Welcome, everyone. This is the eighth and final seminar in our series on future directions in teacher education,
research, policy and practise, and I'm delighted to introduce Professor Alice One-Star,
who is going to talk with us today about building research capacity in teacher education as a sort of tying it all together.
The seminar series No Pressure, Alex. We've had a series that started last term with our own Cochrane Smith.
We've talked about some of the issues in teacher education accountability there.
We've learnt from other colleagues in the US doing work in multiple countries right through to today,
trying to bring this issue of policy practise and research together, particularly in relation to building research capacity.
Alice is Professor of philosophy of education and research policy, as well as director of research here in the Department of Education.
She specialises in studies of research, policy and governance and in philosophy of research,
including work on research, assessment, impact and knowledge exchange research,
funding, research, quality evaluation, open knowledge practises, research ethics, capacity,
publication practises and the cultural value of research in the arts and humanities.
The strand of work is complemented with a strong interest in teacher education, research,
innovation in teacher education policy and practise knowledge and values in the teaching profession and the role of research in teacher education.
Alice has two Ph.D.s, one in policy and governance for research front from here the University of Oxford and one Edith Epistemological and Research.
So thank you, Alice, and we look forward to hearing from you and then we'll have some questions at the end.
Thanks very much for the transcription. I am. Welcome to the last one of the field,
and you'll be pleased to hear that I propose in honour of the end of the spending, not a couple of tweezers for you.
And as you get to feature with the Royal Mint,
it's a lot of work to do is to look at some of the one of the challenges around
teacher education and the relationship between teacher education and research.
And then to focus on the notion of research capacity or capacity for research and ask a few questions.
Now what do you mean by capacity boost capacity? What are the kind of models that have been used in different contexts and guided by policy
policymakers in trying to stimulate growth in research capacity in teacher education?
And how should we do some reflections based on the work that I have done with
colleagues recently in Wales and in Norway and try and derive from that experience?
Maybe a few principles a way forward in relation to capacity building in teacher education.
That brings me back to my lesson plan. I. If I seem to be digressing enough lot.
As promised, Elizabeth. So this is a quiz for you.
And who's this individual? And guesses.
My husband, this is some gentleman from times long gone.
Of course I cannot see. And I can see that if you have already guessed who that was.
So be ready for the next one. Businessman. This was good time.
That's three of the three. How about this one?
Nice Thanksgiving. Oh, yes, we've got an expert on just yet.
He's the ECB that really the Pfizer's correct with being witch hunt for future survey six.
Pretty good, pretty advanced. Yes.
And which one? Market for her.
Not quite. That's probably.
Who was he? I'm sure, you know, it was also said some very,
very important review of teacher education in Wales that kind of sits in between
two reviews by John Thain and thinking back to one of the seminars that we had.
The fourth and the last one is very, very girl.
You see who I here for the whole of the series.
And so I've selected, you know, those those figures and to illustrate the point that you know what counts us as a teacher,
educator and as somebody who influences teacher education and the relationship with research is actually a very kind of wild notion.
There are people who crunch data and influence talking to them on international stages.
There are people who define themselves as teacher educators through the
practise that they engage with and through the research that being carried out.
There are visionaries and reformers, you know, sort of different walks of life.
There are policy makers and there are people involved in accountability systems.
And that's because education research more widely, but due to an education and teacher education research, more specifically,
is what Steve Coca-Colas called a go between field,
where there's an astonishing kind of expectation of monkey conditionality amongst all of those who populated sufficiently.
And these people are even though you can't police many of them inhabit.
Aside from schools and other types of organisations in having education departments within higher education institutions.
So this is the second the last of debate and that's about the size and shape of the field in the UK.
How many people are in statistical terms? Full person for votes?
So how many people do you think there are in education departments, associated education departments in the UK?
We're going to figure. Who gives a thousand years more and more?
This is a fight about anything.
Any advice on that? There is a little fight.
More fuel. OK.
So 5000 new fuel. That's the theory, but actually, those 9000 people associated with the education course said that,
according to his home education statistics agency statistics, it's still one of the largest fuels of any description in UK higher education.
Of that massive field, how many professors do think that? But you here for them.
What are we talking for hundreds of years?
They took it fulfilled. So yeah, yeah, four hundred percent of those 400000 August.
The problem here is how many would you say are BME black and minority ethnic women?
Well, none is a good guess for.
So that tells us something about the field.
The 9000 people are quite there's quite a lot of women in that field when he goes down to to to assess those.
