Opportunities through Communities of Discovery
The teaching profession has been characterised as one that “eats its young”1 with Early Career Teachers (ECTs) in England not only facing the demands of surviving in the profession but existing in one that has been sharpened, shaped and affected by the recent pandemic context. Among other issues created by the Covid-19 global pandemic, it is useful to consider how Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and the professional development (PD) of new teachers, has been affected. Likewise, are the implications of this context on the collaborative networks that continue to exist and have been affected.
Professional development has, perhaps through necessity rather than design, creatively responded to constraints in pedagogical interaction as it has morphed into adaptive and hybrid ways of learning and teaching, whilst, at the same time, preparing and continuing to support new teachers for an uncertain educational world. Azorín suggests that despite the restrictions that arose from the pandemic, it offered a “golden opportunity” to “rethink what matters most in education.”2. However, we need to consider what it is that matters most, particularly in ITE and PD now, as new teachers entering the profession face an ever-changing and unstable context. This on-going and changeable context is not only affected by the fall-out from the Covid-19 global pandemic but also by national policy, such as the implementation of the Department for Education’s ‘Early Career Framework’ (ECF)3 and the promotion of narratives such as ‘the recovery curriculum’.
In this article, I show how the PD within our meaningful ‘community of discovery’4 has been one golden opportunity and one that matters most in terms of networked approach to PD. Alongside the pandemic, our community of discovery has been shaped by the tensions that exist between “economies of performance” in school contexts and various “ecologies of practice”,5 which we have, and continue to explore, through the artful application of a Theatre in Education (TiE) programme provided by Big Brum Theatre in Education Company.*
Using a case study example, I will explore, how university academics, drama teachers and TiE practitioners have collaboratively and creatively worked to develop a meaningful and durable cross-sector community of discovery that exists betwixt and between the formalities of university education and the day-to-day realities of school life. The space created through our collaborative work is one that adapted to the pandemic context in an attempt to understand what ‘being a teacher’ meant, and continues to question this. One potential future development, in terms of PD, is that increasing the awareness of the tacit complexity of professional identity formation has clear implications for academics, senior leaders in schools and teachers who wish to develop as more confident and innovative educators. In this way a collaborative networked approach to PD might become more strongly developmental.