The Struggle for Teacher Education: International Perspectives on Governance and Reforms 9781474285537, 9781474285568, 9781474285544

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Series Editors’ Foreword
The Struggle for Teacher Education
Introduction
Waves of struggle within teacher education
The first and second wave of teacher education reform
The third wave: Teacher education as a problem
Struggling with teacher education reforms – the chapters
Struggle with a primacy of policy
Struggle with practice policies
Struggle of teacher educators in higher education
Struggle with learning outcomes
The struggle for the ‘good teacher’
Chapter 1 The Visionary Position: Critical Factors of Utopian Social Engineering in Education Reforms
Management of objectives as a master idea of reform
Kairos – a rhetorical perspective
U – topos – the making of a visionary position
Political holism
Political-scientific governing regimes
Science expansion and disciplinary specialization in teacher education
Khronos – timing, rhythm and order of reform
Problems as solutions
Notes
Chapter 2 Challenging Policy, Rethinking Practice: Struggling for the Soul of Teacher Education
Introduction
The struggle for teacher education
Global teacher education reform: An Australian perspective
The primacy of practice
Conclusion: Ready to teach, or managing the soul?
Notes
Chapter 3 Reforming Teacher Education in England: Locating the ‘Policy’ Problem
Introduction
The ‘taken for grantedness’ of reforming teacher education – market forces
The ‘taken for grantedness’ of reforming teacher education: Alternative providers and unexpected outcomes
And the consumer of new forms of teacher education?
Extrinsic motivators for choice
Intrinsic rationale for pathway choice
Discussion
‘Locating’ the policy problem?
Chapter 4 Comparing Secondary Initial Teacher Education in England and Finland: Learning Together
Introduction
Comparison between England and Finland and models of Initial Teacher Education
Material and method
Exit surveys
Helsinki University, Finland exit survey
Semi-structured interviews
Discussion
Chapter 5 Teacher Education in South Africa: Teacher Educators Working for Social Justice
Introduction: Towards improving the quality of education
Policy reform in teacher education
Teacher education qualifications framework
Professional and academic expectations
Socioinstitutional factors
Conceptual considerations
Strategic interventions
Conclusion
Note
Chapter 6 Dutch Teacher Educators’ Struggles over Monopoly and Autonomy (1990–2010)
Introduction
Monopoly and autonomy of teacher educators, and the struggle for teacher education
Context: Teacher education in the Netherlands
Method
Three struggles about the profession of teacher educators (1990–2010)
Final remarks
Chapter 7 Learning Sciences: Reconfiguring Authority in Teacher Education
Introduction: Norwegian teacher education and pedagogikk
Productivity and teacher education
Pedagogical authority and teacher education
Boundary work – analysing conceptual changes
Learning sciences: replacing pedagogy
Learning sciences: dissolution of national knowledge traditions
Pedagogy in teacher education – lost in translation
Notes
Chapter 8 Teacher Education in South America: A Problem or a Solution?1
Introduction
National educational contexts and school achievement
Teachers and their preparation: Evidence from the TERCE study (OREALC/UNESCO, 2015b)
Critical situations recognized as problem areas in the selected countries
Concluding thoughts
Notes
Chapter 9 Teacher Education in England: Professional Preparation in Times of Change
Introduction
The good teacher and good teaching
Teaching as a professional activity
Initial Teacher Education and the role of university
Principles of a successful Initial Teacher Education Programme
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter 10 Reform as a State of Exception
References
Index

Citation preview

The Struggle for Teacher Education

REINVENTING TEACHER EDUCATION Series Editors: Marie Brennan, Viv Ellis, Meg Maguire, Peter Smagorinsky The series presents robust, critical research studies in the broad field of teacher education, including initial or pre-service preparation, inservice and continuing professional development, from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. It takes an innovative approach to research in the field and an underlying commitment to transforming the education of teachers. Also available from Bloomsbury Transforming Teacher Education, Viv Ellis and Jane McNicholl Teacher Agency, Mark Priestley, Gert Biesta and Sarah Robinson

The Struggle for Teacher Education International Perspectives on Governance and Reforms Edited by Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen and Tobias Werler

Series: Reinventing Teacher Education

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen, Tobias Werler and Contributors, 2017 Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen, Tobias Werler and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-8553-7 ePDF: 978-1-4742-8554-4 ePub: 978-1-4742-8555-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents List of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors Series Editors’ Foreword The Struggle for Teacher Education  Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen and Tobias Werler   1 The Visionary Position: Critical Factors of Utopian Social Engineering in Education Reforms  Tom Are Trippestad   2 Challenging Policy, Rethinking Practice: Struggling for the Soul of Teacher Education  Bill Green, Jo-Anne Reid and Marie Brennan   3 Reforming Teacher Education in England: Locating the ‘Policy’ Problem  Meg Maguire and Rosalyn George   4 Comparing Secondary Initial Teacher Education in England and Finland: Learning Together  Paul Richard Dickinson and Jaana Ilona Silvennoinen   5 Teacher Education in South Africa: Teacher Educators Working for Social Justice  Maureen Robinson   6 Dutch Teacher Educators’ Struggles over Monopoly and Autonomy (1990–2010)  Anja Swennen and Monique Volman   7 Learning Sciences: Reconfiguring Authority in Teacher Education  Tobias Werler   8 Teacher Education in South America: A Problem or a Solution?  Beatrice Ávalos-Bevan   9 Teacher Education in England: Professional Preparation in Times of Change  Jacek Brant and Katharine Vincent 10 Reform as a State of Exception  Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen and Tobias Werler References Index

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1 17 39 57

75 99 115 131 147 169 185 193 218

Figures Figure 2.1 P  ractice Theory and Philosophy Figure 7.1 Proportion of teachers in Lower Secondary Education (ISCED 2) who have completed ITE (2013) IN %; graph based on data provided by European Commission/ EACEA/Eurydice (2015): 10 Figure 7.2 Total public expenditure on education as a percentage of total public expenditure (1995, 2005, 2011) Figure 8.1 Performance in the TERCE evaluation, third- and sixthgrade reading Figure 8.2 Performance in TERCE evaluation, third- and sixth-grade mathematics Figure 8.3 Type of teacher preparation institutions attended by TERCE teachers Figure 8.4 Teacher reports on opportunity for fieldwork or practicum experiences during initial teacher education (% of teachers)

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134 135 151 152 153 154

Tables Table 6.1 Characteristics of the Participating Teacher Educators 121 Table 8.1 Characteristics of countries studied 149 Table 8.2 Mean scores in PISA 2012 of participating countries 151 Table 8.3 Teacher participation in a continuous professional development activity over their last two years of experience (% indicating participation) 154

Notes on Contributors Beatrice Ávalos-Bevan is a professor of education at the Universidad de Chile, Chile, and is one of the founders of the Interdisciplinary Education Research Programme (PIIE). She is currently working as a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Research in Education (CIAE) and heads its research programme on teachers. She is currently a member of the International Institute for Educational Planning UNESCO (IIEP) Research Advisory Council as well as the Joint ILO/ UNESCO Committee of Experts on the Application of Recommendations Concerning Teaching Personnel (CEART). Jacek Brant is a senior lecturer in Economics and Business Education in the Institute of Education, University College London, UK. He has a background of teaching in the field of economics and business education since 1986, with previous experience in the manufacturing industry. He also has international experience, having been involved in educational projects in a number of countries. Marie Brennan is a professor of education at Victoria University, Australia. She teaches and researches across education sectors, with particular interests in teacher education, political sociology of curriculum and education policy, participatory research and social injustice. Paul Richard Dickinson is the director of the Institute of Childhood and Education at Leeds Trinity University, UK. Paul has extensive experience as a teacher of English, is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has been head of the Teacher Education Department at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. His research interests include the teaching of English and international models of initial teacher education. Rosalyn George is a professor of education at Goldsmiths University of London, UK. She has an abiding concern for the issues of equity and social justice within schools and institutions of higher education, and these concerns are reflected in her research and teaching. Her most recent publication, Pedagogical Responses to the Changing Position of Girls and Young Women (2016), with Paechter and

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McRobbie, reflects her ongoing interest in urban girls and informal school cultures. She is now engaged in exploring the current drive to encourage teachers to become researchers in classrooms and schools. Bill Green is a professor of education at Charles Sturt University, Australia, and a Foundation Key Researcher with the Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education (RIPPLE) at Charles Sturt University, Australia. He has been awarded several Australian Research Council grants in the field of teacher education and rural education and is one of Australia’s most recognized researchers. He is currently the co-editor of the UK-based journal Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education. Meg Maguire is currently a professor of sociology of education at King’s College London, UK. She has a long-standing interest in education policy and practice, social justice issues, the life and work of school teachers and teacher education and deals with the challenges of inner-city schooling. Her publications include The Urban Primary School (with Tim Wooldridge and Simon Pratt-Adams, Open University Press 2006) and Changing Urban Education (with Simon PrattAdams and Elizabeth Burns, Continuum, 2010). With Stephen Ball and Annette Braun, she has recently published How Schools Do Policy (Routledge, 2012). She is the lead editor for the Journal of Education Policy. Jo-Anne Reid is a professor of education at Charles Sturt University, Australia. She is past president of the Australian Association for Research in Education, the Australian Teacher Education Association and the NSW Teacher Education Council, and was vice president of the World Association of Research in Education (WERA) in 2011–12. She has won competitive research grants in the field of teacher education and has served as co-editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education. Maureen Robinson is the dean of the Faculty of Education at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and the former dean of education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa. She has also worked as a high school teacher and at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, where she completed her PhD. Prof Robinson’s research interests are teacher education and educational change and the relationship between theory, policy and practice in teacher education. She has been a Fulbright scholar, has served on the executive of the South African Education Research Association and the Education Deans’

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Forum, and has been involved in many national and international networks advancing research. Jaana Ilona Silvennoinen is a senior lecturer in teacher education at the University Teacher Training School at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Jaana has worked as an EFL teacher and as a mentoring teacher at a teacher training school for over twenty years. She has also worked as a principal and has produced published teaching material. Her research interest is in the field of international models of initial teacher education. Anja Swennen is a researcher at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The focus of her research is on the development of the education profession, in particular the profession of teacher educators. She has published academic articles and chapters in books about teacher education and has also disseminated her research in professional publications and at national and international conferences. She is an associate editor for Professional Development in Education. Tom Are Trippestad is a PhD in science theory, professor in pedagogy and a former director of the Centre of Education Research at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL), Norway. He has done extensive research on education reforms and governance, the rhetoric of reforms, global teaching and teacher professionalism. He has taught pedagogy in teacher education at all levels. He was recently project responsible for the government appointed evaluation group researching the newly initiated pre-school teacher education reform. Monique Volman is a full professor of education. She is the program leader of the Educational Sciences research program of the Research Institute of Child Development and Education (CDE) at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Main areas in her research are learning environments for meaningful learning, diversity and the use of ICT in education. In her work she aims to build bridges between educational theory and practice by applying and further developing methodologies for collaborative design research, in which teachers and researchers collaboratively develop and evaluate theoretically informed innovations. Katharine Vincent works as a lecturer in education at the Institute of Education (IOE), University College London (UCL), UK. She works as an education and programme leader for the UCL IOE’s Secondary PGCE programme. Before joining the IOE, she spent ten years teaching English in London secondary

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schools and a year as a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University’s Teachers College, USA. Tobias Werler is a professor of education at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL), Norway. His scientific production in recent years is characterized by empirical and theoretical (but not least comparative) projects that are associated with Theory of Bildung, Didaktik, Policies of Education and Teacher Professionalization. He has conducted several Nordic Council of Minister-funded research projects in teacher education. He is a member of the government-appointed follow-up research panel on the implementation of the teacher education reform.

Series Editors’ Foreword Teacher education is currently one of the most pressing and topical issues in the field of educational research. In a number of countries around the world, there is strong interest in how teachers are prepared, in the content of their pre-service education and training programmes and in measuring and monitoring their effectiveness. In all this reforming work, there is a fundamental questioning of the role and function of what makes up the ‘good’ or successful teacher in society. There are questions about the place of ethical and moral judgements in teachers’ practice, about the introduction of corporate methods and about the role of teachers in innovation. Associated with such questions, government policy agendas around the world address whether and how teachers should be educated or trained as teaching comes to be seen, in some jurisdictions, as a short-term mission rather than as a professional career. The Reinventing Teacher Education series makes a timely and important contribution towards exploring these questions by drawing on international experiences and expertise. For some time now there has been an international concern to reform programmes of pre-service (or initial) teacher education. This movement has been driven by a belief that raising standards in education and raising attainment in schools will be managed effectively only if teacher quality is improved. The best way to reform the teaching profession, according to this policy movement, is by changing teacher education programmes. However, as these reforms are being enacted, contradictions in policy, practice and curriculum design in pre-service teacher education are becoming increasingly apparent in different national settings. These contradictions are, in part, related to the underlying cultural identity of teaching (as a profession, for example) as well as the distribution of wealth within and across these different societies. In some countries, teacher education is seen as a vital tool in the building of national educational, scientific, cultural, technological and economic infrastructures. In others, teacher education has become a means by which the human capital of those countries can be improved, economic competitiveness leveraged and status as knowledge

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economies ensured. Yet, while many of the drivers are common across these contexts, the direction of policy and how policies are enacted in practice vary considerably and the roles of higher education and schools in teacher preparation are often a significant source of diversity across countries. The Reinventing Teacher Education series presents robust, critical research studies in the broad field of teacher education, including initial or pre-service preparation, in-service education and continuing professional development, from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives and from different national perspectives. This series will explore teacher education reforms across phases as well as from different disciplinary perspectives. The series has an underlying commitment to transforming the education of teachers and aims to support innovative approaches to research in the field. This inaugural text for the series is an edited collection of chapters from teacher education researchers working in a variety of settings. The Struggle for Teacher Education, edited by Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen and Tobias Werler, picks up many of the intentions of the series in this wide-ranging collection. It is a truly international collection: in addition to two chapters from England, there are contributions from Scandinavia and the Netherlands, as well as accounts of the changes and reforms to teacher education that are taking place in some of the South American national settings, South Africa and Australia. One of the strengths of this collection is that researchers in teacher education, who are given voice as teacher educators in this book, write each chapter. This is important because, increasingly, teacher educators’ capacity for innovation and transformation is being sidelined by their need to be compliant with policymakers’ demands. This book offers contrasts and comparisons between and across different forms of provision to enable the critical reader to take an informed and comparative perspective to this central area of policy and practice. In their introduction, the authors write that Through theoretical and empirical diversity we demonstrate the political, educational and professional complexity of reforming teacher education in a time where simplistic concepts have gained strong influence in this field. This book, we hope, presents innovative ideas and discussions as to what a good teacher education implies or needs to be in this new political, professional and ideological climate. (Page 2)

This book takes seriously the challenges of the Reinventing Teacher Education series through its critical accounts of the current context in teacher education

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reforms in a diverse set of locales. The collection makes a powerful contribution to scholarship and policy analysis. We believe it will become a major resource for those with a commitment towards the field of teacher education and interests in education reform and governance more widely. Marie Brennan, Viv Ellis, Meg Maguire and Peter Smagorinsky Series Editors

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The Struggle for Teacher Education Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen and Tobias Werler

Introduction In the knowledge society, education is perceived as a hub to improve a wide range of sectors, like education, in a global and economic competitive climate. Education is seen as the most important instrument in addressing issues such as social justice, democracy, equality, sustainable development, migration and transfer of culturally important knowledge. Because teachers are recognized as the most important factor in improving education, reforming teacher education is at present at the core of educational policymaking in many countries around the world. Non-governmental as well as governmental policy makers look at teacher education as the key lever for raising achievement, improving schools and elevating the standard of education systems (Barber and Mourshed 2007; Furlong et al. 2000). Reforming how student teachers are educated and rearranging their work, identities and knowledge constructs also represent strategic efforts to shape the identity and work of teachers and the teaching profession in general in a further attempt to change schools (Cochran-Smith et al. 2011; Hulme 2016). The identification of the importance of teacher education, together with the contradictory and often idealized visions and goals from a wide array of stakeholders, produces continuing struggles for teacher education, affecting teacher education in a profound way (Swennen 2012). Through the focus on reforms of teacher education, significant struggles become visible (Zeichner 2009). In the intensified struggle for teacher education nationally and internationally at present, the voice of teacher educators is often missed or marginalized. This book is written from the viewpoint of teacher educators and researchers experiencing the real-life effects of teacher education governance and reform in different countries. Through theoretical and empirical diversity, the chapters demonstrate the political, educational and professional complexity of

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reforming teacher education at a time where simplistic concepts have gained strong influence in this field. This book, we hope, presents innovative ideas and discussions as to what a good teacher education implies or needs to be in this new political, professional and ideological climate. A reform – in contrast to a revolution – has a double meaning of both maintaining and improving social institutions. Reforms change and improve institutions in line with ideology or aims. During the late 1970s and 1980s, governance through political and bureaucratic planning as an improvement strategy was discredited as political ideology and praxis (Sørhaug 2003). Planning became associated with declining economies in the West and failing totalitarian economical systems and totalitarian ideologies in former communist countries. A politic of reform as an alternative form of governance emerged and became the dominant political rationality making a profound global impact on education and teacher education. The reform theorist and researcher Tian Sørhaug (2003) described this shift as ‘the big governance shift’ from plan regimes to reform regimes. Planning regimes and reform regimes represent different ways of organizing change and the means of governance. According to Sørhaug, political governance, through a planning regime, represents a direct and hierarchal intervention in a given reality through the use of instruction, resources and rules. In this regime, politics and politicians are responsible and have to deliver results. Reform regimes represent a more indirect form of governance. Reform as meant by reform regimes typically means to re-form. The political craftsmanship in reform regimes is characterized by constructing or re-shaping the frames that reforms are to work through in sectors like education, installing self-regulatory mechanisms with particular political aims, such as improving quality or efficiency. The actors placed within these mechanisms are responsible for fulfilling the aim of reform. Sørhaug (2003: 46) describes this policy displacement as a ‘mechanization’ of politics. Accountability mechanisms, comparative student assessment studies like Trends in International and Mathematical Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and measurements of learning outcomes, as described in the chapter by Werler, are examples of governance mechanisms used by reform regimes aiming at improving quality or getting more competitive internationally. The shift in governance ideology has profound effects on how teacher education has defined, practised, understood and regulated the work of teacher educators today – and it is one of the main themes in this book. Researching reforms in teacher education means investigating a wide repertoire of mechanisms with the aim of governing, maintaining and developing teacher