There's a vast difference between who has the professorial profile and who doesn't.
And then the distribution between men and women changes a bit.
But if you introduce other characteristics that provide the appearance of diversity in the field becomes changed.
And that's important to think about in relation to what kinds of capacity building in a field like education and such.
How many staff in of the 9000 do you think have a doctoral degree?
What proportion? 650.
But after about about a third week, it's a much more professionally rooted field than many people have seen.
How many people of those and asked this one of the 9000?
There's another code in the statistics agency,
which which records the numbers of people who say that their main interest they might implement addresses teacher training.
And there's about 2000 of of those. We've asked how many postgraduate research students.
Two thousand five thousand. Fewer, fewer than six and a half hours.
But that includes a lot of students who want to part time degrees and obviously pursue at these educational functions as well.
How many doctors are wounded in here? And her country.
A hundred thousand. A few hundred feet.
Well, it's possible I felt free to myself.
So there's a lot in the so-called pipeline of early career research, although think about diversity,
the diversity of those actually completed doctorates is huge and it's not.
All of them will necessarily come as early career research. Actually, only a portion of them would.
And finally, how what proportion of the stuff that I mentioned of the whole stuff in the
whole of the system was submitted to the previous research excellence framework.
You know, lower prices.
He's the man in the know about 27 percent.
So a very, very small proportion,
if you come to think of the of the size of the field was submitted last time around and that was made up of a very big number of institutions.
The submission of which was under 15 full time equivalent,
62 percent of institutions that submitted to the ref had less than 15 full time equivalent staff supplement.
So it's the kind of shape of the field at the moment.
This is where our teacher educators in this country conduct their work and live up to their professional lives.
So the question that comes up every time I look at this statistic is, you know,
these are the folk, these are the ones who were deemed research active last time.
So who are those who are not submitted and what proportion of these people actually
actively involved in teacher education and other forms of professional education?
We don't really know the exact answer to that question, but might my wild guess would be that there's actually quite a lot of people who
are to connected to the world of schools and other parts of the education sector,
but would not necessarily be very subjective last time around.
And we'll see what happens in the future as well we could find for keeping as they are now across the system.
I want do it from. And I think the fact that there is this difference between who populate the field
and does the work in the field and and the a group that is that was the last.
I mean, the truth is no, that was the last time you saw tactic has partly to do with the fact that education and research
and a particular teaching education research has attention on character in terms of its aims,
which are torn between academic and professional aims in terms of its kind of like this technology,
its organisation and its perceived status in institutions.
And some of that ethos of contestation has to do with with conflicting interests and narratives.
Some of this has to do with conflicting narratives about who should control state funded educational provisions.
Some of it has to do with contestation around stuff relative places of different areas of enquiry
within the establishment of higher education and where teacher education is situated within that.
Some of it has to do with internal fissures within education,
research and future education research between different intellectual position and professional choices of positions.
And some of it has to do is the defensive notion of research and practise being separate and lacking
adequate integration that can then build a move smoothly into coherent professional identities.
And I would want to pick that one not point apart a bit more.
This is one of the most pervasive metaphors, I think, in in policy about teacher education and in writing about teacher education research,
the notion of a gap between education and practise and education and research.
And if you look across the world at policy documents, you will see evidence of that notion of the gap pretty much everywhere.
This is kind of random selection, arbitrary selection of different policy documents from different times from from around the world.
If you dig into them, most of them would make a reference to the tension between the gap between the separation.
The need to bridge between practise and research and integration seems to be the key
solution works that is offered in response to that integration between theory and practise.
But you were as easy as that, and we could just legislate regulate integration, then why are we not commenting?
OK, so have we not solved this problem yet?
And I'd suggest to you just for this evening that there's a number of assumptions underpinning the use of that matter.
For them, policies that are based on trying to bridge the gap between research and practise, which are very,
very problematic assumptions and what assumptions like illustrated by that picture
is the one about the hot realm of practise versus the kind of code types of theory.
So the idea that theory and practise are conceptual and also logically distinct, completely separate.
All practise is not theoretical. All theory is non experiential, not practical.
But if you're going to dig a bit deeper into accounts of human rationality and human action and flourishing,
I think that is quite easy and of taken apart as a as a as a policy.
The second assumption that's a good one can trace to all of those policy government is the one that assumes isn't the kind of graphic metaphor.
It assumes that practise and theory are institutionally bounded to particular settings.
The practise is bounded to schools or other educational establishments and COVID-19 to the university,
and that there's a little boundary crossing that needs to be stimulated that by, for example,
investing in practitioner researchers who are able to move between the two settings.
