Essay Cert

“I seem to remember going with quite a thick pile of paper home, and I had no idea what I was doing’: assessment, and the literacy practices of trainee PCET teachers Jonathan Tummons
Lancaster University
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This is work in progress, and comments or feedback are welcome. Please do not quote from or cite this paper without the permission of the author.
Introduction
For many teachers within the post-compulsory education and training (PCET) sector, teacher training provides a first experience of higher education. For lecturers who are already graduates, teacher training provides an experience of work and study within a genre or academic discipline that can be more or less different to one that has been previously studied. Such teacher training tends to be delivered by the HE sector according to one of two models. The first model, pre-service, is the less wide-spread model of delivery, involving a year of full-time study punctuated by work placement, typically at a further education college. The second model, in-service, is larger, and involves studying part-time towards a teaching qualification whilst in paid employment, normally taking up to two years to complete. In-service programmes are delivered in universities, and in further education colleges on a franchise basis. Almost four-fifths of
PCET teacher training provision follows this model.
My research is focussed on a PGCE/CertEd programme that is franchised from a university on the North of England, and delivered to a network of FE colleges in the North of England. The research that this paper rests on was carried out amongst a year one part-time student group at one FE college.

Theoretical framework
This paper rests on two theoretical strands. The first is the concept of learning as socially situated within communities of practice: learning and knowing are aspects of broader social relations amongst people in the world and learning, through the shared negotiation of meaning, is located

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