‘Why am I having to do this?’: The nature and purpose of concurrent courses in Scottish primary teacher education

Abstract

In his Report of a Review of Teacher Education in Scotland (2010), Donaldson presents the idea of the ‘twenty-first century teacher’. Central to this is the requirement for an ‘extended professionalism’ in which emphasis is placed on the development of the student teacher’s academic and intellectual qualities. This article aims to analyse the role of concurrent courses (i.e. university courses taken by education students outside of core education subjects) in the development of this extended professionalism. It does so by comparing it with the ‘graduate attributes’ agenda adopted by many universities, and by outlining two dimensions and three possible models of the relationship between concurrent courses and the purposes of teacher education. It is argued that one of these models best fits the word and spirit of the Donaldson Report, but that further research is required to establish how different models of concurrency have been, or might be, received by students and staff on Scottish primary education degrees.