And again, I think a metaphor like that is divisive. It does not capture the complexity of of of what's going on in both schools and universities.
And I'd say that it's problematic from both the research and the practise
perspective because the research is at the same time elevated and historically,
you know, to the heights of the highest forms of learning. But at the same time, it's impoverished educationally.
Yes, it's something really important sticking to the. It's taken away from education, health research.
And the same applies to practise. This practise is in some ways related because it's kind of closer to reality based on a kind of pedestal.
But at the same time, it's restricted to something that often in some of the police documents,
amounts to a kind of situation that embodied labour within external agendas.
So I'd say that's an institutional fallacy and that the third one of the firemen on the island to challenge is this notion
that researching for theory and educational activity feature in whatever form of education activity equals practise.
Because that means you think that they separate like then.
I think these two kind of linear linear takes on on application form and translation of funding from research into practise.
So the notion of Evidence-Based practise often relies on this kind of assumptions, and I think there's value in that as well.
But that's a different conversation.
And this assumption rests on the notion that teaching and research are different in the future is that they have an education,
both epistemological and pedagogical. And I think that the kind of cultural and political to do some fancy in underpinning that government for.
So with a collection of complicated lives, I'm trying to say that my argument would be that in order to get, we need to move beyond that matter.
What do you think about what, how we want to develop research and research a future education they need to move beyond?
Oh, how do we bridge the gap between teaching, between research and practise?
And one way of moving beyond might be to think about health research and education as being forms of positive practise,
so they actually need they come together in certain core attributes which are shared and such as implicit thinking and language,
reflective use of tools and consider it exercise of virtues.
But both of those three of these apply to both walk, we might say, as research and what we might do because if you want to be practised.
So I will not develop that. So there's ways in which I could explain each of those things,
but I won't develop this argument enough because I think for the purposes of thinking of across the building in education,
simply saying that we there are conceptual ways of moving beyond the metaphor of the gap is enough.
So moving now into the veto of the off the topic, because the leakage capacity in teacher education,
we've had a glut of reviews because I was trying to find a few of them on top of this.
Oh God, we've had a lot of reviews of teacher education with a view to reform in different countries, and this is just in that in the UK.
So we're not lacking confidence.
A lot of those reviews seem to suggest that there is a need to extend, to build, to nurture, to sustain capacity for research and teacher education.
And the question is, how do we do that?
But I would want to test and I can say, no, what do we mean by capacity and whose capacity are we talking about?
Often what we talk about is the capacity of teacher educators situated within universities to conduct
and evaluate critically research and the capacity of teachers and of other important stakeholders,
including policymakers, to understand, critically evaluate and use research.
That's the kind of definition that underpins a lot of the tools to develop capacity in teacher education.
But you know, that list that actually includes an awful lot of other people as well.
And sometimes controversially, I like to include teacher educators in schools and, you know, sitting on that list,
as well as to not to restrict the notion of teacher educator to one particular setting, either the school or the university.
And what capacity? So, yes, individual capabilities are important to act professionally and to support our business to track professional, yes.
And when you think about capacity in that sense, in terms of expertise, having the right kind of expertise,
having the motivation to act in the light of expertise and the opportunities to do so.
But it's not only an individual level that matters when you think about investing in capacity building,
it's also the organisation of global resources human and because of the kind, the culture,
the infrastructure, the structures which would support professional activity.
And there's also the systemic and organisational levels of the resources and the infrastructures that
are required at the national and international level in order to sustain that sort of activity.
So thinking that we would somehow sort out the individual capacity scope of capabilities of those inhabiting education departments,
and that would be the full answer to the so-called capacity problem in teacher education for research,
that is a very kind of limiting way of thinking about it. And they will expand on this.
I'm. But for now, just a draw to kind of lungs has capacity building different from cultivating individual skills and knowledge.
I think I've just explained some of that.
And growing organisational so-called critical mass of researchers or research partners with individual aspects of it.
I think I've just explained that historically we focussed on upskilling people methodologically
and giving them knowledge about research and enabling users giving them literacy.
So developing their capacity to understand and perhaps use of time research.
Even at the individual level, I think it's probably becoming transparent already kind of thinking about what I'm saying,
but in terms of what practise and research have in common as far as practises, that's not quite enough in terms of describing engagement in research.
How about at the organisational level? This notion of critical mass has been extremely popular, even though it's been,
I think, a moment in time, but it's kind of coming back into fashion as an expression.
