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The purpose of this paper is to focus on pedagogy as a crucial element in postgraduate research undertakings, implying active involvement of both student and supervisor in process of teaching and learning.

Drawing on Australian higher degree research supervision practice to illustrate their argument, the authors take issue with reliance on traditional Oxbridge conventions as informing dominant practices of supervision of postgraduate research studies and suggest pedagogy as intentional and systematic intervention that acknowledges the problematic natures of relationships between teaching, learning, and knowledge production as integral to supervision and research studies.

The authors examine issues of discursive practice and the problematic nature of power differentials in supervisor‐supervisee relationships, and the taken‐for‐grantedness of discursive practice of such relationships. The authors do this from the perspective of the student involved in higher degree research programs, a departure from the bulk of the literature that has as its focus the perspective of the supervisor and/or the institution.

The paper examines the perspective of the student involved in higher degree research programs, a departure from the bulk of the literature that has as its focus the perspective of the supervisor and/or the institution.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the suggestive possibilities of an approach to undergraduate English teacher education that the author has called the 3D Approach – Develop professional knowledge, Display professional knowledge, Disseminate professional knowledge – in relation to a number of groups of first year pre‐service teachers (PSTs) engaging the teaching and learning materials of their English education course.

The paper examines ways in which this approach has been assessed by the PSTs themselves, constructing this as an expression of their lived experience as PSTs. The author draws on Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development, initiates a systematic and orchestrated program of explicit scaffolding of first year PST learning and draws on University‐generated student assessment of their courses, focus groups and individual interviews to investigate ways in which the 3D approach may be considered as enhancing first year PST learning.

PSTs' own informed evaluations of their own developing knowledge have made visible the teaching and learning that they have engaged and articulated. What the author outlines in this paper is not a “Eureka” moment for first year PSTs, but it is the result of careful scholarly considerations of what careful scholarly considerations by first years in Education courses may engage. For this cohort of PSTs, and for the author, it is a particular form of engagement with pedagogy. It is a pedagogy for teachers, part of active engagement on the part of the teacher and the learner, producing knowledge together.

Lack of generalisability from case study research may be considered as a limitation, but the author would argue that it is the details thrown up for careful examination in a case study which may serve to inform professional discussion and debate.

Negative press of inadequate teachers emerging from universities, with their specious claims will not progress reasoned discussion; research on how the PSTs are themselves taught and how they develop as professionals will. PSTs' own informed evaluations of their own developing knowledge will go some way towards enabling this to happen. This sort of research opens up possibilities for starting with the right sort of questions, a shift from asking the wrong sort of questions, which the author would argue is that sort on which the media are basing their opinion pieces.

Continuing public discussions, usually conducted in and by the media, about teacher quality, particularly as this tends to be tied to notions of teacher pay, indicates a wider social concern about the need for quality teachers. This sort of social concern is also a major concern for teacher educators, and is to be addressed as such. This paper addresses some of those concerns.

The paper engages issues about teacher education raised publicly in the media and ties these to the more private domain of university practice in a given teacher education course.

Rashidah N. Andrews is an academic advisor in the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned an Ed.M. in higher education at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and is currently a doctoral student in educational administration at temple. Before arrival at Temple, Rashidah spent three years as project manager for the Ethnic Minorities Student Achievement Grant (EMSAG) at Halesowen College in England, one year as director of College Retention at a non-profit in Philadelphia and two years as admission counselor at her alma mater. Her research interests include access, retention and persistence of low-income, first-generation students.