Flourishing, engagement and learning: insights from our Cambridge PGCE students
In my previous editorial for JoTTER, I have argued that our student teachers’ research, which they undertake as part of their PGCE courses can be seen as forms of “real utopian work”: grounded in the realities of contemporary education, yet oriented towards more just, inclusive and educationally rich futures. As with previous volumes, the articles published in this Volume 16 of JoTTER offer powerful illustrations of such work, bringing together research projects developed by former student teachers from the 2023-2024 Cambridge PGCE cohort.
Taken collectively, the articles in this volume speak directly to pressing questions facing schools and teachers today: how can education support all students to flourish within increasingly diverse and complex classrooms and societies? And how can teachers develop their pedagogical practices that meaningfully engage students in support of their learning, and to respond to the complexity of students’ lived experiences, identities and ways of knowing? While the articles in this volume span different school phases, subjects and research approaches, they broadly cover two themes connected to these questions: diversity, identity and flourishing; and engagement and learning. Together, these works highlight our student teachers’ commitment to becoming research‑informed and critical‑reflexive practitioners who place their students’ experiences and perspectives at the heart of their work.
Diversity, identity and flourishing
Across this volume, questions of diversity, identity and flourishing in educational spaces emerge as lived realities that shape students’ school experiences. These questions are central to the articles by Liam Travers, Emily Davenport and Dana Coggio, each of which engages (from different subject and phase perspectives) with how students’ make sense of themselves, of school subjects, of the world, and of others across national, racial, cultural and embodied dimensions.
Liam Travers’ work in secondary geography, for instance, closely resonates with broader debates around representation, belonging and the diversity within subject specific knowledge. By engaging Year 8 students with postcolonial India through a decolonial curricular perspective, this work illustrates how young people’s initial understandings of “distant places” are often shaped by simplified, stereotypical or singular narratives. Importantly, this study showcases how deliberate decolonial curriculum-making by schoolteachers can support students’ learning about difference and multiplicity around topics connected with places and communities.
Concerns around diversity are explored in Dana Coggio’s theoretical reflection of primary students’ ethnic, racial and national identities in England’s increasingly diverse primary classrooms. This work challenges simplistic notions of national cohesion and raises critical questions about how schools navigate narratives of belonging, particularly in contexts shaped by policy and media discourses around “Fundamental British Values”, and how it links to national identity in multicultural English schools. The argument developed here positions primary schools as key sites where identities are negotiated, affirmed and sometimes invalidated. In particular, it draws attention to the ethical and moral responsibility teachers carry when working with knowledge and experiences that are deeply entangled with power, representation and social cohesion, asking us to consider how educational practices can either reproduce singular, exclusionary narratives, or create space for complexity, plurality and recognition.
Similarly, Emily Davenport’s review of primary children’s physical wellbeing also connects to students’ identities and diversity. Rather than assuming that school‑based health initiatives automatically benefit all pupils in the same way, this review calls for more attention to be paid to children themselves, given how research has shown that physical activity and issues of participation and wellbeing can be varied and contingent. In doing so, this work contributes to broader reflections about inclusive approaches to wellbeing and flourishing, while also challenging prevalent narratives in English education of one‑size‑fits‑all solutions in for, amongst other areas, physical wellbeing and schools.
These works then position diversity, identity and inclusion not as “additional” considerations, but as central to how students experience school and flourishing. Indeed, they invite teachers to move beyond deficit or universalising assumptions about their subjects, their students, and their school communities more broadly to, instead, engage with them as culturally, socially and emotionally situated.
Engagement and learning
A second theme running across this volume concerns students’ engagement and learning, with specific attention paid to how pedagogical approaches can support students’ classroom participation and conceptual understanding, particularly to respond to the diversity of students’ prior knowledge and ways of meaning-making. Across subjects and phases, some of these articles in this volume 16 share a commitment to rethinking engagement not as superficial classroom participation, but as a dialogic, multimodal and relational process.
In particular, a thread across several of these articles is the role of pedagogical choices in making students’ thinking visible and then in supporting conceptual change. Ruth Ní Mhuircheartaigh’s study, for instance, examines how the use of variation theory within mathematical pedagogical choices can foster Year 8 mixed‑attainment students’ development of proportional reasoning. This study showcases how the careful structuring of mathematical examples specially grounded in the use of contrasting cases can support students’ attention to critical features of mathematical concepts.
Similar questions linked to conceptual engagement and understanding are also explored by William Malone’s case study in secondary physics. This study illustrates how dialogic teaching, as a pedagogical practice, can help elicit students’ existing informal explanations of scientific phenomena, allowing these to be collectively examined in the classroom. Similarly, Kate Shearer’s case study in biology education, explores how dialogic practice can shape students’ engagement when learning about complex scientific concepts. This study shows how talk, questioning and discussion can support students in grappling with abstract biological processes, such as homeostasis, while also highlighting the tensions teachers face in balancing demands in terms of curricular coverage with dialogic ideals.
Alongside these subject‑specific studies around classroom pedagogies and engagement, this volume 16 also includes studies that examine engagement through inclusive and multimodal pedagogies. Emma Serle’s article, for instance, explores reading aloud across the primary curriculum, challenging assumptions that this pedagogical practice is primarily for younger children or limited to fiction. By conceptualising shared reading as an interactive, meaning‑making practice, Serle argues that engagement also emerges through collective attention, discussion and access to texts, particularly for students who may otherwise find written materials inaccessible. A similar concern with widening modes of participation and engagement with classroom activities underpins Francis Schofield’ study on the use of graphic media to support creative writing in Year 8 English. This work illustrates how drawing on students’ existing visual literacies can support their classroom engagement, while also enhancing their creative writing skills. Rather than treating graphic media as a purely motivational tool, this study positions multimodal composition as a legitimate pedagogical practice that enables a wider range of students to participate meaningfully in creative writing.
Taken together, the articles above showcase how engagement and learning are actively fostered through a teacher’s deliberate pedagogical choices. Collectively, they also resist reductive and universalising one-size-fits-all claims about “what works” in education, offering instead nuanced and research‑informed insights into how teachers can support students’ engagement and understanding through thoughtful, reflective and context‑sensitive pedagogical practices.
Concluding reflections
What connects the article in this volume is a shared commitment by our former PGCE students to placing students at the centre of educational practice and inquiry: as knowers, meaning‑makers and participants in their own learning. Whether focusing on identity, diversity, physical wellbeing, dialogic or multimodal practices, our former PGCE students consistently centre their own students’ perspectives, while also engaging critically with policy, curricular, and pedagogical discourses and assumptions.
As with previous volumes of JoTTER, the articles in volume 16 exemplify the kind of practitioner-researcher we seek to support across our Cambridge PGCE programmes: practitioners who critically engage with research practices grounded in classroom realities and people’s lived experiences. We in the Cambridge PGCE programmes celebrate their professional ambition, criticality and care for their own students. In particular, their research reminds us that questions of diversity, identity, engagement and learning are not abstract concerns, but everyday realities in schools, and that teachers’ critical pedagogical and curriculum-making practices are crucial to supporting young people’s flourishing.