Nicole Brown
1. Tell us a little about your current job. What do you enjoy most?
As a Lecturer in Education I am able to contribute to the education and development of experienced and future teachers, and promote values like social justice and equality. My role as an Academic Head of Learning and Teaching Media enables me to work alongside colleagues in developing best educational practices for our students. As an ARENA assessor and mentor for HEA fellowships I often support members of staff through the portfolio writing process. It is that mix of learning from and with staff and students that I find particularly rewarding. I enjoy collaborating with others on practice-based enquiries and research projects that help shape teaching practices and create better learning experiences for all.
Before working at the Institute of Education I had been a secondary school teacher with responsibility for teacher education as a school-based subject mentor before taking a career break. Once my son was a little older, I looked for ways of using my experience in the classroom to support others in becoming teachers or improving their classroom practices.
2. I see you have come some way from doing the MTeach. What would you say are the key things about the MTeach that have stayed with you?
The practice-based enquiries and the practical experience I gained from that. To me, the MTeach was and still is the best professional development course any teacher could ever want to undertake. This is because during the course of the programme you are challenged to develop critical thinking and reflective practices, but you are also provided with the tools needed to continue that beyond the course. I still return to those tools I gained from undertaking the MTeach, and I still carry out classroom-based research. The only difference is that my classroom is now full of undergraduate or postgraduate students.
3. What did your dissertation/ practice based enquiry (RPBE or PBE) explore? What did you find out and how did it influence you?
The focus of my dissertation was the deployment of foreign language assistants (FLAs) in the modern foreign languages classroom. I wanted to see whether how FLAs were used and whether they would be used to their best ability. To find out if there were specific FLA best practices that language teachers could utilise. What was interesting about my findings was that FLAs often do not assist the second-language learning processes in the classroom. Instead, they end up functioning as mediators between teachers and pupils, a role that the FLAs are not actually prepared for in their orientation courses before the enter the MFL classroom.
4. How was the MTeach work different from School or other professional development courses (e.g. INSET)?
The main difference is that the MTeach is a personalised form of professional development. As I said earlier, you learn general tools to use narratives for reflection or to carry out enquiries in the classroom. But in addition to these general tools, all the assignments are agreed with the tutor, which makes the assignments relevant to your personal experience and interest. Most school INSET trainings provided by external companies are standardised and not really individualised or contextualised well. The MTeach allows for that personalisation from the beginning to the end.
5. The MTeach is for teachers only, it often uses the sharing of participants classroom experiences/practice as a starting point, how did this work for you?
This is one of the major strengths of the MTeach, in my view. As a teacher, life in the classroom is busy and yet, we know that learning is not happening in a vacuum, but is constructed in a social environment. The fact that the personal practice was the starting point for the learning allowed for personal exchange of experiences and learning from each other, but also to understand how my personal and individual experiences were after all not so unique, but were generalizable to other classrooms and contexts.
6. What is your next career move?
I have not yet decided what I will be doing next. I am currently writing up my doctoral thesis, part of which is about developing participatory and creative methods for enquiries to make the research process more accessible to participants and to make the dissemination of findings more interesting for the wider public. At the same time, I am involved in a range of projects including staff-student collaborations to improve classroom practices.