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education. Thorough the chapter’s key mechanisms and their underlying problem definition, goals and effects on teacher education in many different countries are discussed. In the chapters of Trippestad, Swennen and Volman, Robinson and Ávalos, the instalment of academic and scientific mechanisms, tools and goals are analysed in Norway, Netherlands, South Africa and several Latin American countries. In the chapters of Green, Reid and Brennan, a broad instrumentalization of teacher education is addressed in Australian education as well as part of a global ideology. How political ideology shapes education and teacher education is most evident in England. In their respective chapters, Maguire and George, Dickenson and Silvennoinen, and Brant and Vincent discuss how the English neo-liberal government diminishes academic teacher education (which in policy documents is referred to as teacher training) in favour of increased control of schools and school leaders over teacher education, thus taking back teacher education to a traditional apprenticeship model. This model contrasts with the Finnish ideology (also in the chapter of Dickenson and Silvennoinen) in which teacher education is still firmly grounded within the university. A planning regime presupposes a predictable future and a belief in the need for long-term coordination. As a contrast, Sørhaug claims that reform regimes build on the notion that futures are quite unpredictable. Because of this claim, detailed planning and centralized and bureaucratic control are considered barriers to improvement and innovation. The global economic narrative of nations competing to prosper in an uncertain and unpredictable future is an example of a narrative that promotes an ideology of reform rather than a plan ideology. While plan regimes historically were quite hostile to the market and tried to contain it, various reform regimes have a more positive view on market mechanisms. In his portrait of reform regimes Sørhaug claims that in this mechanization of policy, mechanisms of reforms may serve as a substitute for politics. In their chapter, Maguire and George also describe how the dominant neo-liberal ideology impacts educational reforms that support marked mechanisms and alternative routes into teacher education in England. They critically address this ideology and its consequences through analysis and empirical investigations of the choices and experiences of teacher education students in a marked. These choices and experiences of the students challenge the political rhetoric and idealized aims of marketization. Plan regimes demand loyalty from the different actors to the plans and systems of coordination and control. In reform, coordination and control are based on leadership models rather than beliefs in systems or plans (Sørhaug 2003). As in so many sectors, the leadership role in education and teacher education is

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expanding and is considered critical for success and for the implementation of reform. Within reform, space is also supposed to be given to professional judgement. Self-regulatory practices are expected, given and created to reach political goals. This space is limited, though, by demand of loyalty to leadership and by the reform mechanism being politically installed (Sørhaug 2003). Leadership means inspiring and motivating employees and communicating the goals, mechanisms and expectations of professionalism. In Trippestad’s chapter, key mechanisms behind this construction of leadership and the professional as a reform object are critically analysed and questioned. Reform regimes presuppose employee influence on how tasks are to be performed and at the same time the self-regulatory practices of professionals are constantly checked and accounted for. The mechanisms of self-regulation and control can be contradictory and subversive for the work of the professionals. Throughout the chapters, impossible and often contradictory demands that are made on teacher educators, mentors in schools and students are critically discussed. Planning and reform regimes represent different forms of governance. The former has come to mean direct and hierarchical governance of centralization and bureaucratic control and the latter means reforms with mechanisms that expand leadership ideologies, demand self-regulatory practices and set up systems for the accountability of professionals. Although there is a dominant rationality shift from plan to reform regimes globally, there are grey zones, translations and interaction between these regimes (Sørhaug 2003). Different national challenges, distinct political and institutional arrangements and geological layers of pedagogical history, ideology and practices play vital roles in how travelling governing and reform ideas and mechanisms are implemented and how they affect the work of teachers and teacher educators. Through examples from different nation states, the authors in this book address a global climate of reform and governance in teacher education, but also present microclimates in the different countries in which we live. The background for this approach was an international conference held at Bergen University College in Bergen, Norway, in 2014. Teacher educators and researchers from fifteen different nations met and presented teacher education reforms and policies from their countries and discussed how these affected teacher education programmes and institutions. Although coming from different countries and continents, collective experiences with political rhetoric, reform and problem-definitions developed through the conversation. We identified the existence of what has been called ‘master ideas’ in reform literature (Rørvik and Pettersen 2015);

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ideas being internationally widespread, often with unclear origin and being ‘self-evident’ ideas that initiated reforms and are eclectic as they mix with local or national context. Not surprisingly, the self-evident character of these ideas is described in the chapters by authors from England, as Maguire and George and Brant and Vincent. The chapters in this book critically address influential master ideas behind the intensified struggle for teacher education within their own national and regional contexts. As policies travel and policy borrowing has become characteristic of educational reform and governance, it is important that policy learning is stimulated (Chakroun 2010). Although important traits of reforms seem to originate from the same master ideas, the chapters also show that the reforms, policy solutions and struggles for teacher education in different countries are diverse, which makes space for constructive comparison, critical reflection and learning.

Waves of struggle within teacher education Reforming teacher education does not happen in an orderly and peaceful way. Teacher education reforms are grounded in historical, economic and social struggles between competing ideas, values and disciplines. Such struggles are characterized by the claims of stakeholders about how teacher identities are best developed and how teacher education should support this. Struggles are productive formative forces raising fundamental questions that challenge the very nature of teacher education. Long and complex relationships between social, political and economic forces are interwoven with goals, structures and the content of teacher education. Until the last decades, teacher education has primarily been a national concern. From the time formal teacher education was first introduced – for most Western countries around the beginning of the nineteenth century – it has been an arena in which stakeholders within nation states have struggled to increase or secure their influence. The emergence of new stakeholders and transnational influences and the use of comparative scientific tools in governance made the picture complex. As reforms rarely replace former policies, but rather are stacked like geological layers on top of each other, the struggles, goals and responsibilities and work of teacher education have become substantial. As formulated by Ellis and McNicholl (2015: 4–5), former ways of understanding and living in the social

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world of teacher education clash with new understandings. The past lives on in the present in the education of teachers through sedimented cultural practices, teacher’s community and forms of professional identification. On the basis of global developments in teacher education, we identify three waves of struggle of teacher education reforms. While the first two reform waves were oriented nationally and were concerned with the building of teacher professionalism, the present wave is global and addresses standardization.

The first and second wave of teacher education reform The first teacher education reform wave from the 1960s through to the 1980s was a silent one (Tom 1997). Teacher education reform was mainly concerned with solving national disputes in a phase of massive expansion (Boli, Ramirez and Meyer 1985). It was closely interlinked with the needs of mass education related to reproduction of the nation state (Popkewitz 1998). This first wave of teacher education reform was thus concerned with the internal processes of teacher education, making it more coherent and effective in relation to its functions. Teacher educators and teacher education institutions commanded a high degree of autonomy. Governments trusted the institutions of teacher education to adapt teachers’ preparation to shifting social realities and demands (Hörner et al. 2015). The motivation for education reform as well as the concepts often originated from within teacher education institutions or the teaching profession (Archer 1979; Green 1990). Typically, issues of reform struggles in these phases were debates over content and teaching methods. Discussion revolved around topics such as the places where content and methods were to be taught to prospective teachers. Did placement at universities or colleges matter? How did certain content and methods affect the preparation of teachers? How much should student teachers learn about children, their development and learning, and pupil and education in their historical and social context (Criblez 2006)? During the first wave, reforms attempted to establish teacher education as normative professional preparation according to democratic and cultural values in many nation states. Teacher preparation left teaching to teachers. Student teachers were educated in pedagogy and subject knowledge so they were able to support their future pupils. The first reform wave in teacher education was mainly about rearranging the components of teacher education (content

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knowledge, school subject knowledge (the discipline in the school), philosophy of school subjects, subject matter-specific didactical knowledge and didactical knowledge) (Shulman 1986). Those reforms had been conceptualized as solutions to internally identified problems and challenges of professional work, but without altering the status quo of teacher education (Hoyle 1982; Casale 2003). Bringing together the above points produced arguments that revealed teacher education was able to evolve on its own premises. From the 1960s to the 1980s, we find the first major pupil assessment studies mainly driven by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The various assessment results, though, were not reflected in the first teacher education reform wave. Teacher education was not held responsible by policy stakeholders for assessment results, for being introverted or for being of poor quality. The political and public debate explaining the results apportioned the responsibility primarily to insufficient development of schools’ curricula (Dickson 2001; Werler 2012). The publication of the US report A Nation at Risk (Gardner 1983) can be identified as the start of a second teacher education reform wave (Mehta 2015). Originating from the United States, the report began a worldwide discourse on pupil underperformance. Today that discussion has evolved into the hugely influential PISA report on national receptions of the quality of respective educational systems in the public discourse and hence the proceeding national policymaking. Tröhler (2013: 154) identified a direct and immediate link between these reports and the comparative data as an instrument for policy use to establish standard-driven accountability measures in education systems, which were soon to affect teacher education. The national reports in the wake of PISA diagnosed and ‘detected’ problems in the state-supported school systems. Narratives of insufficient academic qualifications for teachers and poor quality of teacher educators (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2009) emerged in many nation states. The demand for ‘substantial improvement’ in teacher education programmes became a global trend (Gardner 1983: 22). The rise of accountability ideologies in teacher education also became an international trend. Efforts to change teacher education were to an increasing extent initiated by educational politicians and global stakeholders like OECD and the World Bank (Ball 2003; Connell 2013). The political discourse gained the privilege of defining the problem. More politically framed solutions rather than pedagogically framed ones emerged from this policy position. Teacher education institutions began

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to struggle with increased political attention and interventions. Governing ideologies such as Management by objectives and New Public Management reduced the former space for professional autonomy although with varying degrees of intensity internationally. The demand for more standardization of form, method and content within teacher education programmes became an international trend.

The third wave: Teacher education as a problem The third global wave of teacher education reforms can be located in the millennium shift and was highly influenced by comparative pupil assessment studies, such as PISA, TIMSS, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), comparisons of educational resource expenditure (Education at a Glance) and the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg 2006). Poor school quality and pupil performance were associated with failures of teacher education (OECD 2005; European Commission 2007; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 2007; World Bank 2009). New policy concerns for the efficacy of teacher education emerged as drivers of reforms. Questions were raised about how teacher education institutions prepared prospective teachers to teach pupils in schools effectively in the light of achievement standards and outcome-based ideology became core policy concerns. The policy identification of a direct causal relation between teacher education, student teacher, school and pupil achievement represented a paradigm shift in how to approach teacher education. This new mode of conceptualizing teacher education has both marginalized and challenged traditional methods of teacher education and characterized them as non-efficient (European Commission 2007; Schleicher 2012). Worldwide, colleges and universities began ‘restructuring their teacher education programs, closing some, opening others, and radically changing most’ (Fraser 2007: 1). International agencies, new stakeholders and more aggressive national educational reformers implemented design and accountability systems – often designed outside teacher education to both support and put more pressure on teacher education. New routes for teacher education, such as more school-based training programmes, emerged. Some governments are implementing academic teacher education; others strive towards standardized teacher education system. As a global trend, it seems that teacher education institutions struggle

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with increasing ambitions by governments to monitor and control teachers’ preparation. New accountability measures can be understood as a replacement of governments’ trust in teacher education. The many waves of reforming teacher education have left teacher education with a diverse and complex struggle coming from both within the profession and the outside, challenging and restructuring traditional modes of teacher education work, identity and position.

Struggling with teacher education reforms – the chapters In as far as we have moved into the third wave of teacher education reform we realize that several struggles regarding teacher education are connected to the reform movement. First, we identify that there is an ongoing struggle with the primacy of policy which refers to the politicization of teacher education. This development is accompanied by a new focus on the usefulness of teacher education, labelled in reform discourse as practice. Connected to those reform efforts we see that the teacher educator’s role and identity in higher education is highly contested. This is underlined by initiatives of governments that define teacher education by learning outcomes that undermine the self-understanding of teacher education. Second, we identify chapters that focus on the problems, challenges and rewards relating to the shift of teacher education into higher education and the struggles of teacher education and teacher educators within higher education. Finally, the struggles are connected to concerns about how teacher education (reform) can prepare the good teacher.

Struggle with a primacy of policy A vital idea underlying the present policy primacy is the construction of professionals as being selfish and orthodox, protecting privileges and resources rather than having client interests in mind (Trippestad 2009, 2011, 2016). The premise limits the theoretical possibility of teacher educators themselves being the driving force of positive change and improvement. Traditional actors and structures in teacher education are at present presented in political discourse as barriers to improvement and resistant to change (Ellis and McNicholl 2015). Public professionals have become de-legitimatized and challenged. As a result,

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ideologies of leadership and managerialism have supplanted primacy of pedagogy and teachers and teacher educators as sources driving reform and positive change. In The visionary position, Trippestad critically addresses idealized constructions of leadership and the de-legitimatizing of professionals underpinning reform and governance in ideologies such as Management by objectives and New Public Management. Using Karl Popper and The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) as a critical resource, he interprets these governing forms as Utopian social engineering, being political panic reactions to more open, rapidly shifting societies and globalization. Through rhetorical analysis of several Norwegian teacher education reforms, two distinct reactions are identified. Arrested state reforms typically try to arrest or control change by going to solutions of the past, restoring values, culture and identity through teacher education content and curriculum. Another distinct reaction is the installation of political-science regimes trying to control the future through scientific models, centralized policies, large-scale reforms, instrumental bureaucracies and research-based evaluations of reforms. A more research-based form of teacher education is at present installed through a comprehensive teacher education reform in Norway. As a constructive alternative to this top-down science-based strategy, Trippestad promotes piecemeal social engineering, involving professional experiences and interests in a more profound way in the development of reform. Through the book several chapters analyse and criticize the privileged position of policy in defining problems, creating solutions and reforming teacher education. Green, Reid and Brennan argue in their chapter that the escalation of political control and reform in and on teacher education is experienced as both abstract and chaotic from positions as teacher educators. Teacher education has been positioned as a mechanism for achieving ends determined elsewhere, from urgent political agendas and new social ideas with marginalizing effects on teacher educators and their influence. They describe the situation as a struggle for the soul of teacher education. They argue that there is an urgent need for attention to the everyday work of teacher educators, their students, and the school systems they serve – the practice of teacher education, which is to say, the ‘soul’ or animus that makes teacher education what it is. Too often, however, it is precisely this that is overlooked in discussions of accreditation, standards and international benchmarks. Abstracted, reified, denatured and increasingly devalued in policy, teacher education is indeed struggling to thrive as an intellectual and practical endeavour in a policy context that increasingly seeks to render it as an instrumental field.

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Contemporary policies focus on the policy of control and implementation strategies to improve teacher education, policy has now primacy, in practice and as practice, over theory. Having considered the current policy scene and rhetoric of reform vis-à-vis teacher education, Green, Reid and Brennan argue that we need to rethink teacher education through a lens of primacy of practice across a range of practice fields. The authors develop a richly conceptualized view of teacher education as a specific professional practice field that needs to be anchored in practice theory and philosophy. They demonstrate the use-value in rethinking teacher education, outlining challenges and dilemmas for teacher education policymaking in accordance with such a shift in practice.

Struggle with practice policies A distinct contrast to the development in Norway, with its focus on a more science-based teacher education, is the development in England. School-based or school-directed teacher education programmes like School Direct and Teach First expand into the former territory of academia, educational sciences and higher education institutions in England. The classic dichotomy of theory– practice in teacher education is reshaped through neo-liberal ideologies into a more vocational employment-based model of training located in schools. Vast resources are relocated from higher education to schools. Employers acquire new power over the development of teachers’ education. Teachers’ professional identity is reformed from primarily being that of an academic to demonstrating development of skills development within a wider assessment culture (Ball 2003; Brown, Rowley and Smith 2016). Ken Zeichner has argued that this rhetoric of practice embeds a vision of the role of teachers and teacher education as technicians rather than professionals, that this shift in practice directs attention away from reflection, theory and social justice in teaching (Zeichner 2012, 2014). The chapter by Maguire and George offers challenges to the practice – policy discourse. Through a qualitative empirical study, Maguire and George analyse experiences of trainee teachers who have ‘chosen’ between alternative or more practice-based pathways. They contrast real-life experiences of student teachers with the rhetorical claims that policy and various providers promote. The policy problem identified in teacher education is analysed as being constructed out of ‘multiple forms of constraint’ that focus on the alleged value of some pathways into teaching over others and out of the contested roles of schools

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and universities in this provision. In contrast, the authors pose a different representation of the policy problem grounded in the wider social context of failure to recruit and retain teachers in English schools. Maguire and George demonstrate an analytical position that sees policy ‘problems’ as being socially constructed. Rather than understanding governments as agents addressing or dealing with external, ‘out there’ problems, they argue that governments actively construct what is to count as a problem so that the policy they wish to implement can be introduced as the solution. The chapter analyses three key ‘techniques of governmentality’ driving recent reforms that shape new routes into teaching: the advocacy of consumer choice, the installation of diversity by allowing alternative ‘providers’ of pre-service teacher education and the move to deregulation alongside the erosion of public accountability. This shift towards practice in England is a development that contrasts with changes in teacher education in several other European countries that align themselves with the demands of the Bologna Process, where a four- or fiveyear university-led model is preferred and academic or professional skills are promoted as vital for future teachers to address the needs of (teacher) education in a knowledge society. The model of a more university-led or more academically structured teacher education programme has, in recent policy developments in many countries, also been inspired by Finland due to the high score of its education system in international rankings. In their chapter, Paul Richard Dickinson and Jaana Ilona Silvennoinen explore secondary initial teacher education in Finland and England against a backdrop of how, increasingly, international differences in educational outcomes have prompted comparisons between national educational approaches. The chapter outlines how current policies in England are widening the gap between these two approaches. The strong drive for a school-led system in England is juxtaposed against the strong university-led model in Finland where teacher training schools are merging with education departments of universities and teachers are employed by the universities. The chapter illustrates some of the international lessons that can be learnt about what constitutes effective initial teacher education.

