Management and engineering education in the 1950s and 1960s

The career destiny of many graduate engineers is in industry. Quite how well prepared they were for that career became a matter of political importance in the late 1950s and early 1960s as the issue of Britain's relatively poor economic performance grew in salience. This article looks at this preparation with particular reference to management training. It examines the attitudes of those parties most interested in engineering education ‐ the government, industry, the engineering institutions and the educators themselves. All of these saw management training as being part of the formation of at least a portion of professional engineers at some stage in their career. But there was no general agreement between them about what this should consist of or when it should be provided. At the same time broader changes in engineering education were taking place which cut across and to some extent militated against attempts to enhance the role of management training. The result, it is argued, is that by the end of the 1960s little progress had been achieved.

Reflections of professional practice: using electronic discourse analysis networks (EDANs) to examine embedded business emails

Emails have become a central genre in business communication, reflecting both how people communicate and how they go about their professional practices. This chapter examines embedded business emails as reflections of the professional practices of the regulatory and policy department of a multinational based in London, UK. It argues that the nature of online communication in international organisations, with its high levels of intertextuality and interdiscursivity, requires multidimensional analytical approaches that are capable of capturing its complexity and dynamics. To this end, the chapter introduces electronic discourse analysis networks (EDANs) as one example of such approaches. It begins with a brief review of the literature that has informed the study reported on here before it discusses EDANs as its analytical framework. Using a group of embedded emails and a number of networked data sets, the chapter shows how EDANs can be used to further our understanding of professional online communication.

Ulster PD Scheme: Using e-portfolios and professional conversations to evidence recognition claims

Vicky Davies and Sarah Maguire are Professional Development Managers at the University of Ulster. They have many years of experience in delivering and assessing Higher Education Academy claims for recognition via accredited provision for new teaching staff and post-graduate students. More recently they led the development of the University of Ulster’s Professional Development Scheme http://www.ulster.ac.uk/centrehep/pds/ . The core elements of the PD Scheme are the production of an e-portfolio and an assessed professional conversation. This workshop will explore the learning they have acquired through developing this process and piloting it with applicants. You will have the opportunity to discuss this and to identify any transferability to your own practice.

Teacher educators: proposing new professional development models within an English further education context

At a time of increasing public and government focus on the quality of teacher education, little is known about the professional development needs of those who teach teachers in further education (FE). Yet they are crucial players. Efforts are intensifying across a significant number of countries to promote the professional development of teacher educators, but there is little support for new or experienced practitioners and no substantive professional standards regarding this role in English FE. This has an impact on the professional practice and career trajectories of teacher educators themselves. Based on a series of semi-structured interviews, an online survey and focus groups, this mixed-methods study uses a sequential exploratory design. The study captures the voices of English FE teacher educators who identified mentoring, induction and a choice of continuous professional development sessions as important strategies to improve the effectiveness of their role over time. This article will propose flexible models of professional development, following an analysis of new and experienced teacher educators’ needs in FE in England. The article recommends that new professional standards for teacher educators could be written collaboratively by practitioners, within a policy and institutional framework which supports the scholarship and research requirements of teacher educators.