And usually that is defined as having co-signing a sufficient number of staff of teacher educators with the right research expertise.
And that would give you the critical mass to be able to kind of have a voice in the in the field of research.
That for me, reducing that to a number is probably the most limiting thing you can possibly do to the notion of capacity, and I'll come back to that.
This is, I think, sprouted a variety of variations, one of which is the notion of research power.
I'm familiar with that notion.
Thankfully not, so that is an artefact of the ref, someone two times higher than the tables, right after that, after the ref.
They calculate something called research from the size of the submission of a department said to come and has that kind of stuff that they make.
It comes by a formula that builds on the quality profile that they have.
So the formula is not one that can be, you know, proportional force that you sense proportions of other professional proportion, which means that,
you know, in the end, a department that has the most people, if there's enough of a difference in size, will come first regardless.
Just because of the way it's calculated. Some have condemned that to the notion of that, it doesn't matter quite as much,
but that the volume what really matters is the proportion of people who are engaged in research being in an institution.
But all of these numbers. So my my great.
There's a lot of kind of transfer of of those numbers into redefining expectations and accountability processes for future education.
But I'd like to look kind of beyond numbers, you know, is there anything else you know,
aside from the total staff with the kind of expertise in one area of, say,
subject pedagogy in an institution that makes a difference in terms of capacity and probably the social and intellectual organisation,
of course, of education of research activity in that organisation does make a difference.
And these are potential descriptors that have with colleagues and we have harvested from
the literature and attempts to recontextualize the notion of casting critical mass.
And they are very different from, you know, research poems, research intensive care and all of those and the number of people with a doctorate
of the kind of being more crude indicated that I was talking about earlier.
And there's a lot more qualitative as well. So there's still publications and production generation of knowledge.
But that is why in terms of the flow that is commensurate with the resources and the the groups of staff within the institution,
there's there's something about funding that it's more about equity than about the
volume of funding that the particular the grant value of a particular moment in time.
There's something about collaborations,
but that is actually lifted to more important kind of position in relation to what kinds of capacity about the density of collaborators,
not internally around a coherent agenda. It's also about how central an institution organisation is seen in Netflix beyond itself.
And it's also about pedagogical continuity in early career development and doctoral education,
and about the balance between continuity intellectually, professionally and of sticking to the tradition.
And this continuity having the agency to critique, to change, to, to challenge.
So that's a very different kind of language from the from the previous figures that I showed.
So what kind of language has informed the various over the years, the various attempts in the UK to build capacity, to be infected,
to create public investment streams for capacity building in teacher education in particular and run really quickly through
what I think are some of the most emblematic or some really powerful examples of investments in capacity building in the UK,
starting with the largest ever investment in the country,
which is the research which shows that teaching and learning research programming investment by the SABC to the tune of about 50 million,
and he was extended before 2009 for a couple of years as well.
But that was the kind of core funding for it. This has, at its heart, a very explicit commitment to building capacity in future education.
The reasons for creating the T.A.R.P. in the first place had a lot to do with the perceived urgent need to build capacity for research.
So it included a research capacity building network, which was formally funded for a number of years and also if you a teacher education group,
the reading of which was specifically to develop capacity for research and teaching and teacher education.
And then they delivered all sorts of things,
including having a requirement for some capacity building to be built in every single project that is funded from that stream of funding.
So a lot of future investment here is the investment for more training workshops,
examination, online training resources, a virtual research Obamacare.
Lots of of all those things were created as a result of those requirements.
After the comedian of the year, Larry,
they're also kind of coming together of different stakeholders in the form of something called the Strategic Forum for Research and Education,
which was again funded by the U.S. on time being out by the Department of what would they then the Department
for Families and what they were doing and what they're trying to do was to have four yearly fora to look very,
very closely with all of the stakeholders. In all, four countries of the U.K. had key issues identified in relation to education research
and capacity was one of the first and kind of most dominant strands of that work,
Force said. There are other investments we just want to scale, but we got a different kind of implications from the very big system, right?
So this was a regional investment for the Future Research Network, which was funded to support capacity building in the north of England.
I believe with the northwest through informal professional learning in multi-institutional groups
who are supported and encouraged to then move on and do collaborative bidding for research funding.
So a very different model from the levels of capacity building.
Astonished by the larger investment fellowships, there are different forms of mentoring in a one to one 122 mentoring and support.
Scotland also made a big investment in the kind of 2000 in capacity building, for instance, and that was now the traditional research scheme,
which invested about two million in kind of formal interventions through distance learning modules,
but also mentoring, peer coaching and other forms of investment in Wales.
