26
time this has been a critical if unanticipated dimension of the
Alternative Course.
As the students on the course appeared
froι
its early days to be
qualitat ively
different from those of their
previous experiences so
its staff were similarly liable to be affected.
University tutors and teacher tutors like any learners exposed to
new sets of critical circumstances
and conceptions into their way of
they themselves are no longer as
, incorporate new skills, attitudes
seeingβ^and fail to apprehend that
they were. Philida Salmon (i98θ)
puts
the
emphasis
on this
process
of becoming and its
portance
in the growth and development of personality. In the following comment
she expresses the
relationship between personal changes and knowledge.
..... the personal nature of knowledge is its most
fundamental aspect. What one knows, in a final sense,
one knows about oneself. Who one is, is inextricably
bound up with who one is known to be. Still other
features of the personal nature of knowing are the
facts that people learn through relationships with
other people, that knowledge is never independent
of personal meanings and values, and that it is embedded
in social structures and groupings. (1980 P5)
This is perhaps nowhere more
true than in its reference to professional
knowledge which is necessarily generated from within and with
reference to particular patterns of organisation and of practice.
Working within the different structures both in schools and in the
training institutions developed by the Alternative Course has neces-
sitated change
in the professional practice of university
school
group tutors.
The research has suggested that far reaching changes
are required in their roles and
has indicated that resistances and
blocks to further progress might
be seen as both personal and insti-
tutional matters.
Whilst it is possible to draw out dimensions of changes and point
to sources of resistance it
is also
important to look back to the