90
them being the streng th and persistance of what Lacey called the
subject sub culture. The mode of course organisation with its strong
boundaries between
subjects
insulated Social Studies students
fro!
the influence of different interpretations of school experience and
regularly constituted a secure home base from which to view, often
critically, what for other students were taken for granted realities.
Whilst
these may have been
portant
factors
underlying the parti-
cipation of the Social Studies group> for the English group factors
which pertained to the desirability of developing particular ways
of working with schools were undoubtedly influential. (See Burgess
1975) ɪn the early years of the Alternative Course its popu-
lation comprised the Social Studies students and a group of English
students. For the English students there was, from the beginning,
the possibility of choosing the Alternative Course with its emphasis
on inner city schools, continuity of contact with the school and
its commitment to a change in the PGCE. Not surprisingly from the
beginning there was a substantial degree of 'radical' commitment
from mature students who tended to value experience highly. The
extension of the course later to include Mathematics students (1979)
and later, for the year
of
the research^ a small
number of RE
and
Humanities
students
(1981)
apparent
the varieties of commitment
and the necessity for their professional development thorughout the
year. So . in i98l staff were reported as seeing one advantage of
the course as its capacity to be ‘'responsive to students' abilities,
Undoubtedly this feature had emerged in response to staff's experience
of working with students who displayed socially patterned regular-
ities that could be anticipated and thus responded to. It is