And there was an earlier investment in the Welsh Education and Research Network,
which funded bursaries and mentorship, as well as collaborative fellowships.
And this was followed in the more recent years by larger scale investment in research education,
which is a big initiative for developing capacity building that Ian and Ann and James
and Nigel from the department and myself were involved be as the evaluation team.
So I'll referred to that evaluation to. But this particular investment covered pretty much every initiative that I could foresee
for intervention that you can possibly think of in terms of capacity building at,
particularly the individual. Some of the organisational level has worked.
And then there were some investments in Northern Ireland to kind of stepping back from that.
The structure that there's different types,
different models of what capacity building is taking us as mean individual organisational and more systemic level.
So there's a formal model, which seems to me to have kind of three options to it.
From what I've seen so far in these initiatives and in other countries, it's either through recruitment.
So you build the capacity of an organisation by going outside to the pool of that organisation and bringing in new expertise, new skills and so forth.
And some systems, including the Norwegian system.
Some states, I think, encourage this explicitly as a practise there draught professional learning models,
some of which are qualifications and research training.
So formal courses, some of including degree level and postgraduate courses and doctorates,
and some of which are more oriented towards CPD meant to support views and engagement with research.
And then there's the funding based model of commissioning models.
For example, I believe that it's those one as an example. You know,
one hub is funded and then kind of funds out of grants to a variety of other organisations
within certain parameters to create a more distributed kind of network of research activity.
These are, you know, fairly formal in how they're set up, organise and run.
There's then someone known for models of lots of which strong the notion of communities of practise or on kind of wider notions of social practise.
And I think I classify it kind of do of teaching quality teaching.
And as you know, a lot of them have less formal models rather than the formal ones because it involves,
I think, more mutual kind of shared ownership between the different parties approach.
And then there's more informal ones which have to do with peer networks, many of which are very, very lively at the moment.
There are a lot of grassroots kind of professional networks that have now reached sufficient
maturity to begin thinking about engagement with research and those forms of digital engagement,
including social media and so forth. And maybe something I'm yet to develop that as I watch this space kind of thing,
something that might be on the notion I introduced earlier on situated, inquisitive practises.
So formal, known for what you call whatever,
a variety of models still at the heart of many of those models is an emphasis on methodological capacity rather than any other aspect of research.
And that emphasis on methodological expertise, methodological capacity is not convergence.
It doesn't really take into account fully the diversity of forms of research that may make the contribution to teacher education.
And let me substantiate this point. OK before I move on.
So I've created a crude diagram here on the horizontal axis is policy conscious of a particular
design or methodology that is common in education research and on the vertical axis.
And I'm kind of plotting the extent to which expertise in the use of gas methodology is distributed across the system of teacher education.
Right. So that's how widely feature education, but you do education, community and course.
That's that's that's expertise and that is policy purchase.
So if we think about a design of a methodology that has high quality approaches and there's
quite widespread understanding and skills of it in future education community in the UK,
what might that look like? I'm waiting for an example.
Something that lots of us, you know, we're comfortable with and policymakers are not going to kind of throw their hands up in often for.
So they think that's a really, really good example. One more.
But he tried it before, so I felt that something in such case study research,
some research involving not just on the qualitative interviews and focus groups.
They seemed to be the skills for them seemed to be more widely spread.
And there seems to be kind of policy acceptance of the of the value of that research.
How about areas of more concentrated skillsets but still quite high quality purchase?
So advanced country techniques,
experimental research on city research on a more restricted to a certain segment of the population of future educators,
but still quite quite high as a priority in terms of what is seen as valid solid policy evidence in terms of wide spread.
But perhaps lower quality purchase eye for things like action research, pedagogical research, positive practitioners.
There's this huge professional approaches here, and there's a huge understanding of the value that these forms of research offer, but I'm yet to see.
I have to say I've yet to see a policy document which draws entirely and very strongly from action films and qualitative practitioner research,
and I'm hopefully I'm beginning to substantiate what I was suggesting earlier that actually,
there's a bit of a world of analogy going on there in the emphasis on building capacity methodologically.
Give me an example of that one. So not concentrated skills and low quality purchase.
Well, if you're a doctoral student in transition from acting like I did in one of my doctorate and then this is a very kind of specific kind of skill,
so to speak, it requires an awful lot of time to actually refine that particular skill set.
But again,
I'm not sure that there is an awful lot of policy reports that I've come across which draw this discourse analysis and assessment graphic studies.