Struggle of teacher educators in higher education The expansion of the role of higher education in educating teachers is another internationally recognized distinct policy trait. Teacher educators’ work has

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changed distinctively as more academic and research demands are made on them. This shift shapes new premises of professional power, work and relations. The development of the identity of teacher education and teacher educators is affected at profound levels (Swennen, Jones and Volman 2012). Increased emphasis on academic content goes in tandem with a more intensified political will to govern and audit higher education more rigorously, installing tools of governance, standards, comparison and measurement that bring both support and pressure for more research-based academic teacher education programmes. An important example of the expansion of higher education into teacher education can be found in South Africa. Since the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994, education was, and continues to be, one of the most important arenas for social reconstruction. A vast number of new policies and strategies have been introduced in an effort to increase the quality and capacity of the education system. The most significant policy revisions was the incorporation of colleges of education into higher education, the provision of bursaries in order to recruit academically strong candidates into teaching, and the introduction of a new national framework for teacher education qualifications. In her chapter, Maureen Robinson explores the material conditions of teacher education institutions, focusing in particular on the conditions that enable and constrain the dual imperatives of research and professional responsibilities as teacher education develops within a higher education system. The chapter outlines some of the constraints and possibilities of the ‘hybrid space’ that teacher educators in South Africa face between their research and professional responsibilities. It identifies leverage areas and institutional arrangements that could best contribute to the advancement of teacher education as a contributor to social justice in South Africa. The absorption of teacher education into higher education does not necessarily mean more academic freedom, authority and autonomy for teacher educators. In their chapter, Swennen and Volman describe the results of a study of recent struggles for the primacy over the teacher education curriculum (in a broad sense) in the Netherlands within the context of increasing governmental interference. The outcomes of the study reveal that, as a result of the interference of the Dutch government, the autonomy of teacher educators has eroded over the past ten years. The government implemented reforms in teacher education using laws and financial incentives. Teacher education became more academic because it moved into higher education. At the same time it became practice based as school-based teacher education programmes were introduced. Teacher

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education was also standardized with the introduction of compulsory knowledge bases and knowledge tests. Teacher educators play a minor part in the struggle for the curriculum. The reasons for the erosion of autonomy of teacher educators may be the ongoing negative public opinion about teacher education, the lower status of teacher education and teacher educators within higher education and the lack of professional and academic knowledge enabling teacher educators to engage in the debate. An interesting outcome of the research is that teacher educators acknowledge the interference of the government and the erosion of their autonomy and yet they accept it. Teacher educators as a professional group in the Netherlands today have, as a result, a limited voice in the struggle for the teacher education curriculum.

Struggle with learning outcomes Another challenge to the autonomy of teacher educators over the curriculum, content and methods is the growing influence of the learning outcome ideology promoted by the OECD and the European Bologna Process. This influence impacts and influences educational governance (Werler 2016) worldwide. As a global phenomenon, the ideology puts pressure on national knowledge traditions and traditional disciplinary knowledge within teacher education. The outcome ideology puts particular pressure on teacher education to change its pedagogical concepts from teaching to optimize pupils’ learning. The learning outcome ideology revolves around a concept of education for employability, seen as a person’s generative competence to adapt to a changing economic world (OECD 2004). The development of educational sciences in close relation to new outcomegoverning ideologies marginalizes the role of teacher education by presetting the principles for what suitable contents of teacher education are supposed to be and how they are to be evaluated. The chapter by Tobias Werler takes the recent teacher education reform in Norway as an example and explores how a particular understanding of learning sciences is used as a governance tool in teacher education. The chapter analyses how certain stakeholders think it is possible to achieve improved learning outcomes of pupils in school. The content of teacher education is to an increasing extent developed and defined in places other than teacher education. Teacher education as a pedagogical authority seems to be weakened. Critically, Werler argues that learning outcome ideologies suffer from

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one-sidedness by not considering student teachers’ and pupils’ development as citizens. Learning outcome policies support variable ideas of efficiency and help stakeholders to demote teacher education to a service provider. In her chapter, Beatrice Ávalos-Bevan describes the development of an outcome-oriented teacher education system in South American countries like Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú and Uruguay. The countries participated in UNESCO’s Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE) in 2014, a large-scale study of pupils’ learning achievement. Ávalos focusses mainly at links between characteristics of education and teachers and learning results and relates these to existing policies for teacher education. The chapter analyses how and in what way reform policies change institutional characteristics of teacher education programmes, such as intake quality of teacher candidates, as well as processes of curriculum making in teacher education, and the attempts to improve teacher educators’ capabilities. Furthermore, the chapter investigates changes that allow teachers to develop competences, which match the needs of disadvantaged pupils, the relationship between education’s focus on academic or practical training and the inadequate regulation of teacher education institutions. Ávalos demonstrates by comparison different South American countries how different teacher education systems respond to a uniform reform impulse. All over South America there is a strong endorsement of the importance of quality assurance mechanisms in teacher education. Furthermore, processes trying to secure improvement primarily through standards-based control and accountability mechanisms are a hallmark of teacher education in Southern America. However, because of inadequate support for teacher preparation, policies and practices have not been able to improve the conditions.

The struggle for the ‘good teacher’ The struggle for teacher education is primarily about what constitutes a good teacher. On a global scale, governments and other stakeholders are undertaking efforts to define the qualities of a good teacher and how the good teacher is created. Historically, and as one of the first, Spranger (1958) argues that true educators are ‘born’: they know what to do and how to do it. Consequently, teacher education should mainly teach about school subjects. Recent views on teacher education do no longer agree with this simplistic idea about teacher

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education, and Moore (2004) identifies three struggles regarding how good teachers are prepared. Teacher education should create charismatic individuals, competent craftsman based on practical training or reasonable, reflective practitioners. In their chapter, Katharine Vincent and Jacek Brant explore basic ideas of good teachers and teaching and investigate different approaches of how to achieve good teaching through a good system. They examine these ideas in the context of the changing landscape of initial teacher education in England, with reference to existing routes into teaching and the nature of school– university partnerships. The chapter offers a view about what can be achieved by universities involved in teacher education within a difficult policy environment. It argues that teachers working in teacher education in universities must develop ways of responding to critics, by finding ways to provide credible evidence of the effectiveness of their practice, enabling teacher educators to make strong claims about the effectiveness of their programmes. The authors argue how this will require effective research into the results of the different teacher education programmes, including comparative studies and programmatic research.

1

The Visionary Position: Critical Factors of Utopian Social Engineering in Education Reforms Tom Are Trippestad

Management of objectives as a master idea of reform An influential master idea in educational reforming and governance in Scandinavia is management by objectives (MBO). Master ideas are ideas that are widespread, often with unclear origin. They are ‘self-evident’, release reforms, and are eclectic (Rørvik and Pettersen 2014: 13–50). The origin of MBO as an idea and model is connected to Drucker’s (1954) governance theories. His original ideas underlined the need for working against fragmentation and individualization in corporations through harmonizing individual visions and goals with overarching visions and goals of the corporation. Key to this idea of governance was to formulate transparent, clearly understood goals that promoted corporation. Managers and professionals were empowered to a large extent to make their own goals in order to motivate and give productive control over their own work in order to reduce unproductive external governance and control. When MBO was gradually introduced in policymaking in Scandinavian countries during the 1980s, the model was turned into a representation of political and bureaucratic centralization and control (Utdanningsforbundet 2013; Johnsen 2007).1 During the 2000s it was later expanded and associated with New Public Management governance, being a part of or involving more mechanisms of markets, comparison, competition and consumer choice in public policymaking (Hernes, 2007). MBO, as it has historically evolved in Scandinavia, is representing a mixture of ideologies and rhetoric from right- and

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left-winged policy. It represents centralized policy and control bureaucracy and, at the same time, political use of comparison, competition and consumer choice in governance (Utdanningsforbundet 2013). MBO approaches to governance represent little political polarization and rivalry among politicians from left or right wing. It has become a dominant approach and reasoning among politicians and bureaucrats. Polarization and controversy, though, has not disappeared. New conflict lines between politics and profession have emerged as a result of this governing form (Trippestad and Roos 2015b). This chapter aims at criticizing key rhetorical formulas and social–epistemological constructions in this hegemonic reasoning while addressing some of the conflicts, problems and critical factors it implies in educational governance.

Kairos – a rhetorical perspective In classical rhetoric, persuasion is often seen as the work of kairos – that is, of the speaker’s skilful calculation of place (topos), time (kronos) and the public. In new rhetorical theory this concept has been developed to take into account the construction of the public, or the author’s model audience (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969). In the modern public sphere, the speaker is not literally facing the public. It is the speaker’s image of the public that governs their rhetorical choices. Such models or images of the public can be transformative. If the government has a model of an irrational public and caters for them accordingly, the public may come to act like it. As the above example shows, the construction of a public also implies a staging or construction of a speaker or governance and a power relation to the public. Social constructions are created (or repeated) as part of a rhetorical process. Power relations emerge that could be repressive or productive, critical or destructive (Trippestad 2009, 2011). Social constructions and power relations created in the rhetoric of reform will be the main theme of this analysis.2 How are the objectives, management and those to be managed rhetorically constructed in management by objective reforms? What are the normative, practical and democratic implications?

U – topos – the making of a visionary position In the white paper On Organization and Governance of the Educational Sector published in 1991, the principle of MBO governance was officially introduced

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for all education in Norway. MBO gives the political and bureaucratic level a superior epistemological role in the making and implementation of reform; being able to set good goals, be rational in planning, able to overview, monitor and assess the process and allocate the correct resources. Management by objectives demand that the superior authorities formulate the goals, communicate the goals down the system and analyse the results. The Ministry must install administrative and resource arrangements so that the goals can be achieved. Monitoring and assessment of results of operations in the subsidiary bodies will be an important part of management. (Ministry of Education 1990–1: 15)

MBO brought with it a visionary strategy for governance. The overarching goals were to be derived from ‘visions’; on skilful and inspired interpretations of the future (Trippestad 2009). Politicians were given high epistemological value as visionaries. It enhanced their power as they were implicated in problem identification and solution making, due to their insight into future needs and demands. A more rigorous bureaucratic process was introduced for implementing the political goals. Political and bureaucratic use of science played a vital part in monitoring and assessing the process and results. (Hernes 1979, 1998; Trippestad 2009). The ideology implied further that policymakers and bureaucrats would learn from their mistakes and adjust the course if necessary (Børmer 2014: 20). The theorist who has most thoroughly criticized visionary strategies and governance systems similar to MBO is Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (Popper 1995a,b). He defines such approaches as utopian social engineering (Popper 1995a: 18–34, 157–68). Popper asks: Are speculative interpretations of the future, smart starting points for governance and reforms? Can such reforms be planned? What are the epistemological dangers of such an approach? Do politicians and administrators really learn from mistakes given such powers? The first problem with this reform concept is to predict the future or find a realistic ideal model on which the goals are to be set. In general, politicians make visions of the future unrealistic and grand. Reforms are often oversold (Cuban 2001), making them hard for professionals to implement and find the means that work in practice. Visions and political goals can be part of a strategy for persuading the public or for outcompeting other parties, rather than for setting precise and realistic goals for planning and implementation. The distance between formulation and realization is usually difficult to overcome (Lindensjö and Lundgren 2000).

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If the vision of the future turns out be wrong and the visionary a fake, everything that should rationally follow the vision breaches (Rolf, Ekstedt and Barnett 1993). MBO’s approach seems logical and rational as a reform process. It is, however, a speculative high-risk strategy at its starting point. MBO has ‘prophecies’ or ‘prophets’, with luck as its basic premise. MBO in itself has no theory on how visions are made, how visionaries could be selected or how futures can be predicted. Popper claims that utopian engineering gives away power to unchecked sovereignty in governance (Popper 1995a: 121, 120–37). A good example of unchecked sovereignty in Norwegian school and teacher education reforms came shortly after MBO was introduced in Norway, through a charismatic and rhetorically talented Minister of Education, Gudmund Hernes. He was a professor of sociology and a skilled scholar in economic sociology and political power studies. Hernes reformed the entire educational system from kindergarten to universities in a few short years. He had himself made an official analysis of higher education called With Knowledge and Will (Universitets- og høyskoleutvalget and Hernes 1988). A very limited analysis was made, though, on the rest of the sector, its strengths and problems. Little research had been made nationally on the entire education system. An OECD report released in 1988 stated that the Norwegian authorities had a serious lack of data and knowledge of their own education system. In her PhD thesis, Nina Volckmar interviewed Hernes on what knowledge basis he had for these grand reforms. The education minister answered that it was his own childhood experience of going to school and his deep model insights in Marx, Weber and Durkheim that had formed the basic concepts of reform (Volckmar 2004: 197). In reality, then, visions were constructed from nostalgia and old sociological models rather than from divine inspiration of the future. Is this a good approach for reforming a significant and complex sector? The example shows the critical factor of unchecked sovereignty – of letting visionary leaders set premises for reforms in large and complex sectors. As the case shows, visions sometimes come from past experiences, and hence are partial and personal, rather than solid interpretations of the future.

The arrested state In part Popper holds the origin of utopian engineering to be a panic reaction that emerges when a society opens, becoming complex and more dynamic. To control

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the influx and uncertainty of openness, policy acquires traits of what Popper calls the arrested state (Popper 1995a: 21, 86–119). Past values and solutions are used to arrest and control change.3 Arrested state policies set a golden age as a contrast to a present critical condition. The present is interpreted as decline from an original idealized good state. Restoration of this golden age becomes the core of reform. Past values and solutions are given epistemological superiority because they are considered more true, robust, real, and unchangeable (Popper 1995a: 18–56). The notion of a lost golden age, together with a present-day decay, construct problems that need to be addressed by reforms and policy. However, are these problems real?

Visions as erasers A significant danger with MBO and its use of visions and overarching goals is the potential for what has been called the Nirvana-mistake in policymaking (Demsetz 1969: 1). The Nirvana-mistake is made when politicians compare real phenomena with idealized and unrealistic alternatives. Overambitious goals and idealized solutions cast shadow over present solutions. Unrealistic goals construct artificial needs for reforming institutions, agents or professions that, in fact, could be seen as functioning well if they were interpreted with realistic measurements. Misguided political models have reality transforming effects when acted upon, because actions take place in a real world. In Maguire and Georges’ later chapter, this particular ‘policy problem’ is further discussed on the English scene in reforming teacher education. Teachers and teacher education have, in particular, seemed vulnerable to Nirvana-mistakes in policymaking over recent decades. In the mythology of the knowledge society, education is seen as a hub for improving all sectors. Ideals from many sectors are imposed on education. Education, therefore, also becomes responsible for many problems in the different sectors. In being governed by many and idealized visions or goals, teacher education is set under constant critique and reform-demands from a wide array of stakeholders (Roos and Trippestad 2015b), a pressuring problem analysed and discussed on the global and Australian scene in the following chapter by Green, Reid and Brennan. Because teachers are seen as the key factor in improving education, teaching and teacher education becomes of particular political interest, under the belief that improving this aspect can improve entire educational systems (Ellis and McNicholls 2015: 13–17).

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In the reforms of the 1990s the dystopia of a population falling behind in a future global economic race between nations was set up. This narrative seem to be present in many of the countries we represent thorough the chapters in this book. For Norwegian policies a key vision was to create a competitive, more knowledgeable population through its educational system (Universitets- og Høyskoleutvalget and Hernes 1988). Another vital vision was the reinstalment of a harmonious society built on common references and associations, allowing for democratic participation, effective communication within its population and protection of the national cultural heritage against the forces of globalization (Volckmar 2004; Trippestad 2003, 2009).

Construction of crisis On the basis of such Nirvana visions, both economic and cultural crises were constructed rhetorically, requiring reforms and more government. The evermorespecialized worker population would speak their own specialized language. Contrary to Marx’s prediction, they would not develop a class-consciousness or organic solidarity with the nation. Professions would instead develop a selfish loyalty to their speciality. A society in strike constantly fighting over privileges and resources could be the result, threatening the global competitiveness of Norwegian society. As counter measures, teacher education, schools, teachers and curriculum were expected to foster protestant work ethics in pupils. Students would be made to work tolerantly together and share the result of their work in solidarity (see Ministry of Education 1993: 16–24). Another counter measure was to form a strong national identity and language through schools and teacher education in order to prevent a Babel situation. A common education based on a clear and forceful national canon would prevent the negative effect of modern specialist identities and language and their limited world views (Ministry of Education 1993: 25–9; Trippestad 1999). A detailed canon of national myths, songs, stories, pictures and history was set up in primary and secondary education by expert curriculum groups firmly controlled by the ministry – a policy analysed as both a knowledge solidary line (Volckmar 2004) and more critically as Command Humanism (Trippestad 2009). A restorative and patriotic reaction became a typical trait of the policies of the 1980s and 1990s (Telhaug 1992, 1995). The visions and reforms for teacher education in the late 1990s were derived and built on these politically constructed crises. Teacher education should

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train teachers to have and give a broad education to counter the forces of differentiation in society, as well as the relativistic values of postmodernism, and restore harmony. A general teaching model was introduced as an important solution for the management of change and renewal in a rapidly shifting society (see the white papers NOU 1996: 22; Stortingsmelding nr.48 1996–7). A new half-year mandatory subject matter of Christianity, Religion & Lifestyle was implemented to counter postmodernism and secure a humanistic and Christian heritage in a growing relativistic and value-confused society. The negative effects of these crisis constructs and solutions were reforms that set teacher education under more strict national governance. The arrested state traits left teacher education, schools and teachers unsupported for a decade in terms of addressing crucial and real problems in their present situation. Within teacher education and schools, multicultural competencies were underdeveloped and down-prioritized. Another negative effect was a theory shift of the entire educational system, today considered the main reason for substantial dropout rates in vocational training in Norway. Popper argues that the use of golden age mythology creates policies and reform that do not understand the past. Faults and mistakes of the past are, therefore, transferred into new solutions. Because the present is interpreted through misunderstanding the past, the present is not very well understood either. Well-functioning solutions of today could be misinterpreted as part of decay. Real problems that need to be addressed could easily be ignored or not discovered (Rolf, Ekstedt and Barnett 1993). Misguided visions not only create crisis but could also erase real problems and solutions in reforms and governance.

