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singularly Innappropriate if account is taken of the fact that the
constellation of skills, attitudes and values that informs a teacher’s
professional persona is both individual and creative and itself
changing and developing. What the students require is the oppor-
tunity to learn from all their encounters in school the particular
skills, attitudes and values that will form the basis for their
beginnings as teachers.
Learning
implies
the
kind of evaluation that goes beyond what
may be conventionally construed as success or failure, either of which
tend to be seen as relatively fixed. Students need to examine both
in relation to themselves, fellow students, teachers and the
school more generally. Increasingly the research suggested that under-
standing and realistic responses to success or failure required
broad understanding. The social, economic and political context
within which teachers teach and pupils learn are factors with an
increasing degree of immediacy and this was often clear to students
as they detailed their encounters. What is implied here is that
the encounters
that
up the
student’s school
experience will
play a vital role in shaping the kind of teacher
the student will
become. Further,that this experience is shaped by a variety of local
and wider factors that students
themselves
need to appreciate in
order to work effectively as teachers. So work which begins close
to personal experience and encounters whether in the school or in
the training institution tries to move beyond that point both in
terms of understanding and of incorporating that experience in the
student’s professional persona.
It accepts that unless teacher
education
can begin
from
this
point it runs the
constant risk of
being pulled back to it in the
sense that when
experience runs