There has been a huge increase in the number of Teaching Assistants (TAs) working in UK schools in recent decades, meaning that most teachers now share their classroom with at least one other adult. Despite this, there has been little systematic or structured research into such a key relationship in the education system. This thesis aims to address this by exploring teachers' and TAs' experiences of working together in primary schools. This is an exploratory piece of research which was conducted from a critical realist perspective. To find out more about the dynamics at play in this working relationship, semi-structured individual interviews were carried out with five teachers and five TAs across two primary schools. The data was subsequently analysed using thematic analysis. This illuminated six themes: 'power dynamic'; 'occupying different spaces'; 'interpersonal and intrapersonal factors'; 'systemic factors'; 'nature of the relationship'; and 'reflection on the relationship'. Each theme is described in detail and presented visually in a thematic map. The relationship between the themes is also discussed. The theme of 'power dynamic' in particular was found to have an effect on the other themes. The results are discussed in relation to previous literature, as well as theoretical frameworks relating to power, psychodynamic theory, and attachment theory. The strengths and limitations of this research are outlined alongside suggestions for future research. Potential implications for practice are then highlighted. For Educational Psychologists (EPs) this includes having both teachers and TAs present during consultations about students, facilitating 3supervision groups for teachers and TAs, and delivering training for these staff members on how to work together effectively. The thesis ends with self-reflections on the research journey.

This research explored the experiences of three secondary headteachers and the way in which role conception, informed by unconscious processes, functions as a mechanism for managing the stresses and demands of said role. The research was underpinned by a psychosocial framework and used an explicitly psychoanalytic epistemology. The research used semi-structured interviews to explore influential biographical factors, which were then explored using a psychoanalytic lens. This produced a series of themes used to thematically analyse their accounts of their jobs and the stresses and strains within it. The ensuing analysis revealed that the unconscious patterns, implicit in their narratives, influenced both role conception and the way they perceived and related to the organisations they led. In discussing these findings, links were made to relevant psychoanalytic and systems-psychodynamic theory; especially Bion's work on containment and alpha function, as well as Rice's seminal thinking about the way in which the unconscious influences role acquisition and task engagement. Further applications to both theories are suggested. A central argument is that working with school leaders has a systemic impact on schools and school populations, something well within the remit and consultative skill-set of Educational Psychologists. This research concludes that unconscious patterns and processes are involved in the management of stress and anxiety and that this is done through unconsciously "shaping" the way headteachers conceive of the role and the schools they lead.

This thesis explores the stories of three women. They are different stories connected by experiences of first or second generation migration, ambiguous identities, belonging and otherness. I also connect the stories as I am one of the women, my cousin is another and the third is my friend. My interest is both personal and professional as this research serves both my personal interest in our lives and careers, and my professional concern as a practitioner about the development of career counselling practice to meet the needs of clients. The search for and interpretation of meaning (Bruner,1990) informed the methodology and analysis of this work. I do not seek a ‘truthful account’ of our stories, accurate in their telling, but a ‘truth seeking’ narrative, what memories and stories mean to the teller. The methodology is auto/biographical. I began the research where my thoughts and questions began, with my own story. This is neither autobiographical nor biographical research, it is an interplay between the two. The ‘/’ both connects and divides my story and those of my participants (Merrill and West, 2009). I reflected upon images, memories, collage and discussion about my own life and career. The stories of my co-participants, gathered through loosely structured interview and using artefacts, poems and family histories, are rich in themselves but their intersection with my own story is also part of the heuristic nature of the methodology. The interviews, lasting one to two hours, were recorded and fully transcribed, and those transcripts shared with my co-participants for accuracy. A second interview, after a period of reflection on the transcription was conducted with one participant. In this follow-up interview, questions were shaped by events and elements in the story that were of particular interest and were then able to be explored further. With the other participant a full weekend of discussion followed the interview, which brought in other family members, reflections and stories. The analysis of the material is holistic and considers the ethnography, process and Gestalt of our interactions (Merrill and West, 2009). The meaning in these lives and careers is a co-construction from themes within each story and also the shared meaning between them. The three stories present windows into very different lives and careers, but also into recognisable and shared struggles and resolutions. Although personal agency is at the heart of each story, this is set within and shaped by the family, history and communities in which each of us grew. The work of Jung (1938), Adler (1923), Frosh (1991) and later of Savickas (2011) provided some theoretical ‘heavy lifting’ in understanding the relationship between personal identities and career. Each is invited into the thesis to comment upon and to illuminate the processes at work in this shared space. They help to understand the relationship between the threads and themes in these stories and how they create a tapestry of meaning for the teller. Insights into the three stories offer a critique of the dominant models of professional practice in career counselling. Such critique follows a now well established paradigm shift in career theory in response to the changing nature of work and of social structures (Bauman, 2000; 2005: Frosh, 1991) and an increased interest in contextualism in career counselling (Richardson, 2002). Social constructionist theories and models include Savickas’ (2011) Career Construction Theory in which he identified the significance of pre-occupations as threads that accompany us through career and life, connecting the plots, characters and scripts into a story that in the telling has meaning and purpose. Pre-occupations in our three stories were identified from themes in the interviews and in other material and the pre-occupation that united us was the clarification and construction of our identities. Sometimes it was a clear and painful roar and sometimes a quiet question hidden within micronarratives that were re-membered in our conversations. Career provided us with a stage whereon identity was more or less resolved and reconstructed. The significance of the relationship between personal and career identity emerges as the key argument of this thesis and a counter narrative for career counselling. It provides an alternative to neoliberal, individualistic, outcome driven practice (Irving, 2013), and has at its heart an acknowledgement of the relationship between who we believe ourselves to be and what we do in our lives. I conclude that such a counter narrative must be illustrated first within the development of the curriculum for the training and education of careers practitioners. It must also be reflected in the development of models of career theory and counselling. In this way it will be secured within the practice of careers professionals for future generations. On a broader level there is much that the exploration into the relationship between personal and career identity can illuminate outside the specific context of career counselling. Social and political concerns about radicalisation and the construction of identity in migrant communities may be illuminated by the insights offered by this thesis. Moreover as identities become more mixed and complex in ‘liquid modern’ worlds (Bauman, 2000) this thesis offers a further understanding of the scaffolding that is needed for identity construction and life planning, when traditional structures are hard to find.

