In a very impressive move to win 'most dedicated podcast guest', today we welcome Dr Rachel Shanks from the University of Aberdeen to our studio in person! For obvious reasons, our original request to Rachel involved a down-the-line interview, but we were very happy indeed to be able to instead welcome her to Cardiff after an epic train journey from Scotland.

Rachel has had a major impact on school uniform policy in Scotland following her work with students to analyse the policies of a huge number of schools in the country, and today she joins us to discuss this often under-appreciated aspect of school life. As we found, the more you dig in to what seems like a relatively simple topic, the more interesting cans of worms get opened, and regular listeners to the podcast will know that's just the way we like it!

The discussion ranges across Rachel's around such knotty issues as affordability, sustainability, comfort, and why schools feel the need to have uniforms in the first place. If you want to find out more about Rachel's work, you can check out her web page here.

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Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 18th November 2024.

It’s that festive time of year again, and hopefully anyone involved in the world of education is relaxing after a very long Autumn term.

We’re back with our usual Christmas offering - though we’re out of our normal studio as our friends in the Sport Broadcast and Media programmes are having a busy last week of term up on the second floor.

In a partially successful attempt to cut the duration of our epic Christmas special, we’ve limited ourselves to four items each, and as ever, neither of us knows what the other one is about to bring to the table in a white knuckle ride of an episode recorded as close to the end of term as we dare…

We hope you enjoy the resulting chat, and it whiles away a post-Christmas walk or two.

We’ll be back with our normal service in two weeks’ time.

Merry Christmas from Emma & Tom!

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Recorded in studio D0.12 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 19th December 2024.

One of the perks of hosting the podcast is that we get to invite people who’ve influenced us to come on as guests, and in our world of teacher education, there are few people who’ve had more influence on us than Professor Trevor Mutton from the University of Oxford. Co-author of a huge number of articles and books that have shaped our thinking about how new teachers learn, we’ve been privileged to work with Trevor for a number of years.

Now, we’ve managed to get him into the studio to discuss an article he’s co-authored about Initial Teacher Education, whether we as a profession have a clear story to tell about how we educate new teachers, and why that matters. But the discussion ranges more widely than the article, looking at how teacher education policy in England has moved in a different direction from that in Wales, and chewing over some of the really tricky questions around what we believe about what it means to be a profession.

The article we were talking about in the main discussion is: ‘Learning to think, perform and act with integrity: does teacher education have a signature pedagogy, and why does this matter?’ by Clare Brooks, Joanna McIntyre and Trevor Mutton.

The article mentioned by Trevor in something interesting is ‘Educative mentors? The role of classroom teachers in initial teacher education. A New Zealand study’ by Helen Trevethan.

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Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University's Cyncoed Campus on 6th November 2024.