Teacher Preparation in Scotland

Rachel Shanks

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839094828
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrerausbildung

This book charts the origins and development of teacher preparation in Scotland from 1872 onwards, covering key milestones in policy and practice, and looking ahead to the future.
Rachel Shanks, in this edited collection, brings together a narrative of the drivers influencing teacher preparation in Scotland across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, answering fundamental questions: How has the role of universities in teacher preparation and the acceptance of education as an academic discipline changed over time? What have been the impact of policy changes such as Curriculum for Excellence and the Donaldson Report 'Teaching Scotland's Future'? What role does partnership-working play in the preparation of teachers in Scotland?
The book includes contributions on the historical development of teacher preparation and the current pathways into teaching which include undergraduate degrees, the one year Professional Graduate Diploma in Education, Online and Distance Learning and Masters routes. There are individual chapters on the topics of school placement, teacher induction, Catholic teacher preparation, the Episcopal Teaching Training College, and the preparation of English language teachers. Concluding with suggestions on how teacher preparation may develop in the future, this book is a truly comprehensive record of the historic, current and potential evolution of teacher preparation in Scotland.

Chapter 1

Teacher Preparation in Scotland, 1872–1920

Moira Hulme

Abstract

This chapter examines the inauguration of the university study of Education in Scotland and its relation to teacher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The chapter outlines moves to establish Education as a disciplinary field in higher education and the junctures at which this movement aligns with and is in tension with concurrent moves to advance teaching as a profession. Academisation and professionalisation are the twin poles of this debate. This is not a parochial or obsolete debate. The place of teacher preparation in higher education has been the focus of sustained discussion across Anglophone nations. Three examples – the inauguration of chairs and lectureships, the governance of teacher education and deliberation on the content and purpose of a degree in Education – are used to help explain the apparent paradox between the historic place of education in Scottish culture and identity and the relatively recent full involvement of Scotland's universities in the professional preparation of teachers. Investigating the activities of the first academic community of educationists in Scotland may help to understand continuing struggles over jurisdiction and authority in this contested and yet neglected field.

Keywords: Universitisation; academicisation; professionalisation; paideutics; advocacy; educational politics

Introduction

This chapter explores the inauguration of the university study of education in Scotland and its relation to teacher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The term ‘universitisation’ refers to the movement of teacher education from monotechnic teachers' colleges to universities. Full universitisation did not take place in Scotland until the late 1990s and has been subject to reversal elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In the account presented here, attention extends beyond ‘Acts and facts’ to the moves through which interests were mobilised and temporary settlements achieved. Thus, universitisation is not approached as the inevitable outcome of a ‘march of progress’ but the result of purposive activity of educationists competing to make space for their work vis-à-vis other interests. Three illustrative cases are used to animate the politics of educational change. The first of these considers efforts to establish chairs of education in Scotland's ancient universities. The second addresses prospects for collaboration in the publicly funded national system of education between local government (Provincial Committees), the Scottish Education Department (SED) and the universities following the creation of Provincial Committees in the university seats of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St. Andrews in 1905. The final case revisits debate around the aims and content of university awards for intending teachers (Literate in Arts, 1883; Edinburgh Diploma, 1886; Baccalaureus Paedogogiae, 1917)

The parameters of this enquiry preclude adequate attention to less visible but important issues of gender, social class, region and denomination. Attention is directed principally to the university connection. Uncertificated teachers, women teachers and elementary school teachers are underrepresented. ⁱ The range of primary and secondary sources consulted includes the records of University Court and Senate and the University Calendar and graduate rolls held by the archives and Special Collections of the universities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St. Andrews. The correspondence of John Miller Dow Meiklejohn was accessed at St. Andrews and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Matters of governance were examined using the records of the National and Provincial Committees for the Training of Teachers held by Strathclyde University Special Collections. Correspondence of the SED was consulted at the National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. The publications of the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) were consulted at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow. It is acknowledged that the retention of the above records forms part of a process of institutionalisation that renders some aspects more visible than others.