Christian teachers of Personal social health education (PSHE) can be conflicted when confronted with sensitive and controversial issues in their professional practice. Concerns include unprofessional conduct, exercising undue influence of their personal values and beliefs on students and being untrue to their faith. These can lead to uncertainty in negotiating areas of conscience and controversy. This life history study situated within the south east of England was used to illuminate the complexities which abound when operating within a wider milieu of perceived marginalisation of the Christian faith through advancing secularisation and liberalism. These tensions are reflected in the curriculum, policy frameworks and legal documents and have implications for teachers’ personal values, Christian faith and professional practice. Semi-structured questionnaires were administered to 13 PSHE teachers and analysed for emergent themes, borrowing language from thematic, ethical and theological analysis. The research illuminates insights into a wider context of faith in professional life. It demonstrates the way teachers are in transition in these conflicts, yet understanding faith as a holistic quality. Findings show that the approaches that teachers adopt to the interpretation and application of faith in personal life influence how faith is integrated professionally. The conflicts confronted, reflect responses of resilience, compliance and rebellion, while some teachers remain unchanged in their positions. Analysis of the data suggested that discreetly integrating faith in practice is a coping strategy some teachers employ. My study suggests that silence can be a price to pay for faith, balancing courageous restraint with conflicting compromises and professional hypocrisy. The research captures teachers in transition located in professional practice obligations, ethical and theological positions as they negotiate and navigate the place of their Christian faith and personal values with students’ rights, freedoms and autonomy.

Human Rights Education (HRE) for Palestinian refugees in Gaza Strip is integrated in a context where history, culture and collective memory are priorities in the local discourses of right-hood and justice. Palestinian learners are citizens of a non-recognized imagined community, existing through the processes of collective remembering, and the local discourses on rights. This study examines UNRWA’s special HRE curriculum for Palestinian refugees in Gaza Strip. I analyse UNRWA’s HRE policy and a sample of secondary level textbooks. This results in forming my original contribution to the field of human rights and HRE in a context of conflict. That is giving voice to a “collective” counter-hegemonic response to UNRWA’s model of HRE, which marginalizes the local discourse of right-hood. Collective, not in the sense of generalization, but in recognition of Palestinians’ legal and political status, which is a major obstacle for human rights and HRE in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For this, I use qualitative document analysis and a dialectical-relational approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the materials in relation to the wider geo-political and socio-cultural context. The research outcomes reveal that UNRWA promotes a discourse of Human Rights, Conflict Resolution and Tolerance (HRCRT) through a model of HRE which promotes a standardized culture of human rights. The study suggests that, at the level of conflict resolution, UNRWA’s discourse of HRCRT overlooks vital political and legal issues that hinder HRE in Gaza Strip. The curriculum is highly de-politicized and knowledge-based that it prescribes a de-contextualized curriculum, which represents the world as it “ought to be” rather than what “it is”. Therefore, the study argues that the way forward for HRE resides in directly addressing the complex components of the conflict and acknowledging the importance of the local discourses and collective memory for HRE for Palestinians.

