Challenging assumptions and making progress

Our role as teacher educators in higher education (HE) is two-fold. First, we need to educate trainee teachers at their level, and second, we need to educate them about different pedagogies to use in their own classroom with children. Using the community of enquiry or Philosophy for Children (P4C) approach with students can enable us to do both; the student is engaging at their level, while experiencing how the process works as a participant, before going on to consider how to apply this in their classrooms. This approach to teacher training in ITT follows one that was also advocated several years ago by Matthew Lipman.