So my suggestion is actually, we need an awful lot still to do in terms of recognising the contribution of the full spectrum of educational research
on future education research so that the interventions that we evaluated in Wales colleagues might disagree with me.
But I would suggest that this is possibly where the policy focus for that investment was in
developing those cohort studies that have strong data infrastructure for them that use our CRC UK
environment with their investment in in a quantitative strand advanced one strand for funding for
teens and early career researchers to emphasise this area here again with high quality approaches.
The large scale investment that very traditional Endowment Foundation is making into intervention
research and Aristides again kind of falls into this into this area that comes close at first.
Closely focussed, though,
that many investment in developing capacity in those other areas of research that have been historically some investments in,
for example, both for my areas, for teachers to engage in practise nurse practitioner research and scholarships.
But all of those investments tended to be a lot more, I think, small scale and those kind of mixed outcomes.
The investment in this properties is more internal investment by her education institutions
in sustaining areas of expertise and developing these through perhaps doctoral degrees and.
So the examples which are run through very, very quickly. Wales, it's a small system,
so that's just the figures in terms of the numbers of places for for you should be your injection of the stuff in the education centre in Wales,
their school accredited providers like the government in Wales.
And I think what's really interesting for the purposes of this tool is that the fact that we're experiencing,
as described by point by John in one of the earlier seminars, a system wide reform of first and accountability mechanisms for teaching,
education and research actually features explicitly in those in those efforts to to introduce that reform.
When we went to Westminster to evaluate the intervention of Louisiana Education Commissioner,
I described, we went quite thoroughly through kind of the different aspects of it.
So we went through a lot of in-depth interviews the how much, you know, this is a participant validation a variety of things.
I won't go through the methodological details of what we did, what we did there, but I'm honest.
I'm only saying this now because this is the kind of grounds on which I'm raising what I'm saying about what we're.
And finally, from the Welsh example, this is just a few snippets from a police document,
which is called the action plan, which usually involves this national mission, the actual plan 2017 21.
And I think if you read through this, you know, it's about enhancing the use of evidence and lead to policy.
It's about building the research base through supporting collaboration and sharing effective practise.
It's about increasing the engagement between universities and schools for research in this profession
and measuring the growth of educational research so that all of very worthwhile kinds of commitments.
When you, when you, when you look at them. But what I suggest that we we do this kind of spend a moment in the light of the kind of things that
I said earlier about the gap between research and practise about diversity in educational research,
about the relationship between different types of institutions and kind of really begin to question the statements.
Very generous indeed. Statements such as this.
And it is in the nature of, I think, all policy documents that they're trying to do more than one one thing at once.
But I do worry about thinking about the use of evidence in a linear way.
I do worry about measuring the growth of educational research through pure,
simplistic quantitative metrics without thinking more fully about research structures and development of the diversity of education,
research and researchers.
And I do worry about the notions of the gap that might still be lurking there behind the investment into developing a research based approach.
And I have to give the warnings about the context in which I been working for the last few years,
which is knowing I know why the system will do the population is not that much bigger,
but the system is much larger and the number of institutions is larger now as well if there's going to be institutions.
Bear in mind, you don't need to see the list here, but this is a list of what could be the entire system.
So the ones with the bullet points next to them are the new institutions.
Because the whole country is going through a process of mergers, institutional mergers,
creating from a number of institutions, a smaller number of providers of IP,
both primary and no secondary education, each of which has several different campuses that used to be institutions in their own right.
And I think this might ring some bells to some of you about some things that happened in England as well in the past.
Now, with these three, these ones, there are huge changes because they can be very far distances.
Given the geography of Norway between one particular satellite campus and the Central University on another campus of the same university.
Now Norway is undergoing an even vaster and primary and second lowest that can deliver a faster system,
perhaps from a programme of reform, than perhaps what else is at the moment,
because that encompasses everything they done, the structural reform they do, you know,
fully formative qualifications for full entry to Fiji and moving the profession to a Masters level profession.
You can't actually exit with a qualification before you do your masters anymore.
And that's five years and reforming the curriculum,
and that's new a new framework for future education at those levels and then reforming the forms of partnership
for greater education and recent features very heavily on all aspects of all elements of that reform.
And so the reason I was in Norway for the last three years is that I was part of this group,
which is an international expert group that was commissioned to work with institutions and with all of the stakeholders,
including policymakers, to develop capacity for research in particular in future education in Norway.
Because this was one of the kind of core and have you seen seen as a difficult aspect of delivering that particular reform?
