135
educational experience. Whether acknowledged or not this experience
is likely to play a large part in the construction of professional
attitudes and behaviour. If this is the case and evidence from the
Research Group and School Group strongly suggests that it is then
it follows that it should be an active concern of teacher education.
Similarly although
more complex the student’s political
social and
the whole person is both the beginning and the end of education but
definitions and processes of professional education carry with them
pressures for segmenting both the course and the person so that only
lip service can be paid to an ideal continually made obsolete by
professional practices. In the Research Group the political climate
of the Method Group was
referred to and it
is important to stress
that political and social attitudes are not merely personal and pri-
21
vate matters. Lacey (1977) demonstrated the construction and
influence of sub-cultures based on subject group membership and
showed the effect on students’ teaching as well on attitudes. The
important point to note here is that this influential sub-cultural
specific concerns.
knowledge refers to much more than subject
a) Personal Concerns
At this early point in the year students identify themselves in the
group through their individual concerns as the following extracts
indicate. It is only later that this develops into a capacity to
translate ideas into practice. Groups vary acording to their willing-
and
ness or ability to work at a personal level and frequently
properly some of this work will be accomplished between individual
student and tutor.
But what
can be drawn upon by both is the accumu-