Political holism Another key trait of utopian engineering is its emphasis on making large-scale comprehensive reforms. Every piece should be interpreted or solved as a part of a whole picture. The report that introduced utopian social engineering in the Norwegian reform regime was With Knowledge and Will, led by Gudmund Hernes, later to become the education minister in 1990, a position where he forcefully implemented the strategy: But the tasks the country faces cannot be resolved by bitwise improvements. The situation must be faced by a fundamental reorientation under a unifying

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The Struggle for Teacher Education perspective) … ad-hoc decisions, where fundamentally important decisions are seen as solutions to clean ‘practical’ issues … has … confusing, unintended and often undesirable effects. Therefore there must be a solid common framework, which the individual decisions and the order of them can be compared. (Universitets- and høyskoleutvalget and Hernes 1988: 7, 20)

Such a unifying perspective entails rhetoric where ideals of the whole, integration, everything seen together are seen as the only rational approach to reform. Popper calls such approaches political holism (Popper 1995a: 80–9). It installs a social architecture in governance and reform that implies power positions with negative democratic implications (Trippestad 2009). Political holism elevates a superior leadership or elite to a position from where they purportedly see more of the whole picture than others do. Less rational people or ‘interest groups’ only see their part, but are blind to how their part is related to the whole (Popper1995a: 120–68).

The public and its problems A new and negative construction of the public and professional agents came into play during reforms in the 1990s on the basis of economic theory. Professionals were considered homo economicus – as selfish agents trying to maximize profit for as little effort as possible. In this constant struggle and demand for resources, power or prestige among agents, there would never be enough resources or positions to share to make them satisfied. Politics was accordingly defined as regulating this constant war over resources and power among selfish agents (Eide and Hernes 1987: 11). Negotiation and democracy was interpreted as a facade hiding self-interest and the fight for more privilege and power among professionals. In addition, because organizations and professions had succeeded historically with such struggles, they had gained a lot of privileges, rights and resources (Hernes and Martinussen 1980: 25–9; Hernes 1984). Any political action of reforming the sector would release a reaction of professional orthodoxy and scepticism towards change (Trippestad 2009).

Construction of leadership and its problems The negative construction of the public and professionals formed basic premises for a new and idealized leadership model. Leaders had to fight life views derived from self-interest, irrational debate and professional conservatism that opposed

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true change. Only true leaders could see and represent the true client interest of the particular public service. In this social architecture of reform, it became of less value to include professionals in reform making as it was perceived that participation of professionals would threaten reforming efficiently, consistently and according to visions and plans (ibid.). Such governing axioms lie behind the abstracted, denatured and devaluated state of professionals in forming teacher education in several chapters of this book. Examples of the widespread of such managerial ideologies are exemplified and discussed in the chapters on England by Maguire and George and in Australia by Green, Reid and Brennan. During the last thirty years these tenets of MBO have been the underlying theoretical premises turning reforms from negotiations, participation and pieceby-piece approaches, to more managerial processes with expanding political and administrative control over professions. In Norway, the channels of negotiations between politicians, education department, interest groups and organizations were shut down, and public debate and hearings had marginal influence on the reform processes (Telhaug 1995; Volckmar 2004; Trippestad 2003, 2009). The problem with this economic understanding of motives in public debate, negotiation and professional conduct is the practical need to include professional competence in the realization of reform. The theoretical trust of professional competence is undermined by the distrust of professional motives. As a complete contrast, there is a strong rhetorical demand of trust in leadership motives and competence in the reform model. Although leadership is given a decisive role in MBO, it is theoretically unclear why leadership does not fall under the spell of the homo- economicus model; being egoists, orthodox and blinded by interest or part perspectives. For the model to work rhetorically, the construction of exceptional abilities and higher motives in leadership is necessary. Popper points historically to many such exceptionality models – the great composer, the great architect, the artist genius and the philosopher king. Popper claims these leadership models to be undesirable in a democracy. A composer, architect or artist, in general, does not like their work being tampered with by others, and hence are poor starting points for negotiation and participation in democracies (Popper 1995a: 165–8). When teachers, teacher educators and their organizations are rhetorically constructed negatively, they cannot be the directive force of positive change.4 For change, leadership is, therefore, necessary. An expanding leadership ideology has been introduced during the last thirty years, giving more rigorous governance and control over teacher education to politicians, ministry and new

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departments. Deans in teacher education have been given an expanding formal power and control within teacher education. Dean schools are expected to train deans in better governance. Different teacher education institutions in Norway have constructed corporations for making national schools for principals in the primary and secondary school system, designed to engender better management. In the leadership market in education, new organizations such as BI and Handelshøyskolen (private and public business schools in Norway) have taken a substantial market in training school principals to be leaders. Themes such as classroom management have expanded into the disciplines in teacher education designed to make teachers and teacher students into leaders. In addition, theories of self-leadership or self-regulation have gained substantial influence in pupil pedagogy.

The dilemma of middle leaders The definition of politics as regulating resource battles and manufacturing consent created a double leadership role in the system: to both control scarce resources and to be a pedagogical leader implementing a comprehensive and detailed curriculum.5 The strategy marginalized the influence of teachers, teacher educators, parents, public debate and organizations regarding the content, processes and the means of education and in the governance system (Trippestad 2009). In practice, though, principals became economic leaders more than pedagogical leaders, which undermines the model. In the research project The teacher role seen from the position of the teachers, approximately 2,500 teachers were asked about their experience with the modern principal role. Of these teachers, 55 per cent described the modern principal role as distanced, with lack of mutual respect and trust. One in three teachers was uncertain whether he or she could seek pedagogical advice and counselling. The teachers experienced principals who withdrew from teaching and subject matter; principals who were rarely there when teaching was taking place. The teachers also experienced lack of support when problems arose that they could not solve themselves. The principals, on their side, reported their everyday life as being under pressure of time and strict economic conditions, and with an ever-expanding queue of challenging tasks, and suggested that pedagogy was being down-prioritized (Skaalvik and Skaalvik 2013). Middle-level leaders (as principals) are key factors required for reforms to succeed. According to Popper, utopian engineering will have the tendencies

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to choose middle-level leaders who are loyal to plans and are easy to govern. People who are good at being led will not necessarily be very good at leading others (Popper 1995a: 134–5). Reforms will tend to collapse in practice in such instances. Loyalty will turn inwards and upwards in the organization, rather than towards their sector’s concrete problems and support for the first lines of work. As such, utopian social engineering will weaken the organization’s practical ability to solve its most important tasks.

Political-scientific governing regimes According to Popper, another panic reaction to a more open and rapidly shifting society is the political belief that the future can be controlled through grand plans, big reforms, science and bureaucracy.

The problem with the dictator’s successor Grand plans or designs take a long time to succeed. Big reforms, are therefore, problematic in democracies because political leadership often changes before the reform has the possibility of reaching its goals. Popper calls this problem the problem of the dictator’s successor (Popper 1995a: 167, see also 120–37). When leadership changes, new leadership will rarely have loyalty to or agreement with the previous regime’s reforms. A lot of work and resources in reform efforts are potentially wasted. Big reforms will not sufficiently take into consideration learning – that both negative and positive experiences with the reform’s goals and processes will take place and might demand corrections along the way.

Wholeness, critique and change of circumstance The results of grand plans must be viewed in the long term. It is, therefore, hard to accept critique part-way through. Big reforms easily become rigid, orthodox or irrelevant when the situation changes. They are hard to adjust without making significant resource allocations and substantially changing the power relations. Democratic ideals of participation will often be set aside. Political holism and utopian engineering make the wholeness of the plan important and part adjustments ideologically difficult without affecting the totality and wholeness. Although the plans could be science based, in implementation scientific ideals

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of insecurity, critique and discussion will need to be set aside for a long time in order to succeed with the plan. In Norway, the rhetoric of reforms in the 1990s used experimental metaphors and scientific authority for outlining the methods of reform (Sjøberg 1994). In practice, the size and number of reforms made it impossible to control or research for cause and effect (Trippestad 2009). When the government-financed research became critical of many different elements and unintended results of the reforms, politicians and the Ministry of Education reacted ideologically, ignored the results, fired some of the researchers and criticized others publicly (Blichfeldt, Lauvdal and Deichmann-Sørensen 1998; Trippestad 2009). This historical example shows critical features of a political-scientific regime. First, it creates an exclusive conversation between educational scientists and politicians that forms the premise, goals and social architecture of governance and reform. Corporative channels, public discourse and negotiations have little influence. When science then records negative effects, policymakers will potentially ignore scientific results if they contradict political ideology.

Robinson Crusoe Syndrome This unwillingness to be corrected by criticism is a typical trait of utopian regimes (Popper 1995a: 157–201). This is partly due to what Popper calls the Robinson Crusoe problem (Popper 1995b: 219–27). Robinson Crusoe more or less developed his own science without the possibility of being criticized or corrected in a friendly – hostile social public sphere of science. In utopian regimes, leaders will potentially end up in desolate epistemological islands (Popper 1995b: 212–58). Because inner democracies in the organization are strategically weakened and the public is seen as a strategic space for promoting reforms rather than discussing them, the ability to accept criticism, learn and interact becomes weak in utopian leadership. The quality of information for governance and reform becomes scientifically poor, democratically and socially (Trippestad 2009).

Rational irrationalism, reinforced dogmatism and scapegoating The Robinson Crusoe problem typically implies what Popper calls reinforced dogmatism in governance (Popper 1995a: 157–201, 1995b: 215–16). Instead of holding oneself accountable as a senior leader for negative results, belief in

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the dogmas is strengthened and conciliated when criticism occurs. Rather than learning from criticism, utopian leaders have the tendency to go from rational to irrational in governance (Popper 1995a: 157–68, 1995b: 224–58). When desired results are absent, the causes could be explained by other parties’ lack of competence, selfish interest or conspiracies in the form of unions or organizations (Popper 1995b: 95–7). To govern conspiracies, irrational or wrongly motivated people, strong use of power and irrational means are necessary for leaders who are implementing reforms. According to Popper, the most rational leaders often end up using the most irrational means. As such, utopian leaders might create exactly the irrational thinking and behaviour they try to overcome. Scapegoating and conspirator hunts for causes lower down in the system become typical. Power is centralized, responsibility decentralized.

Science expansion and disciplinary specialization in teacher education The 2000s represented an ideological shift from left to right in education policies in Norway, still with MBO as its primary governing form. Several reports showed that the objectives and visions from the 1990s were far from being met. In addition, the Programme for International Student Assessment affected public and political discourse substantially, a phenomenon addressed in several chapters in this book and in particular in Werler’s chapter. The Norwegian primary school system was seen as not providing the desired social mobility, basic skills or knowledge, and was criticized for being mediocre in a global comparison. Although follow-up research, evaluation reports, a number of critical researchers and public debates had pointed to substantial problems with the governance system and the reform regime (Blichfeldt, Lauvdal and DeichmannSørensen 1998; Haug 1996; Koritzinsky 2000; Volckmar 2004; Trippestad 2009), schools, teachers and the then-teacher programmes were blamed as core causes of key problems. This is a good example of reinforced dogmatism and the Robinson Crusoe syndrome among leaders not taking responsibility and where scapegoating becomes a tendency, as Popper points out. As a result, primary, secondary and vocational educational institutions were again reformed in a new grand reform called the Knowledge – promotion (Kunnskapsløftet), which was implemented in 2006. Few lessons were learnt from last reform. New leadership

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felt little loyalty to the last reform, the problem of the dictator’s successor became a trait and many efforts and hard work from the last reform was wasted.

A new research-based teacher role In the white paper The Teacher, the Role, and the Education (St.meld. nr.11. 2008–9), a new teacher education and teacher role was developed. At its core was a shift from the general teacher ideal of the 1990s to a more specialized teacher. The national teacher education reform demanded more specialization from professionals. What truly distinguished the new reform was the belief in a more research-based teacher education (Werler 2014: 114–16). Most teacher education institutions were analysed as being weak as research institutions. Several mechanisms of science were installed more rigorously to improve teacher education. More researchers should be working in teacher education. Subjects had to be more research based. Student teachers were to be more involved in research. Teacher education institutions were also expected to contribute with more and relevant research to teaching in schools. The instalment of scientific and academic mechanisms to improve teacher education seems to be a trait in many countries in recent teacher education reforms, with Norway being the extreme case. The chapters on the Netherlands by Swennen and Volman, South Africa by Robinson and Latin America by Ávalos all demonstrate and analyse the consequences of academization as a strategy in improving teacher education. A two-faced strategy of scientific mechanization often seems to be the case in reform: using scientific mechanisms to improve teacher education from within and using scientific approaches and comparisons to gain better and more comprehensive governance data for authorities directing reforms more efficiently. In Norway a research-based teacher education was highlighted as a vital key in managing the shifts and development of a fast-changing, more knowledgebased society (St.meld. nr.11. 2008–9: 9–36). Another example of reinforced dogmatism was the demand of even more leadership in this reform, now in research. The white paper demanded stronger and more strategic leadership in education institutions to support and strengthen research. National research programmes like Praxis in Education (PRAKUT), Education 2020 and FINNUT were set up to provide more research capacity in the educational sector, and at the same time produce more robust and relevant data for governance of the sector. Research schools for teacher educators, the Norwegian National

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Research School in Teacher Education (NAFOL) and the National Graduate School in Educational Research (NATED) were set up to support the education of PhDs with relevance for developing teacher education and teacher education organizations as research institutions. This political-scientific regime is at present fast expanding in Norwegian teacher education. New reform is again taking place. In the political strategy The Teacher Promotion: Teaming up for the Knowledge School (Ministry of Education 2014), a five-year teacher education programme is planned to be implemented in 2017. All teacher students will need to get a master’s degree. Teacher education institutions will be required to document research capacities and research personnel in order to be accredited (Ministry of Education 2015; Rammeplanutvalg 2015). If these institutions cannot establish enough research competence around master’s in Mathematics, Norwegian and English (two of these three), they will not be accredited. At present, several teacher education colleges in Norway face the possibility of being shut down if they do not meet the new quality criteria of research and competence.

A science race in teacher education New policies have resulted in a science race between the teacher education institutions in establishing PhDs (if you are allowed to provide PhDs, you become self-accredited at master’s level as an institution), moving resources from teaching to research, employing more academic staff and raising formal competence internally in the institutions. This ongoing reinforced dogmatism of science and scientific leadership is rarely checked against the effects and quality on teaching, relations to the field of practice and the practice of societal mandate. The science race in and between teacher education institutions may have alienating effects both on educators coming from the work place and on experienced teacher educators with little formal research background. At the same time, parallel reforms are being implemented. The Norwegian government is forcing a new structure in higher education, stimulating fusions of universities and colleges to form larger institutions under a master idea that this raises many standards and benefits the global competitiveness of the nation. A new finance structure is established simultaneously, leaving the institutions uncertain of the economic basis of the new reforms. In addition, a new governing system and organization are to be introduced for the entire sector. The size, numbers and complexities of all these reforms are good examples of

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scientific control going astray in practice, as Popper argues, despite the ideals of controlled experiments that utopian social engineering entails. All the parallel reforms make it hard to avoid undesirable and unintended effects. It also makes it hard to systematically investigate and improve the system.

Khronos – timing, rhythm and order of reform One of the most paradoxical features of these big reforms in Norway is the strategic use of speed and time in development and implementation of the reforms to outmanoeuvre resistance. The calculated timing is a good example of rational irrationalism, described by Popper. Governments use time instrumentally to overcome irrational, orthodox and resistant actors. Such strategy, though, irrationalizes the field. The strategic use of time has undermined the legitimacy of the reforms for education professionals on whom the reform is dependent for success (Sjøberg 1994; Slagstad 1995, 1998; Trippestad 2003, 2009; Følgegruppen 2013). National evaluations of the reforms have repeatedly shown that topdown strategies, combined with the strategic use of tempo, create failures in the entire chain of pedagogical content in the educational system. It weakens the quality of planning, the construction of the curriculum and subject matter, the textbooks, the development of leader programmes and the training programmes for teachers (Blichfeldt, Lauvdal and Deichmann-Sørensen 1998; Haug 1996; Koritzinsky 2000; Volkmar 2004; Trippestad 2009). Although criticized by prestigious evaluations, this reform practice has not changed during the last twenty-five years and demonstrates the barriers of accepting and acting on criticism that Popper analyses to be a typical trait of utopian reform regimes. This strategic use of time is also a perfect example of Popper’s point on how big reforms have undemocratic features and will need to neglect participation and criticism and set aside public debate in strategic efforts to succeed.

Time and the reform assembly line Teachers and teacher educators do not get adequate time to develop pedagogy, content and methods to achieve the reform’s goals, when reforms are implemented too fast politically and administratively. This kind of a state seems to be a global trend in teacher education. Chaos, alienation and confusion among professionals may occur as result of speedy reforms – the three states that several

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of the chapters in this book address when describing teacher educators living out the paradoxical effects of speed, size and number and the contradictory reform mechanisms being installed upon them. Reforms are generally structured as an assembly line, where different parts do a job in a hierarchical order. Each part of the process is given a theoretical time to do the job before the next in line can do its. Politicians make visions and calculate time biased towards parliament and administration. Administration is then supposed to make laws, curriculums, frameworks, etc. before these work packages are left to professionals to implement. The problem with this process is that politicians and bureaucrats rarely plan their own time effectively, yet the timeline does not change. Instead of an assembly line, reform turns into parallel processes where all those involved work at implementing change at the same time, in overlapping processes. It is the effect of these uncontrolled parallel lines that create the true effect and the reality of the reform. It creates uncoordinated, ad hoc solutions despite the rhetoric of wholeness, planned and rational approaches. The timing, rhythm and order of reform mechanisms underestimate the practical logic and appropriate time needed for developing quality and pedagogy. This marginalization of pedagogical time for teacher educators becomes a crucial factor in developing quality content in reforms and may become subversive to reform goals of making better education (Blichfeldt, Lauvdal and DeichmannSørensen 1998; Koritzinsky 2000; Volckmar 2004; Trippestad 2009).

