Teacher education in the United Kingdom post devolution: convergences and divergences

This paper examines the roles of research in teacher education across the four nations of the United Kingdom. Both devolution and on-going reviews of teacher education are facilitating a greater degree of cross-national divergence. England is becoming a distinct outlier, in which the locus for teacher education is moving increasingly away from Higher Education Institutions and towards an ever-growing number of school-based providers. While the idea of teaching as a research-based profession is increasingly evident in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, it seems that England, at least in respect of the political rhetoric, recent reforms and explicit definitions, is fixed on a contrastingly divergent trajectory towards the idea of teaching as a craft-based occupation, with a concomitant emphasis on a (re)turn to the practical. It is recommended that research is urgently needed to plot these divergences and to examine their consequences for teacher education, educational research and professionalism.

Fabric formwork – prototype to typology

When developmental vernacular practice is telescoped into industrial activity, the role played by construction workers in the honing of a craft is rapidly bypassed. An almost political act is required to maintain the contribution that the hand makes to the uniformity of result that is demanded by the standard classification of typologies of building and technique. Research into fabric formwork techniques conducted by Alan Chandler utilises the flexibility of the concrete mould to explore the meaning of the making ‘process’ and the workers’ role in relation to the formal ‘result’. Chandler’s ‘Wall One’ exemplifies the exploratory prototype and its potential for variety and the trace of the hand in making. The shift to a mass production typology involved in realising the 325,000 square-metre Heatherwick studio project in Shanghai, presented the problem of how to orchestrate the fabric into a fully industrialised process. Part of the research then became how to make the shift from play to profit - and can anything of craft survive the transition into the international development marketplace? Through managing the inherent variety available to the fabric itself, a fabric based formwork solution for realising a building at the scale of a landscape offered the Chinese form work maker the opportunity to be present within the results of a fully industrialised process – a ghost in the machine.