The focus of this thesis is the case study of a single, selective school aiming to challenge students to engage in what it has called research-based learning, a pedagogy framed as an alternative to traditional approaches common in most secondary schools. Using a critical realist lens, the thesis aims to develop an understanding of how sixth form students at the school conceptualise their learning in challenging real-world research projects. It presents rich descriptions of practices within the school, based mainly on the intrinsic case study approach of Stake and the open evaluative approach of Bassey, revealing four key outcomes around areas related to student autonomy, the efficacy of different kinds of learner support, student motivation and the achievement of real-world professionalism. First, it reveals that student autonomy can be liberating but also highly challenging and disorientating. Second, it shows that students in autonomous roles generally conceptualise the minimal scaffolding of the school as positive, but also that some students from less open learning environments may need extra support. Third, it demonstrates that students’ motivations are often blends of extrinsic and intrinsic elements, showing subtle understandings of their roles as learners inside and outside conventional curricula. Fourth, it reveals that students vary in their achievement of real-world professionalism within communities of practice, but that some appear to carry out genuinely innovative work that goes beyond merely peripheral involvement. Emerging from these outcomes, the study finds successes in the school’s resistance to conventional pedagogy, but argues there are also ambiguities within its cultural context. It also contributes to the literature on transformative learning, revealing how the transformation at the core of Bhaskar’s critical realism can be seen alongside Mezirow’s idea of personal growth to indicate ways in which learners undergo change and simultaneously generate change in institutions.

This study provides new insights concerning the development of professional identity in instrumental teachers working in a range of professional contexts in the UK. The analysis shows the extent to which musicians are embedded in the culture of instrumental music education, suggesting that aspects of the field, including high levels of autonomy, are more closely related to professional identity than notions of hierarchy and status. The understandings of instrumental teachers’ lives and identities revealed in this research could be used to inform and enhance existing approaches to careers in music and contribute to career preparation in undergraduate music students. Using an explanatory sequential research design to combine data from a national survey of instrumental teachers with findings from individual case study interviews and one focus group, the research prioritises the lived experience of participants in generating understanding of professional lives and identities in this context. An analysis using Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, field and capital examines the ways in which individuals negotiate the field of instrumental music education, revealing a complex and nuanced approach to professional identity developed through practical experience in this context. Instrumental teaching in the UK is characterised by a lack of regulation and curriculum, where individuals are able to teach with no training or qualification (Swanwick 1994, Woodford 2002). The literature suggests conflict in instrumental teacher identity where individuals prefer to identify as musicians or performers rather than teachers, attributing these choices to the lower professional status of instrumental teaching in the hierarchy of professional roles in music (Mills 2004b, Roberts 2007). This research however suggests that expressions of identity in this context relate to specific meanings associated with the role and identity of professional musician for individuals involved in portfolio careers involving teaching and highlights the need to revise existing notions of the professional musician to acknowledge contemporary careers in music.

This research is motivated by the need for a better understanding of the nature of student-centred interactions in university settings. Although there is now a considerable amount of research into written academic English, studies of spoken academic English, particularly of student-centred, disciplinary-specific events, are still relatively few in comparison. This work aims to go some way towards redressing the balance. The study provides a description of a variety of linguistic features of one type of speech event, problem-based learning sessions (PBLs), within the context of a postgraduate programme in Medical Genetics. PBLs are underpinned by a very clear pedagogy driving their incorporation into academic programmes: through a cycle of tutorials, individual research and presentations, students develop content knowledge and the skills thought essential for the professional practitioner. Although common within the field of medicine, there has been relatively little research into how the discipline and pedagogy are realised linguistically. This study analyses a specially compiled corpus of five complete PBL cycles, each with two stages. It comprises over 12 hours of speech, approximately 115,000 words and is searchable as a whole and for each stage. By applying a variety of approaches, including Conversation Analysis (CA), Corpus Linguistics, and aspects of Discourse Analysis, this allows for a more detailed and fine-grained analysis of student discourse than one approach alone. Applying CA, the study identifies features of the overall organisational structure and the different patterns of talk found in each stage. Academic functions common to the stage two presentations are also identified. The corpus-based analysis investigates three specific linguistic areas: keyword analysis is used to explore vocabulary as a marker of the discipline and approach, personal pronouns as markers of engagement, and the structural and discourse functions of lexical bundles. The investigation into how the interactions unfold and the consideration of keywords reflect the discipline and underlying epistemology of PBL sessions. Clear differences in the frequency and use of personal pronouns and lexical bundles are evident in each stage, indicating that both the mode (spoken) and the nature of each speech event (highly interactive exchanges or presentations) affect linguistic choices. This study of a bespoke corpus provides an in-depth analysis of a disciplinary-specific, student-centred speaking event. This may be useful for EAP teachers and task and materials designers working with students on pre-sessional programmes who need academic language support. Methodologically it adds to the growing number of studies taking a multidimensional approach (i.e. in methodology and focus) to understanding spoken academic discourse.