Problems as solutions As a contrast to utopian social engineering, Popper argues for a different approach, which he names piecemeal social engineering (Popper 1995a: 157–68, 1995b: 212–23). For Popper, the ability to deal with problems, uncertainty and an open society becomes of vital importance. Open debates in public spheres are needed to create and distribute judgement, legitimize sovereignty and install basic abilities to learn and correct mistakes in governance (Popper 1995b: 212– 23).

Science as a method and the need for a public character For Popper, scientific objectivity is necessary in this knowledge process, but this objectivity lies not in unchecked sovereignty or in individual subjectivity, but

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in science as method and in its social construction of making knowledge and addressing problems. Policies should imitate the openness of science. Reforms should be based on the process, spirit and sociality of the scientific method: A scientific approach to reforms in open society must be based on the social sides of scientific method. And, ironically enough, objectivity is closely bound up with the social aspect of scientific method, with the fact that science and scientific objectivity do not (and cannot) result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be ‘objective’, but from the friendly- hostile co-operation of many scientists. Scientific objectivity can be described as the inter-subjectivity of scientific method. (Popper 1995b: 217)

Initiating an open public character is vital to allow for such constant critical discussion (Popper 1995b: 217–23). Different interests must be recognized as holding important information and competence, and should not be viewed only as actors with selfish or narrow interests. Reforms must allow for struggle of interest and value this struggle as a way of producing knowledge. Individual’s interests must not be viewed as selfishness, but as commitment, competence and investment – all elements needed to make reforms work. By keeping the public and reform – process open, different interests will participate and deliver different competence and understandings to the reforms. They will be trained in negotiating and finding solutions. Society’s capacity to solve important problems will increase. Problems will be viewed from different angles, arguments will be sharpened and the quality of information will be improved through the process. The premises are the actor’s abilities and attitudes to both deliver their opinions and at the same time accept public criticism and friendly-hostile inquiry of these opinions.

Reforms should solve problems, not chase visions It is vital that reform is directed at solving the most serious social and economic problems of its time, instead of striving for perfection or achieving great visions of the future. By directing reforms at solving the pressing social problems of society, problems will be gradually eliminated piece by piece. Systematic work against injustice and social problems will more likely be supported by the many than the establishment’s appeal to achieve a few great ideals. Piecemeal social engineering will typically mean taking a pragmatic view of how reform should address concrete problems. Reforms should be characterized by continuous

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processes of testing and trying to involve many participants. Solutions made through such processes will have a broad appeal among participants.

Historical criticism of piecemeal social engineering Piecemeal social engineering, as suggested by Popper, has met historical criticism that needs to be carefully balanced. According to Bertil Rolf (1993: 93–115), participant democracy can give complex and long governing processes that may address vital problems in society to late. Interest and negotiation will have tendencies to emerge when interests are affected being re- active rather than pro – active, not addressing future challenges sufficiently or properly. The results of many and complex negotiations can create contradictory compromises and end up in confusing institutional arrangements and governing signals. Because problems are dealt with as conflict of interest through negotiation, facts, experience, optimal solutions and intellectual processing may be subordinated to negotiation interests and the strengths of organizational power of particular interest groups, according to Rolf (1993). The outcome of negotiations does not guarantee a good solution. Future interest groups or weak groups without any negotiating power or organizational representation may suffer in a piecemeal social engineering model. ‘Experience’ has a key epistemological role in the legitimacy of piecemeal social engineering. The claim of experience, though, may hide egotistical self-interests, prejudice and limited world views. Actors may exploit the theoretical freedom and trust given to their ‘experience’. A negotiation ideology may produce conflict between organizational, professional and academic interests. Such conflict may have practical implications undermining the trust of academic standards and practices. According to Rolf (1993), the pragmatist piecemeal knowledge view can be quite alien to the knowledge ideals and intellectual approaches of higher academic institutions.

Advantages of piecemeal social engineering Utopian social engineering promotes speculation, unchecked sovereignty and mythological trust in leadership in governance and reforms. It may turn out though, that leadership self-interest, narrow worldviews and political prejudice against population and profession form the most critical factors in succeeding with reforms. Great visionaries make great mistakes.

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An advantage of piecemeal social engineering is that if these types of reforms go wrong, the damage is limited. The open processes of debate are a safety net against disastrous solutions, even if they do not produce the best solutions. Piecemeal reforms are easier to correct and adjust than utopian strategies. They will have less potential for conflict because agreement on what the biggest problems are will be easier to achieve than agreement on big values, visions or ideals. For Popper, the judgement of experience is necessary in these processes, but by this he does not mean personal experience. Experience should be institutional. The public character must be a common language, a set of observations, experiments and problems that all can investigate, test or repeat. Institutions from the different sectors must develop the ability to be challenged and to receive knowledge and experiences that are presented in the public domain. The institutions have a duty to facilitate public reactions, give memory to discussions to improve society piece by piece. In such a society bad solutions, opinions and moderate intellect will also live side by side with excellent ones. This is a state we need to accept in an open society, according to Popper. By creating dynamic social institutions, discussions and solutions will gradually improve; opinions will change and can be modified by later scientific insight. Such a process makes public control and transparency possible and does not only limit the governing opinions to a small circle of specialists dreaming of perfection and being resistant to criticism they consider irrational. In his analysis of and suggestions for desired reform regimes in open societies, Popper tries to address the challenging needs of a changing society dealing practically with constantly emerging problems. It is a method of creating solutions that are broadly anchored in the population and at the same time raising the competence of the population to solve problems. It is a strategy of foremost removing the worst problems systematically and gradually improving society. It is an attempt at creating the intellectual basis for an open society, where critical inquiry and debate are possible and have deliberate functions. The open society is a splendid mandate for teacher education and as a concept for working with students in teacher education with the goals of making teachers agents of an open society. Reforms should install in them the capacities and problem-solving skills for dealing with the relativism, uncertainty and risk of living in our times, and for being open to criticism and challenges laid upon them through public discourse.

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Notes 1 The Union of Education of Norway has produced a comprehensive report on management by objectives governance in Norway, showing its origin as idea, its particular Scandinavian history, its relation to NPM and summaries on important research and researchers on the subject in Norway. See Utdanningsforbundet (2013). 2 For elaboration of this style of rhetorical analysis, see (Trippestad 2009, 2011, 2014). 3 Michael Apple has analysed similar arrested state tendencies in educational policies internationally under the term conservative modernization (see Apple 2006, 2015). 4 For examples and analysis of the expansion of leadership ideology versus professionalism in public policy, reform and governance in welfare states, see books like Clarke, Gewitz and McLaughlin (2000), New Managerialism, New Welfare? 5 In LUIS – the leadership course for modern principals that came as a prolonged arm of the ideology – it was a key goal to train principals not to have identities as teachers. Instead, they should be pedagogical leaders and ideological guardians of the national curriculum. They should also become tough employers balancing budgets and making good use of scarce resources. In practice, local authorities prioritized the economic goals in MBO, making the role more bureaucratic and more difficult to be a pedagogical leader.

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Challenging Policy, Rethinking Practice: Struggling for the Soul of Teacher Education Bill Green, Jo-Anne Reid and Marie Brennan

Introduction The ongoing and escalating struggle for control of teacher education in countries around the world reflects the difficult and contested position of teacher education within what is experienced as a chaotic churn of reform. In countries all around the world, government has sought to constrain and ‘improve’ teacher education in the interests of competitive (inter)national struggles for economic power. Within the terms of this struggle between teacher education and the global state, we argue here that there is an urgent need for attention to the everyday work of teacher educators, their students and the school systems they serve – the practice of teacher education, which is to say, the ‘soul’ or animus that makes teacher education what it is. Too often, however, it is precisely this that is overlooked in discussions of accreditation, standards and international benchmarks. Abstracted, reified, denatured and increasingly devalued in policy, teacher education is indeed struggling to thrive as an intellectual and practical endeavour in a policy context that increasingly seeks to render it as an instrumental field. How best to respond to all this? What is the range of theoretical resources available to us, as we take up the struggle from within the field? Our argument here is that a reconceptualized view of professional practice offers real possibilities for regenerating teacher education. In what follows, we first lay out the contemporary policy scene as we see it, with specific reference to teacher education reform, especially, but not exclusively, in our own Australian context. We then present a particular account of practice theory and philosophy as we have been developing it over recent years, with regard to professional education

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more generally. We conclude by proposing the power of a theory of professional practice as a means of strengthening the work of teacher education, underlining the important need for such a coherent conceptual base when what is at issue here, fundamentally, is a struggle for the soul of teacher education, with much more at stake than simply just another bureaucratic-governmental programme, or business as usual.

The struggle for teacher education How best to characterize contemporary struggles and conflicts – indeed, ‘battles’ – over the nature and purpose of teacher education, worldwide? How can we explain and understand the fierce contention that is currently evident, regarding teaching and teacher education, as at once key technologies and symbolic sites in the organization and regulation of the social and political field? These are our guiding questions in this chapter, with specific attention to rethinking the relationship between policy and practice in teacher education. Teacher education is increasingly an explicit focus for governmental as well as public concern, nationally – that is, within nation states – as well as internationally. Rather than a distinctively new problem, however, it can be argued that such registers of concern have been endemic since the very advent of formal teacher education. These ‘crises’ have manifested themselves recurrently throughout teacher education’s history, and indeed may be seen as more or less intractable – a (post)structural feature of the field. While acknowledging the complexity of any crisis situation, we argue here that it continues in large part because teacher education is predicated upon the complex and contradictory historical enterprise of mass public schooling. Notwithstanding the importance of taking a historical perspective, however, there is a particular intensification of the debate at the present time, and this warrants urgent attention here. Clarke and Phelan (2015), among others, describe ‘the contemporary moment in teacher education in many global contexts, including North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand’, as an all-too-familiar pattern of crisis manifestation and management, in the face of never-ending media critique and policy intensity. They draw attention to ‘contemporary discourses circulating around teacher education … premised on the identification of a deficit (or “lack” …) – hence the need for a “tougher stance” – that threatens to become a crisis unless addressed’ (Clarke and Phelan 2015: 2). As they write: ‘One response to education’s induced sense of crisis has

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been an increasing degree of policy hyperactivism …, reflecting a belief that the creation of policy in and of itself suggests order, authority and expertise’ (ibid., 2). It is this ‘policy hyperactivism’, which we might also see as a form of ‘speed policy’, along with the chaotic state of contemporary policymaking with regard to teacher education, that is of concern here. We see this as, fundamentally, a matter of struggling for the soul of teacher education. We employ the term ‘soul’ here in a twofold fashion. First, it refers somewhat ironically to the particular mix of essentialism and salvationalism that is critiqued in neo-Foucaultian accounts of subjectivity; and secondly, it refers to the very nature of teacher education, as a socio-material practice producing subjects – both the teacher-subject and the corporate body of teaching, the ‘individual’ and the ‘population’, as practising subjects. We propose therefore that, properly conceived, practice is at the heart of teacher education – its ‘soul’ – bearing in mind that practice thus conceived always includes its enabling conditions of possibility and intelligibility. What we mean, then, is that there is clearly much at stake in the character (and oftentimes quite heated conduct) of the debate over what teacher education should look like, what it involves and what it is for. Moreover, the debate often seems excessive, or at least more than rational. Something more is going on here than simply a policy debate, then, at least in the conventional or received sense. Ball (2003) argued some time ago now that the ‘policy technologies of education reform are not simply vehicles for the technical and structural change of organizations but are also mechanisms for reforming teachers (scholars and researchers) and for changing what it means to be a teacher’. Citing Nikolas Rose (1989), he described education reform as ‘bring[ing] about change in “our subjective existence and our relations one with another”’, and this, he asserted, is ‘the struggle over the teacher’s soul’ (Ball 2003: 217). Working similarly with a Foucaultian perspective, Popkewitz (1998: 25) proposed that in contemporary education reform, ‘the moral domains of the soul are the site of struggle’. Moreover: ‘An assumption behind much contemporary discourse about teaching is that there are rational paths to salvation – the efficient school, the effective teacher, the authentic teacher’ (Popkewitz, 1998: 7). We can see the same assumption being made about teacher education presently: that the most appropriate and proper preparation of teachers will ensure that they are, indeed, the ‘agents of salvation’. More recently, Zeichner (2014: 551) refers to ‘an intense debate that is taking place in many parts of the world about the kind of teaching and teacher education

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that should define education in the twenty-first century’. He describes these current debates as involving ‘two different visions of the role of teachers and teacher education’, which he summarizes in terms of the ‘teacher as professional’ and the ‘teacher as technician’ (Zeichner, 2014: 559). While such a binary elides the complexity of the issue, it illustrates how each characterization implies a different form of professional preparation and development – different, indeed competing, modes of teacher education – across its pre-service, transitional and continuing forms. In similar fashion, Clarke and Phelan (2015) project a vision for teachers and teacher education alternative to what they see as the prevailing neo-liberal norm, arguing for the value of contemporary theory as a rich resource for redescription, and among other things, ‘reimagining teacher education as a site for dissensus’ (Clarke and Phelan 2015: 5). Like Biesta (2013), they thus offer an important, rich, counter-view to the policy framework that currently shapes teacher education – one predicated on notions such as ethics, undecidability and uncertainty, and this too is appropriately understood as participating in the struggle for the ‘soul’ of teacher education. In all such cases, what is on offer is not only a sharp refusal of the prevailing norm as it plays out in mainstream policy – something elaborated below – but also a distinctive vision for teacher education as a human project, within a renewed sense of the rhetorical politics of possibility.

Global teacher education reform: An Australian perspective The discourse of teacher education policy formation is clearly very much interested in finding Popkewitz’ (1998) rational(ist) path to salvation. Mass schooling, the work of teachers and the practices of teacher education are all bound up with the production and reproduction of the modern nation state. This is where policy comes into play in the domain of teacher education. However, we are now at a time when the nation state is a fragile entity, continuing as a key form of population and economic governance, but increasingly under pressure from particular economic interests and directions in the growth of globalization. In this context, education policy, perhaps in reaction to this phenomenon, is aiming for a more ‘solid state’, wanting tight intra-national control, the production of certainty and clear relationships among its various components. The problem of education in the contemporary era, which Fraser (2009) has called the post-Westphalian1 era, is that relationships among the parts, and the parts themselves, are shifting and dynamic; that is, the stable form of the nation

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state is changing. Fraser argues that in the current globalizing era, nations are destabilized, particularly through economic globalizing processes, and this has undermined the normative projects as well as the substantive capacity of nations to respond to the needs of their citizens.2 In this situation, education policies, particularly circulating from supranational bodies such as the OECD, the European Union and the World Bank, are at once symptoms and responses to such shifts in global power dynamics. OECD (2005) and Moon (2007) fuel the ‘crisisification’ discourse by suggesting that 14– 25 million new teachers will be needed by 2020 if the goals of universal access and success are to be achieved. The ‘struggle for the soul’ across all domains of human service, but perhaps particularly education, is necessarily linked to these broader questions of ‘governing the present’ that bring together matters of politics, economics and personal life, as Miller and Rose (2008) argue. It is in the increasingly constraining and delimiting reforms to (teacher) education proposed in policy that we currently see this struggle being played out in the global arena. As Biesta (2013) argues, though, in this context a congruent and conforming (teacher) education will, paradoxically, result in policy effects that are both constraining and delimiting of educational possibility. The case of teacher education in our own context, Australia, provides fertile ground for exploring the global experience of the ‘struggle for the soul’ of teacher education in policy and practice. Teacher education in Australia is set against a backdrop of a contested set of moves towards federal government intervention to nationalize and control school curriculum, educational outcomes and teacher education (Mayer and Reid 2016). Each of these areas has until recently been the province of the states and territories, rather than the nation as a whole. But in an era of performative comparisons on international league tables – based on student test results such as those associated with Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), comparisons of resource expenditure, achievement of equity groups, etc. – the unit of analysis has become the ‘nation’. In this context, the Federal government in Australia has overseen the introduction of ‘national’ curriculum, testing and teacher and teacher education standards as a means of raising its ‘international performance’. At all levels, these elide and ignore the material differences and effects of social inequality, and distance, that characterize this nation, and by reference to a standardized ‘quality’ teacher, place responsibility on the individual teacher (and by implication, teacher education) to ensure that Australian students meet, and exceed, (inter)national standards.

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At the same time, managerialist or ‘new public management’ discourses of privatization, choice and small government allow a decreasing provision of infrastructure to resource national policy, and increasing ‘responsibilisation’ of the individual provider and client-consumer of education to meet performance targets and national standards. International commentators (e.g. Brennan 2009; Furlong 2013b; Rizvi and Lingard 2010) note the intimate connection between globalization and neo-liberalism, and the policy reification of the links between schooling and the economy, where teachers are described as ‘responsible’ for increasing the global economic standing of the nation. As Connell (2013: 102) argues: Increasingly, education has been defined as an industry, and educational institutions have been forced to conduct themselves more and more like profitseeking firms. Policy changes across the sector have been introduced by different governments, state and federal, and in different forms. But the policy changes all move in the same direction – increasing the grip of market logic on schools, universities and technical education.

