The role of pre-service teachers in reshaping school curricula through the co-production of dialogic pedagogies: Designing a participatory action research study

The OECD’s recent report, Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: Into the Future, underlines the crucial importance of building curricular capacity at all levels in the education system. In response, Priestley et al. (2021), writing in TES magazine, highlight the role of Initial Teacher Education and pose the question, ‘Do we have the right sort of teachers?’. This conceptual paper adopts a Freirean, critical pedagogic framework to radically re-evaluate the role of initial teacher education in creating the ‘right sort of teachers’. The paper proposes a participatory, action research based intervention involving initial teacher education students. It is argued that such an approach can provide novel empirical insights into the developing identity of pre-service teachers, and can also play a radical part in empowering pre-service teachers to co-produce and reshape their curriculum through the co-production of dialogic pedagogies and in doing so, become key agents of change. Drawing on Nodding’s Ethic of Care, the paper also argues that engaging in dialogic praxis has the potential to support positive socialisation in the school community, through forming the teacher identity.