This study is concerned with a neglected aspect of the study of L2 English writing: the processes which teachers engage in when rating essays written by their own students for class practice, not exams, with no imposed rating/assessment scheme. It draws on writing assessment process research literature, although, apart from Huot (1993) and Wolfe et al. (1998), most work has been done on scoring writing in exam conditions using a set scoring rubric, where all raters rate the same essays. Eight research questions were answered from data gathered from six teachers, with a wide range of relevant training, but all teaching university pre-sessional or equivalent classes. Instruments used were general interviews, think aloud reports while rating their own students' essays, and follow up immediate retrospective interviews. Extensive qualitative coding was undertaken using NVivo. It was found that the teachers did not vary much in the core features that they claimed to recognise in general as typical of ‘good writing’, but varied more in what criteria they highlighted in practice when rating essays, though all used a form of analytic rating. Two thirds of the separate criteria coded were used by all the teachers but there were differences in preference for higher versus lower level criteria. Teachers also differed a great deal in the scales they used to sum up their evaluations, ranging from IELTS scores to just evaluative adjectives, and most claimed to use personal criteria, with concern for the consequential pedagogical value of their rating for the students more than achieving a test-like reliable score. A wide range of information sources was used to support and justify the rating decisions made, beyond the essay text, including background information about the writer and classmates, and teacher prior instruction. Teacher comments also evidenced concern with issues arguably not central to rating itself but rather exploring implications for the teacher and writer. Similar to Cumming et al. (2002), three broad stages of the rating process were identified: reading and exploiting information such as the writer’s name and the task prompt as well as perhaps skimming the text; reading and rereading parts of the essay, associated with interpretation and judgment; achievement of a summary judgment. In detail, however, each teacher had their own individual style of reading and of choice and use of criteria.

This doctoral study examines the everyday experiences of the Learning Mentor, a support role introduced into English state schools fifteen years ago. It was conceived as part of a broader New Labour policy agenda which sought to resolve the relationship between ‘risk’ and ‘social exclusion’ as the root cause of many social problems. According to the official narrative, Learning Mentors were part of a wider initiative to ‘eliminate and never excuse’ underachievement in the most deprived parts of England. Their primary task of ‘removing barriers to learning’ was premised on the notion of offering a different type of pupil-support from that which already existed in schools, being described in official accounts as a “professional friend” and “challenger of assumptions”. The role can also be understood as part of a transformative agenda which elevated ‘low level’ workers to paraprofessional status across a range of public services. The thesis is premised on two key areas: first, how this type of occupational domain has been historically constructed and continues to evolve through policy transformations which are enacted at the local level. Second, how the work activities and practices associated with these and other school support workers, expose issues around ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. The methodological approach was informed by Institutional Ethnography in that in order to establish how the work of Learning Mentors was practised, viewed and understood within the school, the researcher undertook to gather and document the work knowledges of several groups: firstly the mentors themselves, followed by children and young people as pupils; teaching and support staff, and middle and senior managers. In tracing the genealogy of Learning Mentor practice, attention was also paid to the legacy of an earlier educational paraprofessional emerging in the 1960s and termed the ‘community agent’; along with a burgeoning youth mentoring movement from the late 1980s – developments which both took place in the United States of America. The problematic of the study which became apparent was that although warmly received by pupils, Learning Mentor practices were marginalised, misunderstood and relatively unseen; casting doubt on the role’s level of influence suggested by formal prescriptions. Furthermore, despite the support systems in which they worked being formally presented as coherent and straightforward entities, they were in fact found to be ‘messy’ and contested spaces which were inhabited by different groups of practitioners, whose differing identities informed and underpinned their own respective practices.