Integrating theory and practice in ITE (including perceptions of practicum) Despite having a deep affiliation with school teaching (explored below in Section 4.3.4), Julie also

recognised a tension with the practice student teachers would experience in schools: ‘a real tension

between telling them what I’m telling them they should be doing, and how important it is, and then

they go into school, and the teacher’s too busy to do it’. This does accentuate a distinction between

the two fields through recognition of different habitus. She repeated this idea a number of times throughout the interviews, referring to ‘a kind of balancing act between what we want them to do and

what they will do in school’. This correlates with Taylor’s (2008) finding that teacher educators’

practice includes “compensat[ing] for any (real or perceived) deficiencies of school placements”, and the suggestion from one of the participants in her study that “however much you do with students before they are in school it all goes out of the window”(p75). In common with the studies by Bullock (2009) and Ellis (2010), Julie also observed that student teachers view their experience in school as most important; also that ‘they separate school and university’, which is acknowledged as a risk by Fisher et al(2010). This suggests a separation of practice from ‘theory’, which could be expected to be part of the ITE habitus at university.

However, Julie acknowledged that she was ‘quite light on theory’ within her sessions, preferring instead to think in terms of providing ‘some kind of context or background’ or ‘reasoning why we do

things’. So, she explained that the structure of the observed session was ‘thinking about it, and discussion about it, and then…actually having a go at it’. As was apparent in this session, Julie

lot of practical trying things out that would…work in the classroom’. This was reflected in further

comments about ‘balancing theory with practice’, and ‘we do…theory and then do the practice’; however, the example she provided was not of ‘Theory with a capital T’, which may indicate, as Swennen et al’s (2008) study found, a lack of theoretical knowledge. Her comment, that ‘I think we can overdo theory, and…I feel a bit bad saying that, ‘cause in a university we should be quite theory- based perhaps’, might indicate this. She did, however, make a distinction between theory and music theory: reporting that ‘they get the theory about how people learn’ in the (general) Professional Development course, she added ‘I’ll touch on that, but…, I want it to be more about how people learn in music, so I try to keep it very specific to the subject, and there is theory that comes into that

obviously’.

4.3.3.3Recognition of distinctions between pedagogy and meta-pedagogy

Although during the stimulated recall interview Julie conceded that ‘obviously this is not a music

lesson in school’, there were occasions during the session when the boundaries between first and

second order habitus appeared blurred. This was highlighted during the stimulated recall interview through comments such as ‘I think maybe making it composition rather than performance in that task

threw them’ and ‘I was trying to push them to the next level on that Bloom’s taxonomy, if you like’. Also, in referring to a student teacher who had requested a ‘theoretical explanation’ of an activity which was being modelled for use in the (school) classroom, ‘she wanted the information, and you

don’t need it’.

It appeared to be the case that, when Julie talked of teaching in the interviews, she did not acknowledge distinctions between the subject content of music teaching and of teaching to teach music – and therefore between first and second order habitus. She did, however, refer to the process of teaching music, rather than learning music:

I’m not teaching [student teachers] about music. But first and foremost, I’m trying to

show them how to do that. I have to kind of turn it on its head, and say ‘OK, I’ll show you this activity, but instead of you doing it to learn about music, you’re doing it to look

at the processes you have to go through to learn about music. So, …it’s not looking at

what you’ve learnt musically at the end of it, …it’s what you’ve learned about working

on this activity in a group, or as a musician, to see –it’s about the processes rather than

the outcome’.

Beyond this, there were limited suggestions of any distinct form of meta-pedagogy, which may be further evidence that her habitus had not expanded to fit the new field.

4.3.3.4Theoretical underpinnings of meta-pedagogical practice

Julie expressed beliefs about the challenging nature of learning to teach, which was why she emphasised the need for student teachers to acknowledge this, and to ‘try things out and to…get

things wrong’. These beliefs may have been linked to the tacit knowledge she had acquired as a

teacher educator, but did not appear to be attached to any particular (formal) theory. This could be seen to be borne out by the statement ‘I don’t know if there’s any one place that I would go, that I would know where to go to find out something generic about teacher education. No.’, and subsequent references to the content, rather than the pedagogy, of ITE.

4.3.4 The impact of former school teacher identity