In Scotland, practitioner enquiry is established within teachers’ professional standards as an integral component of our professional learning. It is not unreasonable, then, to find that within Initial Teacher Education (ITE), we also make use of this methodological approach to explore and enhance our practice.
By Mark Lindley-Highfield of Ballumbie Castle, Lecturer in Teacher Education, University of the Highlands and Islands (Inverness)
Ali Hepburn, Lecturer in Early Learning and Teacher Education, University of the Highlands and Islands (Orkney)
It was on this basis that we reviewed part of our Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) programmes – one-year, full-time graduate courses for qualification as a teacher – to better meet our learners’ needs.
Place-attentiveness had already been identified as a strength of our PGDE programs, as is acknowledged in Redford and Nicol’s Knowing Myself as a Teacher: Transforming the Place of Rurality in Scottish Initial Teacher Education. Our online seminars bring students together from across our campuses – from the sub-Arctic Shetland Islands to the central belt of Scotland – with local partners, such as Aberdeen City Council and the Scottish Borders Council. A student teacher in a city school learns from a student teacher on one of our more remote islands, and vice versa. We wanted to build on this strength and to help our student teachers develop familiarity with their placement schools. Over the year, they spend a total of nineteen weeks in schools, broken down into three blocks of six or seven weeks.
At staff professional learning days, we encountered the UArctic Thematic Network of Teacher Education’s five pillars of Arctic pedagogy: community, culture, language, digitalization, and elders. These resonated with our own teaching team, and we were keen to incorporate them into our programs. We make use of digital technologies to overcome the challenges of distance and of our diverse land- and seascapes. Our different communities have their own cultural heritage and traditions, some shared and some unique to certain places. We depend on elders for the transmission of our cultural knowledge, who act as guardians of the legacy of our forebears. We have a linguistic diversity, though it can be masked by the dominance of the English language. These factors, and others, had us realize that there are synergies between our contexts and those of the Circumpolar North. We then embraced the pillars of Arctic pedagogy as a tool for student teachers to understand their placement settings and conceptualizations of place.
The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) is spread broadly across the north and west of Scotland. Across this area, three languages dominate: English, Gaelic, and Scots. UHI offers ITE in Gaelic or English. While English remains the professional language of the north of Scotland, Gaelic is not the indigenous language across the entire north of the country. Along the north coast of Caithness and on the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland, the Scots spoken is derived from Norn, displaying many similarities with the language of our Nordic neighbours. The language of Scots is rich, alive and regionally varied, with geographically close areas expressing vastly different approaches to the language. Like Gaelic, Scots is a predominantly domestic language, where usage is passed on orally across generations and written Scots is minimal.
Place-attentiveness for ITE students has been based on Arctic pedagogy’s five pillars: community, culture, digitalization, elders, and language. Understanding the language of Scots sits firmly within all these pillars. Schools have been demonstrating an increasing awareness of promoting Scots within the classroom, recognizing the importance of valuing the children’s domestic, cultural language. For our ITE students, we want them to be equipped with the skills to embrace the domestic languages and to have an awareness of the cultural importance this has for our children. One way that we achieve this for the Gaelic language is to have a Gaelic-medium pathway, for which assessments are written in Gaelic and school placements take place in the language. In respect of Scots, within our lectures on professional reflection and enquiry, we promote the pillars of Arctic pedagogy and refer to Scots to illustrate the language pillar.
Having attended the Sustainable Teacher Education conference at the University of Lapland, it is clear that the duality of domestic and professional languages is mirrored across the Circumpolar North. Where indigenous languages are present, they are often considered the domestic or less valued languages by government, education, and policy makers. By understanding, respecting, and promoting the active use of these languages, we can give value within the cultures and communities we are working in. For teachers, it is important to have an awareness of the cultural sensitivity around the language and where there is a political impact. For children, it is important to have the way they speak and communicate recognized and celebrated.
References
GTCS [General Teaching Council for Scotland] (2021) The Standard for Provisional Registration: Mandatory Requirements for Registration with the General Teaching Council for Scotland. Available at: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/653fc30601a80aefd5668009/65de10ce9d1436edbc53b787_GTCS_The%20Standard%20for%20Provisional%20Registration.pdf (Accessed 11 December 2024).
Redford, M. and Nicol, L. (2021) ‘Knowing Myself as a Teacher: Transforming the Place of Rurality in Scottish Initial Teacher Education’, in S. White and J. Downey (eds) Rural Education Across the World. Singapore: Springer, pp.47-64.
UArctic Thematic Network (2019) Position statement on Arctic Pedagogy. Available at: https://www.ulapland.fi/loader.aspx?id=df6946c3-f531-4fb5-923f-c5af0cbad6e5 (Accessed: 4 December 2024).
Photo: University of the Highlands and Islands UHI
