimented with blog posts on the British Educational Research Association (BERA) including a call for teacher educators to be ‘subversive (Boyd, 2021). A particular interest has been on the development of ‘teachers research literacy’ and my thinking on this is reported in a chapter (Boyd, 2022a) and as editor of a collection of international studies (Boyd, Szplit and Zbrog, 2022). I have also engaged with the issue of teachers’ professional learning through social media and online blogging with an open access paper and a blog on ‘post truth teachers’ (Boyd, 2022c; Boyd, 2022b).
References
Boyd, P., Splitz, A. & Zbrog, Z. (2022) Developing Teachers’ Research Literacy: International Perspectives. Krakow: Libron. https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6366/
Boyd, P. (2022a) Teachers’ Research Literacy as Research-Informed Professional Judgment. In Pete Boyd, Agnieszka Szplit and Zuzanna Zbrog (Eds.) Developing Teachers’ Research Literacy: International Perspectives. Krakow: Libron. Pages: 17-43. https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/6368/
Boyd, P. (2022b) Post-Truth Teachers. BERA Blog (British Educational Research Association). Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/post-truth-teachers
Boyd, P. (2022c) Teachers developing research-informed practice in the post-truth world. Research in Teacher Education 12(1): 47-52. Available at: https://www.uel.ac.uk/sites/default/files/rite-may-2022-guest-author-pete-boyd.pdf
Boyd, P. (2021) Being a subversive teacher educator. BERA Blog (British Educational Research Association). Available at: https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/being-a-subversive-teacher-educator
Boyd, P., Murray, J. & White, E. (2021) Becoming a Teacher Educator: Guidelines for academic induction. Advance HE. Available open access.
Harness, S. & Boyd, P. (2021) Academic identities and their deployment within tutorials (2021) International Journal of Educational Research 108: 101777.
Boyd, P. & Smith, C. (2016) The Contemporary Academic: orientation towards research and researcher identity of higher education lecturers in the health professions. Studies in Higher Education, 41 (4), 678-695.
Boyd, P., Smith, C. & Beyaztas, D. (2015) Hyper-Expansive Academic Workplaces: the case of UK lecturers in Nursing and Midwifery. International Journal for Academic Development,20 (1), 18-32.
Lopes, A., Boyd, P., Andrew, N. & Pereira, F. (2014) The research-teaching nexus in nurse and teacher education: contributions of an ecological approach to academic identities in professional fields. Higher Education, 68 (2), 167-183.
Boyd, P. (2013) Professional Education: resolving tensions around the value of different types of knowledge in teacher and nurse education. In Amelia Lopes (Ed.) Formação inicial de professores e de enfermeiros: identidades e ambientes / Initial education of teachers and nurses: identities and environments. Lisboa: Mais Leituras.
Boyd, P. & Tibke, J. (2012) Being a school-based teacher educator: developing pedagogy and identity in facilitating work-based higher education in a professional field. Practitioner Research in Higher Education, 6 (2), 41-57. Available at http://194.81.189.19/ojs/index.php/prhe
Smith, C. & Boyd, P. (2012) Becoming an Academic: The reconstruction of identity by recently appointed lecturers in Nursing, Midwifery and the Allied Health Professions. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 49 (1), 63-72.
Boyd, P., Harris, K. & Murray, J. (2011) Becoming a Teacher Educator: Guidelines for induction (2nd Ed.). ESCalate, Higher Education Academy: Bristol. Available at http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/1349/ (the 1st edition of this publication won the Sage / BERA prize for Practitioner Research 2009).
Boyd, P., Allan, S. and Reale, P. (2010) ‘Being a Teacher Educator: tensions in the workplace environment of lecturers in teacher education in further education colleges’. BERA conference, University of Warwick, Warwick, 1-4 September. Available at: http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/5711/ (Accessed: 28 January 2021).
Boyd, P. (2010) Academic induction for professional educators: supporting the workplace learning of newly appointed lecturers in teacher and nurse education. International Journal for Academic Development 15 (2), 155-165.
Boyd, P. & Harris, K. (2010) Becoming a university lecturer in teacher education: expert school teachers reconstructing their pedagogy and identity. Professional Development in Education 36 (1-2), 9-24.
Boyd, P. & Lawley, L. (2009) Becoming a Lecturer in Nurse Education: The work-place learning of clinical experts as newcomers. Learning in Health and Social Care 8(4), 292-300.
Boyd, P., Smith, C., Lee, S., MacDonald, I. (2009) Becoming a Health Profession Educator in Higher Education: The experiences of recently-appointed lecturers in Nursing, Midwifery and the Allied Health Professions. Health Science and Practice Subject Centre, Higher Education Academy. (Funding from the Health Science and Practice subject centre of the HE Academy 12K).
Boyd, P. (2002) Rose-tinted reflection: The benefits for teachers of initial teacher education in secondary schools. Professional Development in Education 28(2): 203-218.
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