Nearly a decade ago now, Bates (2006) noted the increased emphasis on education as a mechanism for producing the human capital required to respond to the increasingly competitive global economy, with attention turning to the quality of the workforce, and relatedly, the quality of schooling and teachers in preparing this workforce. It is this logic that brings attention to the quality of the preparation of the nation’s teachers for this work. Teacher education is positioned as a mechanism for achieving ends determined elsewhere, according to urgent political agendas and new social imaginaries, with policy decisions about teacher education following a clear logic of bringing about ‘the improvement of student performance through the improvement of teachers via the improvement of teacher education’ (Bates 2004: 119). Teacher education, therefore, becomes an object of policy in a context of tightening control of government/‘professional’ regulation, where policymakers need to ‘determine which of the broad parameters that can be controlled by policy-makers (e.g. teacher testing, subject matter requirements, alternate entry pathways) is most likely to enhance teacher quality’ (Cochran-Smith 2008: 273). Where international competition stakes are high, decontextualized policy borrowing is rife (Philips and Ochs 2004; Lingard 2010) in the pursuit of higher rankings, and the rapidity of government review and policy introduction is symptomatic and seeming inevitable. In the Australian context, as elsewhere around the world, there have been continual calls for reform and associated review of teacher education (Ramsey

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2000; Hartsuyker 2007; Donaldson 2010; BERA-RSA 2014), in order to both legitimate and introduce new policy directions. This has been notable for its use of a particular rhetoric of ‘professionalism’, which, as Connell (2013: 108) argues, contradicts both the ‘industrial and technical realities of teachers’ work’. The growth of teacher accreditation bodies at state and then national level in Australia under the banner of professional self-regulation (across a career pathway beginning with teacher education and early-career teaching) is tied in to the market regime, and tends to foreground forms of initial and continuing teacher education that develop in individuals a repository of practical know-how and occupational identity. These have quite different bases and are ‘provided’ in quite different ways with a proliferation of short, topical ‘injection’-type ‘professional learning’ courses and providers emerging as an associated industry. The increasing responsibilization of the individual to meet performance targets and national standards, noted above, produces a consumerist view of teacher education that values rapid outcomes over longer-term processes, and evidence over experience. The speed of policy change means that teacher education is continually required to produce different, ‘better’ graduates, to ensure that the nation retains its competitive advantage over others. Current emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education, resulting from Australia’s apparent ‘declining’ performance on international PISA results, has led to immediate policy response requiring enhanced attention to STEM teacher education as a requirement for programme accreditation. As Richardson, Watt and Devos (2013) have found from their decade-long longitudinal survey-study of primary and secondary teachers, for instance, most of the more than 25 per cent of teachers who leave the profession within five years suffer from emotional exhaustion and ‘burn out’ from the stress of the work – most commonly, in schools serving economically and socially disadvantaged communities. Where the dream of education as access (and answer) to individual and national economic and social prosperity fails, the work of teaching becomes a continuous everyday challenge. In contexts such as Australia, where a fundamental commitment to resourcing the costs of education for social equity no longer underwrites government policy, change to school curriculum has come to be seen as the most efficient means of achieving the changing needs of government in response to rapid global change (ACARA 2009; US Department of Education 2010) – hence the concurrent introduction of a new, formally legislated National Curriculum (Brennan 2009, 2011). In concert with this, too, is the introduction of national testing of student

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outcomes at regular points throughout a student’s school career, which serves to drive and direct what schools and teachers must do. A linear logic remains powerful in commentary about teaching in Australia (Hattie 2003; NSWDET 2003; AITSL 2011): problems with education, schools and teachers are perceived as being most easily (and cheaply) solved by ‘fixing’ teacher education. This logic is also reflected, and reinforced, in policy, with teacher education above all else constructed as a ‘problem’, to be properly and appropriately managed: ‘Positioning teacher education as a “policy problem” promotes the view that teacher education can be “fixed” through government intervention’ (Mayer and Reid 2016: 11; see also Cochran-Smith 2008: 273). For such cheaper strategies to be actually effective, however, teachers must be constructed in policy as having been ‘professionally’ educated in such a way as to be able to take up new curriculum ideas and develop appropriate programmes of work to teach them, appropriately, rather than having been ‘trained’ to replicate the curriculum and teaching that they have been taught (cf. Schleicher 2012). More importantly for the nation, though, they need the skills to concurrently prepare their students well for the narrow ambit of tests that will measure only a sample of the full range of student capacity and performance. And they must be able to do this as well as educate them for the world beyond the school, in ways that will enable them to achieve the indefinable, imaginary outcomes that are what is actually desired and needed for their own (and the nation’s) economic and social success. It is because this future is ‘indefinable’ that teaching can be thought about as an ‘impossible profession’ (Green 2010), where teachers are held to account for failing to prepare the nation for a world still always coming into existence – and teacher education is similarly held accountable for failing to prepare teachers for something that does not yet exist. As Carlgren (1998) has argued, the teachers that the nation ‘needs’ are never the teachers it currently has, and this means that all attempts at reform that result from actions to improve teacher education in order to redress perceived failures of schooling will, and must, always ‘fail’ in an absolute sense. When policy solutions are adopted, they will be always temporary and conditional; they will serve some purposes, but not all – and because the conditions of schooling will always continue to change, they will always be outdated and untimely. This is the crux of the struggle for the soul of teacher education: as a field of practice, it is linked to continuous and inevitable dissatisfaction with the products of mass education and is charged with negotiating the intractable challenge and indeed the ‘crisis’ of the modern(ist) project of popular-public schooling.

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Indeed, the overwhelming impression is that teacher education policy is caught up, nationally and globally, in what can only be described as a new legitimation crisis, increasingly operating in a world of its own, and increasingly distanced and disengaged from, and moving much faster than, the actual site(s) of practice. Its object is increasingly phantasmatic, with schools and teachers increasingly referencing ‘change fatigue’ as they struggle to understand what they ‘should’ be doing (Lingard, Mills and Hayes 2000; Luke 2004). The more education policy seeks to exercise control, the more it is confronted by its own inadequacy, its impossibility. Hence it seeks to justify its own existence by a relentless hyperactivity, generating an ever-expanding grid of measurement and reporting, a proliferation of governmental textuality that threatens, ultimately, to take over from the real world of professional practice and human possibility, in all its organic complexity.

The primacy of practice An important site of struggle in recent times is what has been described as a (re)turn to practice as a key organizing principle for teacher education (Reid 2011). In some instances, this so-called ‘practice turn’ has been instrumentally reactive, in effect simply a re-location of teacher education into, or at least closer to, schools and other education settings, especially in England, as well as in programmes such as the ‘Teach for All’ movement in many countries (Labaree 2010; Furlong 2013b). It has been accompanied by a reassertion of a particular rhetoric of practice – the ‘practical’, often at the expense of attention to review of and reflection on the ‘theoretical’ and social justice concerns of education (Furlong 2013a; Zeichner 2012). This is a limited and indeed limiting view of practice, however, and most certainly not what we are concerned with here. Rather, our interest is framed within the literature of practice theory and philosophy, as it has come to be called, and its reconceptualization and problematization of practice. Practice theory and philosophy is still a loosely articulated body of work: ‘a rather broad family of theoretical approaches connected by a web of historical and conceptual similarities’ (Nicolini 2013: 1). Within this body of work, there have been various engagements with professional education, and teacher education in particular, in our own case informed broadly by neo-Aristotelian and post-Cartesian perspectives and traditions (Kemmis and Smith 2008; Green 2009; Kemmis et al. 2014; Green and

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Hopwood 2015). Drawing here particularly from Schatzki (1996, 2002), practice is understood as involving organized arrays of activities in social time-space, or ‘situated purposive activity-sets’. Practices are systematic, socially meaningful ways of getting things done, and actually doing them. Particularly interesting about such work, for us, is the view that, instead of being conceptually more or less separate realms, ‘practice’ and ‘context’ are brought and thought together, so that ‘context’ is necessarily drawn into a fully adequate account of practice as a distinctive concept. This is partly addressed in Kemmis’ notion of ‘practice architectures’ – the cultural, social and material conditions for practice (Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008; Kemmis et al. 2014). Acknowledgement of these is also usefully seen as a matter of infolding, with practice properly and optimally comprehended as always folding into itself its conditions of possibility and intelligibility, its history and its future, and hence as always being both dynamic and multi-scalar. Properly understood, practice includes both ‘context’ and ‘experience’ (Green 2009a). What such a view involves and highlights is a rich understanding of the socio-material, always embodied nature of professional practice. It places emphasis on the role and the significance of the body in practice, and of (inter) corporeality more generally (Green and Hopwood 2015), of the interaction between teaching and learning bodies in everyday practice, operating at the levels of both practitioner(s) and the ‘corporate body’ of the profession. We have found that there is considerable potential in rethinking practice along the lines outlined here for situating it as the theoretically regenerative centre of a radically reconceptualized teacher education. This is especially appropriate if teacher education is seen, first and foremost, as a professional practice field (Schwandt 2005). Understanding the rich complexity of professional practice, and more specifically the professional practice of teachers and teaching, in schools, is crucial therefore to the project of teacher education. The key point to make here is that such a stance requires professional practice, thus understood, to be seen as the object of teacher education, in at least two senses. First, it is the object-as-goal of teacher education: what is aspired to, or aimed at, in teacher education programmes. Second, it is what is represented in teacher education, as a distinctive curriculum: its ‘content’, as it were; or what get taught, and how. This is in part what is at issue in the ‘core practices’ work of Grossman (2011; see also Grossman, Hammerness and Macdonald [2009]) and others (McDonald, Kazemi and Kavanagh 2013) – an important aspect of the (new) practice turn. The curriculum challenge for teacher education becomes how to introduce prospective teachers to that professional practice, in such

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a way that, by engaging with it, they move towards be(com)ing fully fledged professional practitioners. By this we mean practitioners who are what we see as organic professionals (Green 2009a) with the confidence and autonomy to make informed, ethical judgements in the best interests of their students, rather than ‘responsibilised’ (bureaucratic) professionals caught up the policy rhetoric of standardized professional growth. Programmatic questions follow, such as: How are novices drawn into the professional practice of teaching, as becoming-practitioners? How do they come to be constituted as appropriate and capable body-subjects of the professional practice of teaching? How do they come to know what to do and what to say, and how to relate, in being teachers and in designing and performing teaching? This is currently being investigated in a set of studies (e.g. Reid 2014; Reid and Wood 2015; Lai, Auhl and Hastings 2015) and is a matter of focal concern in ongoing work focused on how practice itself is to be conceptualized. It should be borne in mind that what is at issue is what Nicolini (2013) sees as a ‘practice ontology’, describing the practice idiom [as] an ontological choice, a recognition of the primacy of practice in social matters, as well as the adoption of the idea that practices (in one way or another) are fundamental to the production, reproduction, and transformation of social and organizational matters. (Nicolini 2013: 13–14)

What is the mode of being of practice, conceptualized thus? The point to stress is that ‘the key notion … is activity, or what might be phrased as “doing-ness” – energeia’ (Green 2009b: 43). Practice is activity, first and foremost, and as such, realized dynamically in the world: practice-ed. Because it is dynamic, it means, among other things, that it is difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to fix it, to hold it still, in place, in situ, without changing it, transforming it, and indeed in some significant way ‘falsifying’ it, or at least rendering it different. Hence, Bourdieu refers to ‘this strange thing that practice is’ and proposes that ‘a sort of incompatibility’ operates between practice and ‘our scholarly thinking’ (cited Wacquant 1992: 40), inquiry and research into the nature of it. This same incompatibility also characterizes, arguably, our policy work, as action-oriented inquiry. Elsewhere, an argument has been mounted that a particular relation is to be observed between practice and representation (Green 2009b). In such a view, while practice is indeed conceived as prior, and has primacy, representation is nonetheless necessary, and indeed unavoidable, perhaps particularly when teaching others about it. This is despite the fact that practice theory, as such, is programmatically defined against what has been called representationalism, as a

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dominant aspect of the Cartesian legacy (Green 2009b: 50; Green and Hopwood 2015: 24). Representation needs to be reconceptualized, then, as ‘part of practice, within it, implicated in it, rather than set against it’ (Green 2009b: 51; Green and Hopwood 2015: 24–25). It constitutes a necessary, though subordinate, aspect of practice theory and philosophy. It can be argued, moreover, that policy clearly constitutes a particular form of representation, in the sense that it stands apart from practice as such, yet is addressed to it, and is prescriptive with regard to it. Bourdieu’s notion of the scholastic fallacy is pertinent here, with his critical distinction between ‘practice’ and the ‘logic of practice’ (Bourdieu 1990). This has been described elsewhere as ‘a profound and disturbing paradox’ (Green 2009b: 45), even though quite necessary and unavoidable all the same: in effect, an aporia. However it is not at all clear that policy does in fact work on and with this ‘logic of practice’, as the form in which practice becomes available to it – which indeed can only be realized as particular representations. Policy is necessarily, unavoidably at a distance from practice (as such) – it deals only in its records, its traces, or what is made available to it, including professional memory. In this way, representations constitute the very ‘stuff ’ of policy, in the sense of its codifications and articulations, its textual expression(s), its actualization. Adding to this particular practice-theoretical account is a further consideration. It is important to think practice as institutionalized – as something that occurs in accordance with its dynamic ongoingness which always leaves traces behind it, becomes reified, ritualized and routinized, durable. This requires understanding practice (including professional practice) in its relation to the concept of institution, as well as representation.3 If practice is ontologically dynamic, what traces does it leave in and on the world? What happens when it becomes fixed, reified and codified, or when it freezes in particular moments in time-space? What does practice look like as history, both as registered in the body and as manifested in the material world? This brings in its materiality and highlights its embodiment: it occurs with furniture, and architecture, and objects and artefacts more generally, as well as with particular written and graphic records of various kinds. In this way, an adequate theory of practice must include ‘institution’ as a key concept, in similar fashion to ‘representation’. In such a view of practice theory, institution is still subordinate to practice as such, as concepts, but necessary and unavoidable, all the same. Hence, a reconceptualized, fully elaborated theory of practice can be readily extended to include a notion of practice-as-institution, which is effectively what practice as such leaves behind, as evidence and as testimony, and as its

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context of possibility. Over time, this may even become realized in the form of distinctive architectures, ‘buildings’ and organizational materialities, but also their associated textualities, their ‘records’ and archives (Kemmis et al. 2014). The policy realm includes due consideration of institution, therefore – of the institutionalization of professional practice, in its various forms and realizations. Practice theory appropriately understood, therefore, includes the subordinate concepts of representation and institution, with the three concepts constituting a conceptual field. This can be depicted in Figure 2.1. The long and the short of it is that policy can be seen as working first and foremost with practice-as-representation and practice-as-institution, rather than with practice as such.4 Hence, policy is always a distance from practice, mediated, represented and institutionalized. The risk is that policy, thus working indirectly with practice, at best, can only draw on representations, of various kinds – including those associated with memory and experience. This becomes all the more problematic at scale, when the object of concern is a practice system, as is more commonly the case with teacher education policy for an (inter)national project of education. The question arises: Is there a point when policy becomes effectively uncoupled from practice, as distinct fields, and increasingly self-referential in generating its own momentum? This might be increasingly so, given other and sometimes conflicting pressures on policy in a climate all too often organized by other logics, other imperatives, such as those that characterize the current neo-liberal conjuncture, as a global order. Indeed, it may even be the case that policy thus constrained and enabled, or shaped, engages more and more with the interplay of representation and institution, to the point where it disengages with practice per se altogether. It works thereafter with practice imaginaries, generated as much from popular media as from the practice field itself, and in effect with its own fictions and fantasies. In doing so, it may well compound them – and in this, way, policy may find itself becoming increasingly self-referential, or else caught up in simulacra. ‘Teacher education may have reached a point where symbols such as standards, indicators and outcomes no longer represent the object – education – but have become the object’ (Clarke and Phelan 2015: 12). Representation Practice Institution

Figure 2.1  Practice Theory and Philosophy

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Turning back to a reconceptualized view of professional practice as a central organizing feature of teaching and teacher education requires us to acknowledge their inherently risky, radically uncertain, irreducibly complex nature – indeed, the (im)possibility of their respective but related projects (Green 2010). This doesn’t mean that nothing can be done in this regard, or that the whole enterprise is, therefore, futile. Rather, it implies that it cannot be controlled, or predetermined, and hence regulated in accordance with the modernist dream of reason. A different stance is required, as Biesta (2013), too, has argued, a different attitude. A distinctive vision of teaching, and of the profession more generally, emerges here. Teaching is understood as quintessentially an ‘impossible profession’, in Britzman’s (2009) sense, following Freud. This is because of what she describes as ‘the status of uncertainty in the impossible professions’ (Britzman 2009: 29) – its very ineluctability. This is where due consideration of the structural concepts of aporia and praxis becomes imperative, specifically with regard to the professional practice of teaching (and hence teacher education). Drawn from Derrida, aporia refers to the unavoidable, unresolvable dilemmas at the heart of practice: ‘In professional practice there are always moments of undecidability and decision, moments when one must act, even if the way forward is not clear or – more radically – is uncertain’ (Green 2009a: 11–12). Aporias are these ‘moments of undecidability and decision’, moments when practice and the ‘logic of practice’ are at odds, when it is simply impossible to move forward without risk, or with any guarantee, and yet one must go on. As well as aporia, conceptually, practice is to be understood in terms of praxis: rightful action, or action that is at once ‘good’ and ‘just’. This is where judgement comes into play – professional judgement. It is linked with the notion of phronēsis, or ‘practical wisdom’ as it is commonly understood, an Aristotelian formulation often associated with professional knowledge and education (Pitman and Kinsella 2012). Praxis has priority, however, as (good, just) action in and on the world. As Kemmis (2012: 15) puts it, ‘as it happens, praxis immediately begins to affect the uncertain world in uncertain and indeterminate ways’. The point to emphasize here is uncertainty, in a situation where there is no option but to act (Brennan and Zipin 2008). Biesta (2013) similarly emphasizes the role and significance of praxis in teaching and teacher education, in arguing for the positivity of risk and ‘the absolutely central role of educational judgements’ (Biesta 2013: 131). Moreover, as he writes:

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Exerting such judgements is not something that can be done at the level of school policy documents, but lies at the very heart of what goes on in the classroom, and in the relationship between teaches and students – and this goes on again, and again, and again. (ibid.: 130)

He proposes a particular notion of ‘virtuosity’ as a (re)organizing principle for teacher education – ‘a virtue-based approach’ (ibid.: 135), predicated on the distinctive nature of educational practices. ‘What we should be after’, he suggests, is to promote in our work with student teachers ‘a kind of virtuosity in making wise educational judgements’ (ibid.: 135). However, the important thing about such virtuosity, and such professional judgement, is that it can never be ‘standardised’ or codified, or legislated. This is a quite specific vision of teaching and teacher education, and is entirely consistent with the case developed earlier for a practice-theoretical view of teacher education and education reform. It presents various implications and challenges for the field, and it is to the consideration of this that we shall turn our attention next.

