Jotter: Journal of Trainee Teacher Educational Research

The 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 journal may be contacted by email: JoTTER@educ.ac.uk

Papers in Jotter are published on the JoTTER website (https://jotter.educ.cam.ac.uk) and are also archived in the University of Cambridge Apollo Research Repository (https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/335823). Camtree maintains 'virtual collections' of volumes prior to Volume 14 (2021-2022), meaning that the full text of articles are retained in the Apollo repository. From Volume 15 onwards, Camtree will also have copies of the full texts.