Episode Eleven: Dr. Aimie Brennan “Challenges for Teacher Educators within the Sociology of Education modules”
Let's Talk About Sociology of EducationShow Notes
My guest in this episode is Dr. Aimie Brennan. Aimie is a lecturer in Education Policy and Practice and a Teacher Educator in Marino Institute of Education where she teaches Research Methods and also teaches on the Education Studies programme and the BEd programme. Prior to working in Marino Institute of Education, Aimie spent five years teaching in Mary Immaculate College and has taught Sociology to early childhood education, primary, post-primary and Master’s students. Aimie has a PhD in Sociology from University College Cork, which is where she started teaching and tutoring in the Department of Sociology and Philosophy. Aimie is the convenor of the pedagogy of sociology and professional practice study group in the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI) and is founder and coordinator of the STER project http://www.ster.ie/ The Student Teacher Educational Research (STER) project includes a student peer-reviewed eJournal, a Conference and a podcast.
In this episode we discuss challenges for teacher educators when teaching Sociology of Education in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses. Aimie’s interest in the challenges for teacher educators teaching Sociology of Education stems from her own interest in the position of sociology and teacher education and changes that have happened throughout the history of Teacher Education, she mentions how there have been several reform periods over time, through the twenties, thirties, sixties and seventies and how sociology has always been a core part of teacher education. She mentions how the position of sociology in policy and curriculum is not necessarily always reflected in practice and how she sometimes finds herself teaching sociology that student teachers sometimes struggle to engage with for very legitimate reasons. We discuss the value of sociology and sociological theory for student teachers at primary education level and also how we might use a sociological lens to consider what the challenges are for teaching sociology and looking at some of those influences. We focus on the kind of rationalisation and the homogeneity of the group that we are teaching as the kind of challenges that face us as teacher educators.
As a Teacher Educator Aimie says that her own thinking has probably changed over time and while working in teacher education that she doesn’t actually think as a Sociologist that she can actually fully prepare students to understand all of the complex concepts that exist in the classroom, not with the kind of time that's allocated to sociology, at a sufficiently deep level, but she tries to ensure that students have a nuanced understanding and appreciation of values in different contexts. She says she concentrates on two things (which seem to be the two things that occur all the time when she is talking about sociology, or when she is talking about policy because they overlap). So rather than taking a kind of a thematic approach, which Aimie believes happens a lot in sociology, “where it tends to be, where we’re talking about gender, or we’re talking about class, or we are talking about family or community”... she tends to teach around two things. “So the first thing is encouraging students to see reality as constructors. So social constructionism, on how that underpins everything”. And the second thing, “understanding their own biography, and how that can actually develop more empathy and more understanding of the influence of structure and agency”. She says how one of the important things that students can do is to really spend time and energy unpacking their own biography and unpacking their performance, because all facets of sociology, whether it's class, or gender, or bias, or capital or prejudice, or socialisation are all ingrained in our identity and our performance.
Aimie talks about shedding a little bit more light on how we as individuals and as teachers have responsibility for reinforcing and unpacking inequality, and “how we're actually all influence
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