The Founding of Chairs in Education

James Pillans, Professor of Humanity University of Edinburgh, was an early advocate of university involvement in teacher preparation in Scotland. Pillans sought to position Scotland within a broader Western European movement to professionalise teaching and to institutionalise and academise the study of Education. From 1834, Pillans petitioned for the creation of seminaries for teachers and lectureships in didactics at the four Scottish universities – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and St. Andrews – and the institution of a chair in Education at Edinburgh University. Pillans (1834, p. 500) claimed

…the institution of seminaries for teachers is not only an indispensable accompaniment, but a preliminary condition, in any attempt that may be made to introduce a system of National Education. (Pillans, 1834)

Following the Education (Scotland) Act 1872, Simon Somerville Laurie, a former assistant to Pillans, was quick to see new opportunities for university involvement in training teachers for the national system of elementary education. ⁱⁱ Laurie's evidence to the 1872 Endowed Schools (Colebrook) Commission contained a strategy to combine university and denominational training college instruction. ⁱⁱⁱ This ambition was not without challenge. Any lowering of university entrance standards to accommodate training college students would be contentious. The four universities had limited collective capacity to meet the demand for trained teachers across a national system, and many school boards preferred to staff elementary schools through the pupil–teacher system, including Edinburgh. In September 1872, Laurie wrote to Principal John Campbell Shairp of United College St. Andrews to propose that the Education Committee of the Church of Scotland establish a normal school at St. Andrews to teach extra-university subjects. ^iv In 1873, Shairp petitions Francis Sandford, Secretary of State for Education and Lyon Playfair MP ^v to request full consideration of the interests of Scotland's universities in regulations for the examination of schoolmasters. ^vi Playfair had proposed a scheme for a teachers' diploma as the 1870 Education Bill was being shaped. ^vii Principal Shairp unites with Principal Tulloch (St. Mary's College, St. Andrews) to travel to London to press their case. Following a series of deputations to Westminster, agreement was reached in 1876 to found inaugural Education chairs in both Edinburgh and St. Andrews. ^viii

The first chairs were made possible by modest endowments from the bequest of the Rev. Dr Andrew Bell. The Bell bequest had served to support the establishment of elementary schools in Scotland. When this need was overtaken by the 1872 Act, a sum of £120,000 was redirected to 12 endowments of £10,000; one of which was allotted to the founding of a chair. ^ix Bell had bequeathed funds to the University of Edinburgh to support an occasional lectureship on his system of instruction (the Madras or monitorial system), and the trustees now sought to secure a chair. ^x A successful case was also made for St. Andrews. Bell was born in the town and had attended United College. Following the 1843 disruption, there were at least two denominational Training Colleges (United Free Church and Established Church of Scotland) in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow but no similar provision had been made for the St. Andrews–Dundee region. ^xi The decision to further divide the £10,000 endowment – £6,000 was awarded to Edinburgh and £4,000 to St. Andrews – was to have lengthy and deleterious consequences for the status and security of the first chairs in Education.

Deliberation on the role of a chair in Education at St. Andrews is recorded in correspondence between John Cooke acting on behalf of the Bell Trustees and Principal Shairp between 1874 and 1876. ^xii The trustees sought a course of instruction in the ‘Theory, History and Practice of Education, including the best methods of school organisation and instruction’. The trustees are clear that the proposed Chair should have the ‘opportunity of giving practical instruction to his students in the art of teaching and school management’. As a condition of the endowment, the trustees held the right to nominate the first chair at both universities. Control was to pass to the Crown when an anticipated supplementary endowment from Parliament was made and to the University Court thereafter. Simon Somerville Laurie was appointed the first Chair of Education at the University of Edinburgh and held the post – for which he had long lobbied – until his retirement in 1903. ^xiii The first professor of Education at St. Andrews was John Miller Dow Meiklejohn, who held the post until his death in 1902.