Conclusion: Ready to teach, or managing the soul? How possible is it to ensure that teachers are indeed adequately prepared for the challenge of teaching, from the moment they step into the real world of the school, in transitioning from college to classroom? Similarly, how universities can prepare beginning teachers who will start their professional employment already better than ‘novices’ (Reid 2011) seems the question or rather the fantasy that drives much contemporary teacher education policy reform, and the desire that plays out all too often in policy review. Such a fantasy of control seems to us profoundly mistaken, however, ‘infantile’ in Biesta’s (2013) terms. When the emphasis falls here on policy, and on the phantasy of its implementation, policy has become primary, in practice, and as practice. What we have argued, instead, is for the primacy of practice, and for a richly reconceptualized view of professional practice that provides a more appropriate focus for rethinking teacher education, because it is less technically rational, less confined and more open to the material rapidity of change – perhaps ironically, gaining its potency because of what Biesta (2013) characterizes as its ‘weakness’, at once ontological and rhetorical. As we have argued, such a view is emerging in a heterogeneous body of work identified as practice theory and philosophy, increasingly associated with and

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connected to the ‘primacy of practice’ thesis across a range of practice fields. For us, such a richly (re)conceptualized view of practice speaks directly to the ‘soul’ of teacher education, as an object of struggle in contemporary debates over the teaching profession and its future. Having first considered the current policy scene vis-à-vis teacher education and the rhetoric of reform and then presented an account of practice theory and philosophy, with a view to its usevalue in rethinking teacher education as a specific professional practice field, we conclude now by outlining some challenges and dilemmas for teacher education policymaking in accordance with the practice turn. At a time when government policy in Australia has explicitly challenged teacher education to provide the nation with ‘classroom ready’ graduates (TEMAG 2015), attention to the practice of teaching – how these new teachers will do what they do, and say, how they will relate to their pupils and organize the materiality of their classrooms for, within a truly organic professional community – becomes increasingly important. Learning ‘how’ to teach must be seen as equally important as learning ‘what’ knowledge is deemed appropriate to teach to students (and particular groups of students) at the present time, along with knowledge about ‘why’ some things are best taught this way, here, now, rather than that way, there, later. But the policy need for new teachers to enter the classroom already ready, with this very important professional knowledge about ‘what’ to teach and ‘why’, means that, without significant reform to teacher education practice, there will be significant and ongoing struggle to find time for authentic, engaged learning of practical, embodied knowledge about ‘how’ to do this within contemporary pre-service teacher education curriculum. This important curriculum struggle for teacher education is articulated in the following concern, as raised in the TEMAG report: Initial teacher education programs must prepare new teachers to keep up to date with the latest developments in their academic subjects and in the practice of teaching (BERA-RSA 2014:11). To maintain up-to-date, evidence-based teaching practices through their career, pre-service teachers must be equipped with the capacity to investigate what is and is not effective in their own practice. (TEMAG 2015: 18)

The report suggests that this is essentially a technical matter, to be addressed automatically, without any explicit attention to it, by ‘the qualification and skill levels of staff within teacher education providers’ (TEMAG 2015: 18), along with enhanced ‘partnerships’ with school settings for professional experience placements. As we have argued here, however, if graduate teachers are to enter

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the profession ‘with the capacity to investigate what is and is not effective in their own practice’, what Biesta (2013) calls ‘strong’ policy imperatives such as this will always be self-defeating. Their incapacity to capture the dynamic soul of teacher education, and their reliance only on inanimate, disembodied, institutional representations of practice, can only support a prolongation of ‘the conjuring of crisis and the pervasive presence of social anxiety’ maintaining ‘the proliferation of policy that seeks to manage teacher education’ (Clarke and Phelan 2015: 4). Directing the machinery of government towards managing the soul is always challenging, at the very least, and indeed it may even be impossible (Donald 1992) – but that is another story – and we end, therefore, with the exhortation to maintain the struggle, despite everything that seeks increasingly to constrain teacher education as praxis and as possibility.

Notes 1 The treaties of Westphalia – signed in 1648, signalling the end of the Thirty Years War and the Hundred Years War – are remarkable not so much for ushering in peace in Europe but for recognizing what was then a new form of political order, the sovereignty of political states and the regulation of disorder through negotiation of the balance of power across nation states (Fraser 2009). 2 Other relevant concepts that try to address the challenges to national governance include Habermas’ (1975) ‘legitimation crisis of the state’ and Foucault’s (1991) exploration of ‘governmentality’. 3 In this usage, institution is to be distinguished from ‘organisation’, with the latter used to refer to social bodies of various kinds (schools, banks, professional fields, etc.). 4 Policy is, of course, a practice in its own right – that is not our concern here, however, nor our focus..

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Reforming Teacher Education in England: Locating the ‘Policy’ Problem Meg Maguire and Rosalyn George

Introduction Education policy works by producing sets of ideas that then become part of the ‘taken for grantedness’ of the way things should be. These ideas become enacted as truths, values, beliefs and practices. However, as Foucault has argued, ‘Truth is a thing of this world: It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power’ (Foucault 1980: 131). Each society has its own regimes of truth; that is, the type of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true (ibid.: 131). But Foucault also wrote that while all societies are typified and formed through the various ‘techniques of governmentality’ at play at any time in society, these technologies are characterized by ‘gaps’ and ‘limits’ (Foucault 1986: 119). In this chapter we explore the ways in which initial teacher education (ITE) is being reformed in England on the basis of a set of truths, or policy representations that are in circulation about how best to prepare people to become teachers. In exploring how this policy shift is being enacted, the chapter identifies some of the ‘gaps’ and ‘limits’ in rhetoric and practice in ITE in England. We also consider three key aspects of current ‘techniques of governmentality’ driving the reforms that currently shape the main routes into teaching in England. (See also Brant and Vincent’s chapter on teacher education in England.) These drivers are the advocacy of consumer choice, diversity seen in the expansion of alternative ‘providers’ of different forms of pre-service teacher education, and the move to deregulation alongside the erosion of public accountability (Ranson 2003). In what follows, we draw on a small empirical qualitative study on the experiences of trainee teachers who have ‘chosen’ between some of the alternative

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pathways into teaching (George and Maguire 2015) as well as some rhetorical claims about these routes into teaching displayed on the various websites that promote these programmes. The intention is to counterpoint these illustrations by turning to the policy analysis approach of Bacchi (2010) to complement and augment Foucault’s work on truth and governmentality. Like Foucault’s work, Bacchi’s analysis starts from a position that policy ‘problems’ are socially constructed. Rather than governments dealing with ‘out there’ problems, she argues that they actively construct what is to count as a problem so that the policy answer or solution is the strategy they are seeking to introduce. In this chapter we argue that the policy problem of teacher education is being constructed out of ‘multiple forms of constraint’ about the alleged value of some pathways over others and the contested roles of schools and universities in this provision. In contrast, we pose a different representation of the policy problem grounded in the wider social context of failure to recruit and retain teachers in English schools.

The ‘taken for grantedness’ of reforming teacher education – market forces Over the last thirty years the UK has witnessed what Wilkins and Wood (2009: 283) call a ‘well-documented revolution in the management of public sector services’. One strand of this ‘revolution’ has been forged by the ubiquitous insertion of marketization into the traditional public sector services; the second strand has been the insertion of an accountability and audit culture. The cornerstone justification for these insertions has been to ‘open up’ public services, like health, social care and education, to the market place. Against a background of neo-liberalism, which has become the ‘taken for granted’ discourse of policymakers in the English setting (Furlong 2013), ITE has been subject to a number of reforms to reflect the alleged demands of the market. This dominance of discourses about the efficacy of market forces above and beyond state welfare provision has enabled the insertion of private enterprise into the public sector to provide a model of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and value for money. ‘For neoliberalism, public control over public resources should be taken from the “necessarily bureaucratic” state and placed with the “necessarily efficient” private sector’ (Saltman 2007: 144). While this pattern is mirrored in all aspects of state welfare provision, our focus is with education and specifically,

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the pre-service preparation of teachers. In this chapter we take the mainstream providers to be those higher education institutions (HEIs), the universities and colleges, which have traditionally educated teachers, some of them for more than one hundred years, and it is their courses that have been targeted for reform. This reform process has been tied to the economic pressures of international competition. For example, the white paper The Importance of Teaching (2010: 3) begins with a letter from David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the prime minister and deputy prime minister at the time, emphasizing that what really matters is how we’re doing compared with our international competitors. That is what will define our economic growth and our country’s future. The truth is, at the moment we are standing still while others race past.

In these changing economic, political and ideological conditions, the purpose of schooling and the practices of teaching have to contribute to a productive workforce and enhance Britain’s competitiveness. Teachers need to be ‘trained’ to prepare ‘ready-for-employment’ school leavers who are alert to opportunities, ‘rendering people as assets to be managed’ (Trippestad 2014: 63). Education has strategic importance because it is responsible for producing a highly skilled and flexible workforce, which is indispensable to sustainable economic growth and Britain’s competitive advantage in a global world. From this position of market-orientated neo-liberal thinking, a more open and competitive context is generated in which teachers and schools have to be made more responsive to external outputs and measurement and more receptive to the wishes of the consumer (Apple 2001). To an extent schools are repositioned as business units that compete with each other to ensure they have progressively good cohorts of students that are ‘most likely to perform well in relation to external measures’ (Ball and Youdell 2001: 44) Alongside the marketization of schooling runs another ‘truth’ that ‘induces regular effects of power’ (Foucault 1980: 131) and this is the notion of flexibility in deregulating teacher education provision and expanding diverse programmes of ITE. New routes into teaching are being produced, as we discuss later on. However, there is a contradiction in this proliferation of pathways into becoming a teacher; while some pathways seem to be flexible and autonomous, others have become far more centrally controlled. In the centralized pathways, there are far more stringent controls of both inputs and outcomes of teacher preparation produced through a discourse of ‘standards’ as the dominant narrative. This discourse of standards imposes and produces a specific construction of the

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qualified teacher or the good training provider and provides constant pressure for providers of the mainstream pathways to conform to the same model. Through the conflation of ‘standards’ and ‘common sense’, the government is able to justify its agenda to enhance Britain’s competitiveness in the world market. In this reworked construction of the teacher, practical in-school experience is foregrounded. Indeed, in its white paper of 2010, the government stated its intentions to ‘reform initial teacher training so that more training is on the job’ (DfE 2010, para 2.6.: 20). In consequence, new partnerships between the HEIs and the schools, where the schools are in the lead, typify the English teacher education setting (Whitty 2014). Almost a decade ago, Hursh (2005: 11) pointed out that one ‘neo-liberal policy contradiction is between the notion that markets are self-regulating and the reality that they require significant governmental intervention’. Much of the government intervention into (some forms of ) ITE is managed through the rhetoric and technologies of accountability. Specifically in relation to reforming ITE there is evidence of a conflicted and contradictory approach towards accountability. A highly interventionist stance towards mainstream teacher education has led to this provision being subjected to greater controls and regulations when it is provided by the HEIs a process that has been in play over the last three decades (Murray and Mutton 2016). The inspection regime, as embodied by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), works with a certain set of assumptions about the way in which effective teacher training providers should act. Ofsted has the power to judge whether or not HEIs are ‘successful’ course providers based on the centrally prescribed ‘standards framework’. The inspection process has a powerful impact on the mainstream HEI providers of teacher education because a negative outcome of their inspection can lead to diminished funding and a reduction in the allocation of student numbers. In the current policy climate, schools work in partnerships with their local HEIs and take greater responsibility for the preparation of teachers. However, they do not take an equal share of responsibility should the institution’s inspection be unfavourable – a form of ‘HEI blame’ rather than ‘system blame’. Simultaneously, the school-based routes and pathways enjoy far less restrictions and far less regulated spaces in which to provide for teacher training. What we see in this disjunction, then, illustrates a ‘gap’ in accountability between different provisions of ITE, one core tactic in the ‘techniques of governmentality’ (Foucault 1986: 119).

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The ‘taken for grantedness’ of reforming teacher education: Alternative providers and unexpected outcomes Turning now to another dimension of markets in teacher education, the idea is that ‘innovative organisations will step up to provide public services in new ways. And competition will force performing providers to up their game or face failure’ (Blatchford and Gash 2012: 5). In this shift to decentralization, responsibility for success lies with the new providers, and government stands at arm’s length in terms of its obligation to provide teachers. The alternative providers in England include clusters of schools, academy chains and third-sector providers such as Teach First and the ARK chain of schools (Junemann and Ball 2013; Ellis et al. 2015). Third-sector providers are independent of government and include voluntary groups such as churches and community organizations, social enterprises and co-operatives. They are philanthropically motivated and are usually ‘not for profit’, although they generally have to produce profits to be reinvested to sustain their growth. The alternative routes into becoming a teacher include forms of school-based training where the school/academy chain takes the lead or works in different forms of partnerships with HEIs. These routes also include a range of specialist training programmes such as Troops to Teachers, Teach First and Researchers in Schools (https://getintoteaching. education.gov.uk). The previous senior minister for education, the secretary of state, Michael Gove (2010–15), regularly demonstrated his scepticism about the role of university education departments and higher education’s place in training teachers. His view was that over time, universities had gained a form of producer capture (where teacher education was more related to the needs and interests of the universities rather than the consumers – the schools and the trainee teachers). Even before Gove’s intervention into education policy and governance, moves had been made to introduce forms of market forces into teacher education, to break producer capture and to foreground the classroom rather than the lecture hall as the key site of learning (Gilroy 1992; Furlong 2005). Under Gove, however, the new policy imperatives for training teachers were uncompromising, particularly in the way in which they spoke of HEIs: School Direct also allows schools to shop around between universities for the best support for trainee teachers. That means universities have to shape their education departments to the practical needs of schools instead of the whims of

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These developments, then, mean that currently in England, there are two dominant forms of teacher education and these can be categorized as either school led or university led. The Department for Education (DfE) has a website, Get into Teaching, that details the routes available and explains: There are plenty of great ways to make a difference by getting into teaching. How you go about it will depend on your personal circumstances, qualifications, and the subject and age group you want to teach. (https://getintoteaching.education. gov.uk/explore-my-options?emooption=1)

There is also a range of what are called ‘specialist courses’ and these are perhaps more typical of alternative provision elsewhere. As the DfE website states: There are a number of additional training options available if you’re a Service leaver, an experienced teacher or finishing a PhD. If you have a 2:1 or higher, you’re also eligible to train to teach with Teach First, a charity that places exceptional graduates in schools in low-income areas to become effective leaders. (https://getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/explore-my-options/specialisttraining-options)

Service leavers do not have to have a first degree, experienced teachers without teaching credentials but with experience can become accredited and those with a PhD can attract a well-resourced bursary to encourage them to move into teaching after their research degree. Teach First, a spin-off from Teach for America, offers a two-year Leadership Development Programme that aims to place trainees in ‘hard to teach’ settings where they stay for two years. Teach First is ‘a vocal and energetic campaigner for change, leading the conversation about educational reform at all levels, and working with government, businesses and other charities to end educational inequality’ (http://graduates.teachfirst. org.uk/why-teach-first/what-has-change). All these new providers contribute to what Junemann and Ball (2013: 423) call ‘the ongoing and increasing blurring of the welfare state demarcations between state and market, public and private, government and business’. This move to deregulation and marketization has not only been fuelled by ideologies of market forces and empowering consumers, it has also been driven in part by expediency. This is because there has been, and currently is again, a ‘crisis’ in teacher recruitment in England (although it may be more appropriate to talk of a

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retention crisis rather than a recruitment problem). One factor involved in this ‘crisis’ may well be the reported low morale of teachers (NUT 2015); another factor, according to Estelle Morris, Labour Secretary of State for Education (2001–2), may be the various changes to teacher education that have created instability in the system (Morris 2015). In 2012, the secretary of state for education announced plans to give schools greater control over the recruitment of trainee teachers in England with an intention that by 2015 over half of all training would be delivered by schools. Since this declaration, the allocation of places has shifted away from HEIs towards schools-based programmes like School Direct. However, data provided by Universities UK found that recruitment to the School Direct route into teacher training in 2013–14 fell short by one third, whereas university recruitment exceeded 90 per cent of its allocated places. Nevertheless, this aspiration for a school-led system continues to be reinforced, with allocations for School Direct being increased by 13 per cent and those for university-led places being reduced by 7 per cent. Furthermore, the English Government has adopted a new allocations policy for 2015/2016 recruitment by deregulating the whole system. At the time of writing, there are no longer allocations for different providers but an allocation for the whole country. When this national target is reached, in either phase (primary or secondary), school subject providers will be told to stop offering places (Husbands 2015). For example, recruitment to university-led training in history and physical education had to stop within the first few weeks of applications. At that time School Direct had over hundred places still available. Interestingly, as Wilkins (2015) observes, it is widely acknowledged that attracting candidates to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics subjects is difficult, but despite the fact that university-led providers are far more successful in supplying qualified teachers in these subjects, these subjects have been reduced overall within the core allocation of HEI trainee numbers. The positioning of schools within an ITE marketplace is arguably to promote choice for applicants in the route they choose. However, in placing caps on the number of students that universities are allowed to recruit while setting minimum targets for school-led providers, the government has skewed the market and encouraged schools to recruit above any set targets (Harris 2015). The concern is that as the government pursues its ambition for school-led teacher training at this current pace of change, HEI-led teacher education may become unsustainable and may be forced out of the ITE market with any unused places taken up by other providers. Schools will not close if they fail to recruit trainee

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teachers. (For more discussion of university- and school-led teacher education, see the chapter by Dickinson and Silvoinen comparing Finland and England.)

