Challenging reflexivity in the transition to embed big ideas into the teacher education curriculum

Like all teacher educators in England, we are conscious that our practice is increasingly located in turbulent and changing political and managerial landscapes for teacher education (see Murtagh & Rushton, 2021; Wyse, 2021). The ITT Market Review (DfE, 2021), linked to the recent ITT Core Framework (DfE, 2019) calls for teacher education providers to restate the case for their curriculum and to obtain a new endorsed remit to continue to run existing programmes. BERA’s own response to the ITT Market Review calls for more robust clarity, research and critique around dominant models of learning, teaching and curriculum that are seen to be at the heart of the review. While we have both been embedding and speculating on the outcomes of the market review for teacher education, we have had the opportunity to think again about how we manage subject-specific ideas in our humanities and social science curriculums, especially within the ‘spiral curriculum’ that we adopt. In this BERA Blog post, we outline one such example that we have worked on over the past few months with considerable success.