In a lecture at the Bloomsbury-based College of Preceptors in April 1872, Meiklejohn had made a case for a university course of training. He argued for a code of professional conduct, a career structure that encouraged lifelong learning, and the development of a defensible professional knowledge base (Meiklejohn, 1872). He was steadfast in his conviction that whilst teaching provided preparation for all professions, it was not yet a profession in terms of its own knowledge base and scientific method. In his inaugural address, he spoke approvingly of German education, especially Froebel, the New Education Fellowship, children's gardens and the importance of play. He interpreted the mission of the inaugural Chair as the liberal cultivation of the teacher. In a period of increasing regulation of teachers' work in the publicly funded elementary schools, he sought ‘to prevent a noble occupation from sinking into a monotonous round of dreary labour’ (Meiklejohn, 1876, cited in Gordon, 1980, p. 42).

It was a further 17 years before the chairs founded at St. Andrews and Edinburgh were followed by the first university lecturers in Education at Aberdeen and Glasgow. Joseph Ogilvie was appointed on a part-time basis in Aberdeen University in 1893 and David Ross at the University of Glasgow in 1894 (see Appendix). Ogilvie was formerly the Rector of the Church of Scotland Training College in Aberdeen. Ross was Principal of the Church of Scotland Training College, Glasgow. The institution of a ‘Paideutic Chair’ was fiercely opposed in Glasgow. The first chair in Education, held by Stanley Nisbet, was not established until 1951. The first chair in Education at Aberdeen University was John Nisbet, his brother, appointed in 1963.

The Universities have nothing to do with teachers save to give them, as citizens who seek it, higher instruction, to ascertain that they are thoroughly educated and so qualified for a degree, and thereby fit to enter on teaching as on any other profession. Method in theory, and above all in practice, no university can teach…Experience under an experienced teacher is the best preparation. (John Young, President of the Educational Institute of Scotland, 1893, p. 5).

The meagre endowment and unsecured government grant, combined with ambiguity over the status of education as a university subject, placed the Bell chair at St. Andrews in an inauspicious position. Meiklejohn had no dedicated rooms for most of his 26 years' tenure. Despite petitioning for a classroom in the upper storey of Divinity College, fitted to accommodate 40 students as part lecture room and part model secondary school room, no dedicated teaching spaces were allocated until 1897. ^xiv Meiklejohn often had to seek classroom accommodation in the East wing of St. Salvator College. ^xv As Knox (1950, p. 35) notes, for 20 years ‘The professor had either to obtain the loan of a classroom or lecture in his own house (which he frequently did)’. ^xvi

Difficulty in securing an adequate salary for Meiklejohn is a constant theme of his long tenure. In January 1877, a deputation to London comprised of Meiklejohn, Playfair and Shairp was formed to

…wait upon the Government and urge the propriety of carrying out their former promise of granting a sum of £200 per annum towards the better endowment of the chair of Education. ^xvii

Recommendation 49 of the Scottish Universities Commission of 1878 stated that professorial salaries should be set at a minimum standard of £600 per annum. However, the Commission failed to make any special recommendation in favour of the Chair of Education at St. Andrews. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Series Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Series Editor
• About the Authors
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations or Acronyms
• Introduction: Development of Teacher Preparation in Scotland
• Chapter 1 Teacher Preparation in Scotland, 1872–1920
• Chapter 2 Re-shaping Teacher Preparation in Scotland: Curricular, Institutional and Professional Changes, 1920–2000
• Chapter 3 Teacher Preparation Post-devolution, 1999–2007
• Chapter 4 The Donaldson Report, Partnership and Teacher Education
• Chapter 5 Bachelor's Degrees in Education
• Chapter 6 Professional Graduate Diploma in Education
• Chapter 7 School Placement: Problematising Notions of the ‘Good’ Placement
• Chapter 8 Online and Distance Teacher Preparation
• Chapter 9 Masters-level Teacher Preparation
• Chapter 10 Teacher Induction
• Chapter 11 Catholic Teacher Preparation
• Chapter 12 A Concise History of the Episcopal Teacher Training College in Scotland
• Chapter 13 English Language Teacher Preparation
• Conclusion: Caledonian Teacher Education Futures
• Index