Dr Ben Knight, Benjamin3.Knight@uwe.ac.uk
Dr Ben Knight, Senior Lecturer in the School of Education & Childhood has a new book coming out in January 2024.
The book guides teacher educators and early carer teacher mentors in ways to nurture professional judgement in the complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments of classrooms.
In-the-moment dilemmas and situational awareness are central to teachers’ work, but these concepts may not always find their way into teaching about teaching – as they often get pushed aside in favour of curriculum coverage and box ticking. This book challenges a technicist and mechanistic view of teaching and learning to examine how teacher educators might best prepare soon-to-be teachers to adapt to the multiple and ever-changing dilemmas of classroom practice. It discusses evidence in the literature that teaching does not simply ‘produce’ learning and that nurturing learning is a complex business which relies on both ‘art and science’. Current policies and compliancy agendas influencing the content of ITE programmes are analysed, and the text provides practical suggestions for how to nurture professional judgement in trainee and novice teachers, through HE provision and school-based mentoring.
The book describes the dynamism of those who teach in classrooms and reminds teacher educators of the value and necessity of managing structure and improvisation, protocol and intuition which are at the heart of what it means to be a professional.
The book is available for pre-order from Critical Publishing and Amazon.
Author Biography
Dr Ben Knight is a former primary teacher and current academic, teacher educator and educational researcher. After 11 years in the classroom Ben now teaches future teachers and educational researchers on a variety of undergraduate, postgraduate, masters and doctoral programmes at UWE. His own research and writing interests include teacher professional learning, interactive group work and applications of complexity theory to education.
