Place, (cyber) space and being: the role of student voice in informing the un-situated learning of trainee teachers

This article explores the ambiguities and ontological insecurities of pre-service trainee teachers as they prepare to enter training for work in the post-compulsory sector in the UK. Adopting a contextual sensitivity which explores the role of location in teachers’ professional learning, it makes problematic the anxieties and un-situated learning of trainees as they begin to boundary-shift professional identities at the very start of a PGCE programme. Contextualised by the hyper-rapid and intensified spatiality of teaching, learning and training in east London, the article explores the polycontexual realities of entering a newly drawn professional field in a global metropolis. Trainees’ identity formation and lived experiences are captured by means of a digital ethnographic approach. The adoption of student voice research – as a teaching and reflection tool – is tempered against trainee teachers’ own uncertain, (re)forming and emerging reflective voices captured through an ethnographic sensibility.

Citation:
Kidd, W., (2012) ‘Place, (cyber) space and being: the role of student voice in informing the un-situated learning of trainee teachers’, Research in Secondary Teacher Education, 2(1), pp. 3-7.