‘Jump in off the Deep End’: Learning to Teach in Innovative Learning Environments on Practicum

Abstract

The advent of innovative learning environments (ILEs) raises challenges for initial teacher education, but as yet, such challenges have been under-addressed within policy and research. As ILEs become more common, preservice teachers (PSTs) find themselves in practicum placements in these environments. However, as change in schools is occurring more rapidly in schools, initial teacher education (ITE) programmes can struggle to respond to these emergent developments within a policy and guidance vacuum. We work as teacher educators within a small regional primary initial teacher education (ITE) programme. Grappling with potential implications of ILEs for our ITE programme, we noticed our PSTs were already negotiating such spaces on practicum. We therefore undertook research to learn more about how these PSTs managed to adapt to ILEs during their professional experience, despite the more conventional image of learning and teaching underpinning their teacher education programme at the time. We hoped to both understand how the ILE practicum worked from their vantage point, and how we might adapt our programme to more explicitly support PSTs since ILEs are emerging as enduring features of their professional practice landscape. We therefore conducted focus group interviews with a small number of our final year primary PSTs to explore their experiences of learning to teach in an ILE. We identified a number of potent forces, components and relations—or affects—that influence PSTs’ capacity to act as teachers in the social assemblage of the ILE practicum. ‘Learner agency’ emerged as a particularly influential force. While we concur that learner agency is foundational to engaged learning at school, we noticed that the notion of learner agency also constrained PSTs teaching on practicum in ways that disrupted how we thought about the ILE practicum. Our analysis suggests that learner agency, a foundational material, pedagogical and relational force of ILEs, has implications for ITE curriculum, pedagogies and practices.