JoTTER - Journal of Trainee Teacher Educational Research
About this community
Journal of Trainee Teacher Educational Research
Graduate students preparing to be schoolteachers via the Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) programme in either Primary or Secondary aged-range at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge are expected to plan a classroom-based project which allows them to undertake classroom enquiry into some aspect of teaching and learning whilst on professional placement in our faculty’s partner schools.
This Journal of Trainee Teacher Educational Research (JoTTER) is then an opportunity for those PGCE trainees at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge to make their research publicly available so that it can be accessed by and inform other students’, teachers’ and researchers’ projects and practices around issues of teaching and learning in schools.
JoTTER was initiated in 2009, and submissions were invited from trainees completing the 2008-2009 Secondary PGCE course, who wished to have their work considered for Volume 1. In subsequent years, students in both the Early Years/Primary and Secondary PGCE programmes have been invited to submit.
Faculty of Education PGCE at Master's level
The PGCE at Cambridge, as in many other institutions, is a Master’s level qualification, and trainees are expected to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of subject pedagogy, aspects of classroom teaching and learning processes, and a critical awareness of the nature of educational research.
However, these trainee teachers also carry out their wider professional development activities and assignments whilst teaching a range of classes in our partner schools under the guidance of their school-based mentors. Their qualification is then both of theoretical and practice-based nature. As a result, their research published in this journal reflects approaches to educational research that are necessarily bounded to this nature of the authors’ professional circumstances: they are school-based professionals engaging with studies designed through school-based methodologies (for instance, there are no large-scale national surveys). This also means that the studies reported in this journal reflect the forms of authentic classroom enquiry that are available to, and increasingly expected of, practitioners teaching in schools.
Publishing Papers
Papers published in the journal have first been evaluated both by a member of the Editorial Board who teaches on the faculty’s PGCE programme, and then subjected to a peer-review process.
The faculty is grateful to the work of the Editorial Associates, who have also acted as reviewers, and to the work of our Editorial Assistant and Copy Editor.
Collections in this community
Recent Submissions
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Learning The World As Well As The Story: Applying ‘Worldmaking’ to the study of Greek Literature. A case study with an examination class in a boys’ grammar school
(Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, 2022-11-16)This study investigates how a teacher might purposefully use historical context to enhance GCSE Classical Greek or Latin students’ first reading experience with classical literature in the original language. I argue that ... -
“Just… the thing you get at the end”? A Case Study examining Student and Teacher Experiences of Assessment in Art and Design in a Year 11 GCSE Class during the Covid-19 Pandemic.
(Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, 2022-10-12)Assessment has long been an area of contention, controversy and discomfort in art education. How do educators define, regulate and assess that which is so often indefinable, idiosyncratic and subjective? Through a qualitative, ... -
Mixing it up': an investigation into the impact of a CLIL approach on the attitudes and attainment of a low-attaining Year 9 Spanish class
(Faculty of Education, 2016-01-05)The effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning on lower-attaining students have remained relatively unexplored in the literature, with many studies on CLIL admitting to basing results on students who have been ... -
Contemplative practices in the Reception classroom: the perceptions of seven pupils on a series of PSHE inputs.
(Faculty of Education, 2016-01-05)Improved psychological wellbeing has been reported for adults and older children (aged eight to eighteen years) undertaking various programmes of ‘mindfulness’ and ‘contemplative practice’ (e.g. Irving, Dobkin & Park, ...