So we've been going for national conferences every year for regional meetings in between in all parts of the of the country,
meeting with all of the providers of teacher education, doing workshops, three quarters of the way we met with all of the policymakers.
This is a country we recognise the need to produce resources, and now we're working on it on a final report and kind of thinking about legacy.
So that's the kind of thing would be amazing. The comment that I make in the book about Norway and one of the things that we found,
one of the crucial things that we found about trying to build capacity at system
level in a country like Norway where there is resource and there is policy,
the political will to develop the teaching profession was that top-down interventions we've got of
very heavily leaning on institutions and accountability perspectives perspective don't really work.
So we have to rethink our starting points in that process.
Dealing directly with a quality assurance agency in Norway under extremely open to an alternative way of thinking about working these institutions.
And these are the principles that we decided upon and that we worked with for that for the last three years.
So we wanted capacity building to be participatory and collaborative, to be focussed towards empowerment and kind internal autonomy,
not towards compliance with external accountability demands to be context specific,
but also in a way that is informed by insights from beyond that particular context.
Interesting insights and talk of ideas to be formed by research on future education and on capacity building in future education,
and to be critical to support the agency of everyone involved in the system.
To have a voice to identify issues including structural issues,
needs points for change and actually begin a process of innovation trying to create these things through.
19 wins. Here's the strategy document that kind of supports this process of reform.
The 2025 strategy But unlike in other parts of the world, when when I last went to Norway a few weeks ago,
we were actually able to have a the Minister for Education that's going to engage
with the piano and the stakeholders in the conference around the strategy.
The document again mentions a number of really valuable things things about the expertise in teacher education departments,
things about, you know, it's important to have more research. It's important to have teacher education as a research based enterprise.
But if you read them again, you're probably even more evidence than the example that I gave earlier that some
of the issues that identify as problematic earlier are very much present there,
and they really have to be unpacked and contested. The notion of the gap is there.
And the idea that you address capacity gaps by either increasing the level of qualification of the stuff that you have or recruiting outside.
And there's a there's a strong programme for actually recruiting internationally into navigation situations in the in the in west,
including from other countries.
And there is an emphasis on my research, but then that is narrowed down to interventional studies and experimental studies,
as the examples are given of the types of research that we need more of.
And then there's this expectation that in order to move on, we become active.
Really, what we need is agreement and consent rather than productive generative disagreement,
which is one of the principles that we have adopted as a group in Norway. So there's a lot of interest in having that, I guess.
So what have we learnt from working in those conflicts and from those examples?
I learnt a lot about barriers.
If you started the discussion about capacity building in any conflicts, we feature educators and you of your own future educators.
This is what is happens happening. So I apologise.
Thank you. And and the values are again at the different levels, at the individual level.
We I think we all recognise this. All right. Hands up, if you don't have time and Chris's models of of workloads that increase after restructuring.
And I think in England, we cut some of that as well. Perceived lack of support, lack of support or funding of access to training.
Difficulties in securing stable, not obvious employment,
non casual teaching roles and the right employment conditions that would enable engagement in research.
And these are common to a wide range of sectors contextually and organisationally.
There's the fact that fast change top-down change keeps people extremely busy with trying desperately to comply
with the boxes and kind of does not give them the space to do the real professional work that they to be doing.
This conflicting pressures are generated by restructuring.
There are there's institutional reluctance to invest in teacher education, so the bigger, higher education, the bigger.
The university perhaps doesn't recognise the need to invest in future education and teacher education programmes,
and the financial model applied to them might be a bit more confusing.
And there's insufficient recognition of research as part of the allocation and included,
including research that doesn't fund academic type as far as the workload.
On occasion, there's insufficient appreciation of the demands of high quality research so that it's actually included in
the models and issues around teaching and research not being integrated in the same professional culture.
I think these situations and some of the privatisation of contracts that is happening in different contexts might actually increase.
That's that kind of sense of distance between the different aspects of the.
And then there's some issues that people have identified,
which are a few related having to do with the imbalance in the distribution of of expertise geographically and institutionally,
having to do with the fragmentation of research activities across different types of institutions and groups of staff and modes of research.
We have advanced research skills may be insufficiently spread and which prompts institutions to think, Oh,
I need to just look beyond developing my internal staff into a wider recruitment pool and grades across the
markets and so forth and other kind of forms of pollution of infrastructure that maybe may be missing.
Opportunities are there as well. And I think always a very good example for that, but also probably Wales,
because there's clear political will to engage in a discourse about teacher education that has research as a core component of it.
