Professor Jean Murray opened this second annual conference for the Teacher Education Advancement Network on 20 May 2011 with a stimulating keynote that started with a review of teacher education across the UK (from the Escalate booklet) and ended with a call to teacher educators everywhere to speak up about and for their profession. Talking about the Coalition Government's technicist view of teaching as a craft, she made the point that if teacher education remains 'a hidden profession' then we can continue to expect misunderstanding about what we do.
The rest of the day presented a variety of activity with round table discussions and workshops as well as research papers. Many presenters were disseminating results from ESCalate funded projects (my apologies I could not get to them all) and the book of abstracts is available from the conference web page. The variety in the sessions worked particularly well and I came away with many new ideas on the pros and cons of co-teaching with trainees, on different ways of conceptualising research informed pedagogy, on modelling as a teaching strategy and on the role of HE in teacher education.
All in all, it was a most enjoyable and informative day and I would to thank the TEAN team for organising it. I recommend keeping an eye on their Storehouse for the complete papers which will be available in time.
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