There is well to discuss and to actually make public investment into developing the teaching profession in teacher education.
Does the investment in developing new research leadership roles?
Some institutions have started thinking strategically about what the research of the flagship teacher education programmes do for them.
There's provide for dialogue between high distributions and hydrogen in schools, institutions and schools, and perhaps in many places.
We've kind of gone past that situation where there's a sense of defensiveness because
we're not quite sure what each each each of the types of institutions strengths might be.
And there's a lot more working together, enough of that for dialogue and so forth.
Well, at the institution, folks, I've talked a lot about the methodological question, all of this,
but I just want to pause for 30 seconds on what might might it mean to develop research capacity of organisation and assistance systems?
I think that's probably the least that's not being fully explored so far in those programmes.
And I think that those four things are absolutely crucial.
So it's not just about individual skill is not just about qualifications and recruitment, if it goes.
It's about culture. It's about forms of evaluation, which are formative rather than punitive.
It's about research infrastructure that enables rather than hinders engagement and research.
And it's about research quality that is itself informed by my research about constituting and about future education and
which which which exposes itself to scrutiny through kind of thing from monitoring through evaluation of of interventions.
And this is the only one that I have here.
What might if we have a research culture to develop research culture in this more expansive notion of capacity
building what it might mean an orientation towards enquiry that needs to be cultivated in all types of institutions.
It might mean awareness of the fact that knowledge is transient and contestable,
and that critical enquiry done systematically is important in any form of professional practise.
It might mean that research and teaching so together there are embedded in the professional identities across the system.
And it might mean a nexus of collaboration. And in fact, we do know anything that goes against those things.
We need to think about vacancy in the system.
So I think I think that you are kind of a very quick read through the different levels of of thinking about capacity building.
I think if you throw the huge emphasis that there is on capacity building for individuals in universities or for
teacher education educators situated within universities through all sorts of interventions such as coaching,
mentoring, fellowships, writing, support conference funding, do you support the law?
There's also been some emphasis on developing individuals within schools and other educational organisations through giving them access to research,
coconut cocoa producing research, coastal provision with maybe colleagues from higher education institutions,
professional development and maybe ways of supporting people's engagement in research.
There's been some investment in institutional organisational rather than institutional capacity building, particularly in terms of partnerships,
some tweaks around working environments and some kind of bespoke activities to support these organisations and investment in research leadership.
But I think it is that at this level, at the national level, system level,
the things that need to be put in place have not had the level of investment that is required, and we've we've seen quite a long way from them.
So in terms of research, you formed policy in this field, the regulation in this field,
funding arrangements, data, archiving, infrastructure, open access.
All of these things are not yet to the level that they used to be.
So I close with this kind of thinking a step back and thinking about, Okay,
so if we wanted a more principled take on capacity building across all of those levels, where might we start?
So this is kind of my initial proposition for you, and it's really something to kind of feed into into discussions and for us to continue to.
I mean, hopefully we might come back in a few years and see something that's moved on.
But I, I really would like to see is to have at the heart of this,
a much bolder notion of collaborative professional practise, which is research reach for you in a way that is not apologetic.
I like to see a professional culture that can realise its vision whilst removing from the system one of the incentives that would hinder it.
For example, in some of the countries that I've looked at, there's a lot of kind of rhetoric around encouraging collaboration.
But if all of the funding arrangements and the accountability arrangements are competition,
competition based and drive and drive through competition that would completely go against realising that vision is the policy and organisation,
that rhetoric is that we want to support the rounded academic to flourish.
And at the same time, we promote academics through a very narrow set of metrics, counting publications,
then the impact factors and whatever the tube, the latter hinders the very valuable principle.
There's a vast range of examples like that I could offer from across the system.
I would wants to see that there's a continuum of research, but this is not about just why they're doing the initial teacher training.
These teachers are exposed to a particular kind of ethos.
And then as they move those qualification, that kind of peters out of it needs to kind of be part of the professional identities in a sustainable way.
I would like to see a much more determined stance nationally in different contexts and internationally synthesising
more formative evaluation and internal accountability over punitive external accountability exercises and regimes.
And obviously, I'd have to see this investment in infrastructure and documentation and evaluation of any kind of reform and intervention,
think from the policy level and of the innovations that it stimulates in the current.
I don't think we talk about we talk enough about a very creative practise that sometimes in quite complex circumstances is actually happening,
happening on the ground. I think I ran over a bit and I apologise, but thank you very much.