And the consumer of new forms of teacher education? In England, a number of studies have explored the contribution, and some of the complexities, of the more traditional university routes (Beck 2008; Furlong 2005; Ellis 2010). Other researchers have concentrated on some of the alternative routes into certification (Hutchings et al. 2006; Mujis et al. 2010) and currently some research teams are looking at the impact of wider political and economic changes for ITE (Furlong 2013; Horden 2014). Yet, to date, little is known about the perspectives of the consumers of all these new pathways. Little is known about the actual choice-making of current trainee teachers and their reasons for selecting particular routes into teaching. Little is known about how they perceive and describe the advantages and disadvantages of their chosen pathways. What are their experiences of these different routes that are currently available in England? Does marketization ‘deliver’ for the trainee teachers? Our small-scale study explored some of the main reasons for the choice of pathway of a group of twelve students aspiring to be teachers who were following either school-based routes or what we call the ‘mainstream pathways of the HEIprovided Post Graduate Certificate in Education’. We wanted to investigate why trainees chose their particular route into teaching and the extent to which they considered their particular pathway as the most effective one for becoming a teacher. In order to address these questions we asked our respondents to reflect on how their educational journeys had contributed to their choices of programme, impact of teachers in the family, influence of peers, etc. We were also concerned to explore the trainees’ individual experiences of their chosen route and asked them to highlight the elements that either contributed or hindered progress. Lastly, we wished to explore how far our respondents would advocate for their chosen pathway over others. We considered the reasons given by our respondents for choosing their pathway into qualified teaching status through two broad categories of extrinsic and intrinsic reasons and motivations. We recognize the complexity of their choosing and the overlapping and interwoven factors that are involved in this process.

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Extrinsic motivators for choice Some of our participants’ reasons for choosing a particular form of ITE were straightforwardly to do with accessibility and issues related to their housing and transport. In a large and expensive city like London, these sorts of factors can constrain occupational choice-making for many people, not just for teachers. Those who were applying through the School Direct Routes (salaried and unsalaried) have more capacity to choose than their Post Graduate Certification in Education (PGCE) peers in the more traditional university programmes – an important part of their application involved applying to a particular school or group of schools – and this means they can directly choose their location and the area in which they will be doing their school placement. PGCE trainees, on the other hand, will be offered places in schools where their institution has partnerships and while they may have some capacity to exercise choice. (Those trainees who are parents or who have caring responsibilities will generally be placed first and nearest to their homes as far as is possible.) School Direct entrants get to select their main training school as part of their initial application, which offers advantages and is extremely attractive in terms of practical issues of manageability. ‘And I could walk there, I could walk to school, it takes me twenty minutes from my flat’ (Susan). For some of our respondents, mainly the older trainees who had selected to follow the School Direct pathways, another key driver for their choice related directly to issues of labour market pressures, occupational security and future prospects. Some of these older trainees had experience of sometimes precarious and insecure work and were now turning to an occupation that they thought presented them with security as well as an opportunity for advancement in a professional and structured career. These reasons are also going to be part of why other trainees choose teaching as an occupation regardless of the pathway/ route that they select. However, when coupled with the prospect of a salary while undertaking training, as two respondees separately volunteered, It’s a no-brainer (Claudine and Susan). Others gave a rationale for choosing their pathway that related to matters of the status and prestige that they believed would accrue to them after the successful completion of their programme. For example, some of our respondents argued that attending a certain higher education provider would lend a certain degree of prestige to their profiles. ‘I think the reputation and the … just the overall reputation of the institute as a whole, I think was a big draw for me’ (Frances).

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Trainees on the more traditional PGCE will choose (or at least nominate) their institutions rather than choosing their school placement and it may be that the reputation of the institution (called the ‘provider’ in government discourse) will drive choice to some extent for many trainees regardless of their pathways. However, for School Direct trainees, the capacity to choose their placement school, where they will spend the majority of their time, is a practical advantage, as we have already seen.

Intrinsic rationale for pathway choice Some of our respondents, who had clearly considered their choice of institution as one of the key variables in their portfolio of choosing, had come to their decisions for sometimes less extrinsic reasons. Jean, for example, had chosen School Direct because it offered her a chance to train to teach in her part of London, but she had also considered the institutional side of the programme and the people she would be working with in the university. Like Frances, she was attracted to what she saw as a high status provider, but one where a certain philosophy and ethos would be promoted through the work of a highly respected academic in the field. Our respondents did not have one sole reason for choosing to become a teacher on a certain route: their rationales were frequently multifaceted which is why we describe a ‘portfolio of choice’ in relation to their rationale for choosing. What was evident in what all of our respondents had to say was that they also had some powerful intrinsic reasons for choosing to teach more generally – reasons that are well documented in the research literature on becoming a teacher (Richardson and Watt 2005; Manuel and Hughes 2006). They were committed to sharing their love of their subject with young people; they wanted to ‘make a difference’. As Jean says, she thinks she was accepted on the programme to become a teacher because of her enthusiasm: They saw how much I love teaching and how much I love children and being around them and watching them become these, like, amazing adults that they have the potential to be.

When it came to participants’ reasons for choosing to become a teacher through the traditional HEI-based route of the PGCE, our participants had a set of powerful arguments that explained why they made the choice they made. Emily,

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for instance, decided to take up a place at a university and do a PGCE. She explained her decision very carefully: I was quite keen to do university-based training. I think because I’m quite academically inclined I thought it would make it more interesting, the course. I was aware that I wouldn’t want to just train in one setting, I wanted to see different practices. I just thought it would make me a better, maybe more critical teacher if I trained through a university and saw multiple settings.

Pierre, who had chosen to do a PGCE in modern foreign languages, believed that studying to teach at a university was going to be better route for him, too. He argued that school-based training was perhaps more to do with covering classes rather than helping develop the good teacher: The university’s mission is to produce outstanding teachers, the best they can be. School based training has other priorities which lead to students being put in front of a class without the security of support enjoyed by PGCE students.

Some of the School Direct participants (salaried and non-salaried) were concerned about the university element. For example, Anna said she ‘couldn’t face university again’ and Laura said that her university element of School Direct was ‘rubbish, everything was a bit too late. They only did lesson planning in November and I’d been planning since September.’ However, most of the participants from all of the pathways saw the university-based part of the programme as valuable. As Jean put it, ‘I felt there was still a lot for me to learn.’ Currently the English polity is keen to contract out as much state provision as possible to the allegedly more efficient business community or to third-sector providers (Ball 2015). In the case of teacher education, school experience and the workplace learning it supports are a critical part of becoming a teacher. However, as some of our participants have stressed, they wanted their professional development to be widely applicable so that they could be prepared to work in different settings. They indicated that they were unhappy about simply being inducted into one way of working or being used to bolster staffing needs in a school, something they had not anticipated when making their choices. Melanie, who felt completely at a loss from the outset of her course, stated: The first week I was in my school, they put me in a class, I was teaching two double lessons; I’d never taught in my life and they just left me in there on my own without even another teacher in the room and this happened very early, the first week.

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Paulina also saw being tied to a single school as a disadvantage: Sometimes I feel that schools can be a bit like, ‘Oh you’re working for us so you’ve got to do everything we say or we won’t pass you.’

While being able to choose a route into teaching seems to be an attractive option for aspiring teachers, and indeed the data suggests that our respondents were active choosers, the data also suggests that some of our respondents ended up in a situation they found impossible to escape from: And I am still teaching, even now, those same classes, and one of them is a Year 8 class that I will never win over. I’m a terrible teacher in those lessons. They don’t even listen to me, it is chaos; they are so disrespectful to me (Melanie).

It would seem that our participants sought to have their professional needs responded to in a thoughtful, analytical and caring way and from what these participants have said, there can be some constraints and limits to ‘learning on the job’.

Discussion As Sahlberg (2006: 263) has put it, ‘Business leaders, politicians and educators are looking for solutions for improving economic competitiveness and thereby economic growth. Market values like productivity, effectiveness, accountability and competitiveness are increasingly being embedded in global education reforms.’ For these sorts of reasons, education is constantly under review; education policymakers constantly scan international league tables and access new curricular innovations and reforms from higher-scoring nations in order to ratchet up their own provision; they engage in policy borrowing rather than policy learning (Chakroun 2010) In many ways, perhaps we are all suffering from too many educational reforms where change is the only game in town! To this point we have focused on one aspect of this policy overload: the reforming of teacher education in the English setting. As Hulme (2016: 37) puts it, ‘A repertoire of global reforms has sought to increase control over teachers’ work and performance,’ and one of the most basic ways in which this control can be exercised is through regulating the ways in which teachers are trained or educated for their work in schools. The reform of how teachers are prepared, trained and educated for their work is now a central plank in any attempt to usher

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in changes in schools – first, reform the teachers and reconstruct their work, their understandings and their subjectivities and second, other reforms that overlap with these new sensibilities will follow on, somewhat inevitably (Cochran-Smith et al. 2011). ‘Fixing’ teacher education will ‘fix’ other educational problems. For some time now in the English setting, policymakers and politicians have endeavoured to reform teacher education provision. Through the generation of various ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 1980: 131), at various points in time, English teacher education has been seen as either too theoretical, unconnected to the world of the schoolroom, under the control of left-wing ideologues in universities, lacking in rigour, sometimes too influenced by research and, at other times, not sufficiently aware of evidence-based best practice (Furlong 2013). While English teacher education has always been susceptible to reform, since the 1980s there has been an acceleration in the depth and reach of a swathe of almost non-stop reforming moves that are well documented elsewhere (Furlong 2013; Whitty 2014). However, what we have concentrated on in this chapter is not so much the actual reforms themselves, but the ways in which these policy reforms to teacher education have been justified, explained, made to seem almost irresistible and certainly necessary to the global markets project in education. What we have also tried to explore, albeit in a limited manner, is how one group of underresearched consumers (trainee teachers) navigate this market setting. We started this chapter by arguing that education policy ‘works’ when it ensures that the core ideas and strategies and plans and tactics that make up the specific policy become accepted as part of the way things are, part of the ‘common-sense’ of how to best organize and provide education. As education policy is ‘implemented’ and translated into practice, it becomes enacted as truths, accepted practices, values and beliefs – the best way to do something in response to a particular problem. In the case of ITE, this can be seen in the growing number of possible routes into teaching and the embracing of these reforms by head teachers and schools. However, we also argued at the start of this chapter that according to Foucault (1980: 131), ‘truths’ are socially constructed and ‘produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint’. We have claimed that the construction of a set of narratives about the alleged weaknesses in teacher education has been woven together to articulate what the policy problem is taken to be in this context. This is how the policy problem is being represented (Bacchi 2009). In many of the more positivist approaches to policy work (Swann and Pratt 2003), it is possible to trace the ‘emergence and strength of a problem-solving

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paradigm in a wide range of sites, a paradigm that assumes that “problems” are readily identifiable and objective in nature’ (Bacchi 2010: 1). Thus, the policy problem is seen to lie in the need to raise attainment in schools and to produce what the economy demands. The ‘right’ sort of reforms to teacher education will produce the ‘right’ sort of teachers who can deliver these necessary reforms in the nation’s schools. In this way, as Bacchi explains, governments ‘create ‘problems’, meaning that they create particular impressions of what the ‘problem’ is so that the policy answer or solution is the strategy they are seeking to introduce, and here we are thinking of neo-liberal drivers. From what we have argued in this chapter, we have highlighted a particular ‘version’ of what is to count as the policy problem in teacher education in the English setting. We have also tried to start thinking about how this version of the ‘policy problem’ of teacher education has been normalized and become taken for granted as a ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault 1980: 131). From the commentary in the white paper (2010), it is possible to identity a ‘truth’ about teacher education and the problems that need to be reformed. However, as Bacchi has pointed out, the ways in which policy problems are being represented need further interrogation. First, there is the question of the way that the problem is represented as the need for more school involvement? Does this experience improve the effectiveness of teacher education? What should be the role of school experience (Ellis and Orchard 2014)? And secondly, is the policy problem really to do with a lack of marketization in teacher education? Let us just take the argument that teachers learn best in schools and need to spend more time training in school placements. Trainees on the mainstream PGCE share an almost identical experience to that of the School Direct (unsalaried) trainee, and both spend a similar amount of time based in schools. The barren argument over which setting should dominate displaces or at least is a ‘devaluation of the overall place of universities in supporting teacher learning … and of research-informed knowledge’ (Murray 2016: 188). This is perhaps a more taxing problem for policymakers. While much of the English policy rhetoric stresses what Pitzer (2014: 128) calls the ‘authority of experience’, what we learnt from our trainee participants is that they value a wide range of experiences. That is, as Emily explained above, they value access to critical tools and current arguments in education-based research as well as the capacity to test out and extend their pedagogic practice in a range of carefully supported environments. While our sample is small, what was of concern was the perception of some trainee teachers that in some cases, schools were presenting constrained ways of learning to become a teacher, as Claire said; ‘They made it very clear that the

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institution were meddling in their system, that this is the way they do it and they’re perfectly within their rights to do it this way.’ In terms of our second question; ‘Is the policy problem really to do with a lack of marketisation in teacher education?’, it is critical to bear in mind that ‘markets cannot do everything, however, and should not be expected to. Externalities and public goods test the scope of markets’ (McMillan 2002: 227). From what our trainees said, it was evident that practical matters played a part in their choosing and decision-making, but they all were motivated by more intrinsic reasons related to their concerns about public service, social justice and the common good. They were pleased to have more control and choice over what route fitted best with their circumstances, but they all quickly realized that this choice was limited; they were able to choose their school to fit with other aspects of their lives, but once in school, they were susceptible to all the complexities of life in the workplace, matters over which they felt they had very little control or indeed much choice. Indeed, those on School Direct salaried pathways seemed, in some cases, to miss the buffering effects of external partners such as the HEI providers (George and Maguire 2015). In the English market place of teacher education, there is diversity, as we have detailed in the range of programmes and pathways into the profession. One matter that we have not fully dealt with in this chapter concerns the financial context. The government funds teacher education (through a complex blend of bursaries, student loans and funding from taxation), and the lead institutions (HEIs, schools and alternative providers) attract funding for places for trainee teachers. In an open market, providers compete with one another for business; in ITE, the market is regulated as noted above, and there are some preferred providers and complex technologies that exert more controls on some of the pathways rather than others. If HEIs are not allocated enough places, they will be forced out of the ITE market and any unused places will be taken up by other providers. Schools will not close if they fail to recruit trainee teachers. So, to some extent, the market is uneven and skewed, as we have already illustrated in this chapter when we explored current policies of how places are allocated to different pathways/providers. In terms of structural matters, it seems to us that something as central to national well-being as the education of prospective teachers cannot simply be left to the market to decide. There are practical and systemic questions about supply and demand such as ensuring that teachers are being trained for locations where they are needed and where there are jobs. There are questions of social justice and issues of representation; in a decentred and deregulated system, how

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do we know that we are recruiting a diverse teaching force that represents our cosmopolitan society? We have space for one last question and want to turn to a matter of a more theoretical nature that we think needs to be addressed. In the deregulated ITE marketplace (deregulated that is for some providers but not the mainstream ones), what may be happening is that current policy is aiming to reconstruct a new type of teacher – steeped in their classrooms and perhaps less exposed to broader questions about aims, values and even alternative pedagogical practices. Foucault argued that policies create subject positions that are then taken up by different individuals. His view ‘suggests that policies, through the subject positions they create, shape our subjectivities (to an extent)’ (Bacchi 2010: 6). In the case of ITE reform in England, if the ‘problem’ relates to the place of training and alleged claims of lack of rigour, irrelevance and so on in HEIs, then the ‘new’ teacher trained more and more in school may eschew a more complex view of their role or simply take up the status quo as they experience it in their school. This, for example, may or may not be a ‘good’ thing if the teacher then moves to a different school, with a different intake, and with a different pedagogical approach. However, as Bacchi (2010: 6) points out, ‘Political subjects may either take up or refuse “subject positions.”’ And from what some of our research participants had to say, they held evident commitments to becoming enquiring teachers and extended professionals regardless of the routes and pathways they had chosen. They were clearly not displacing the role of HEIs in helping them in becoming effective teachers and neither were they unaware of the complementariness of their experiences in their schools. This is what Foucault (1981: 13) meant when he said that we can challenge who we are asked to become: ‘Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight and refuse what is.’

‘Locating’ the policy problem? Finally, what we want to do is return to how the problem of teacher education could be represented differently. At the start of this chapter we suggested that the policy problem of ITE was being represented as current practice needing to be ‘fixed’ by schools and other providers. We want to conclude by posing a different representation of the policy problem grounded in the wider social

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challenge of the failure to recruit and retain teachers. Currently there is a significant shortfall in the recruitment of teachers (NUT 2015). Perhaps even more troubling is the massive problem of retention where over forty per cent of teachers leave the profession within the first five years (Wilshaw 2014) and there is evidence that teacher shortages are still increasing (Ward 2015). Our point in this chapter is not to replace one policy ‘problem’ with another; rather it is to try to demonstrate that if the problem is represented in one way, other matters that might be involved get marginalized. ‘Locating’ the policy problem is not about teasing out what is the ‘best’ problem to fix; it is about the recognition that taking the problem in a particular way means that other versions of what could be seen as a problem simply become displaced.

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4

Comparing Secondary Initial Teacher Education in England and Finland: Learning Together Paul Richard Dickinson and Jaana Ilona Silvennoinen

Introduction The comparative study was prompted by a visit to two teaching schools in Finland (Helsinki and Tampere) by two academics from Sheffield Hallam University. At the time of the visit there was a strong interest from the then Teaching and Development Agency (the body responsible for the initial and in-service training of teachers and other school staff in England) in Finland’s teaching schools as potential models for teacher training in England. However, the visit’s initial findings indicated that the Finnish models were far from advocating a move to a school-led system of teacher training. Furthermore, the strong accountability agenda where training providers would effectively have their licence to train removed in England if they did not meet the criteria of a ‘good’ training provider as set out by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) demonstrated yet another significant contrast to the Finnish system where there was a culture of trust in the teaching schools to train teachers. It was the juxtaposition of the apparent drive in England by the government to be as successful as Finland and yet its desire to put in place measures that were removing or at least weakening the teacher training role of universities that needed further exploration to capture what might be lost or gained in the enacting of this policy. Increasingly, international differences in educational outcomes have spurred comparisons between national educational settings, including between Finnish education and other countries. This chapter focuses on secondary initial teacher

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education in England and Finland. Current policy in England is widening the gap between these two jurisdictions. The ‘taken for granted’ discourse alluded to by Maguire and George in the previous chapter has manifested itself as a government ‘truth’ that teacher training would be better led by schools than by universities if the challenges of improving pupil attainment are to be overcome. This ‘truth’ is being used to justify current government measures to allocate an increasing proportion of student teacher numbers to school-led teacher training and to question the roles of universities. The recent white paper (2016) Educational Excellence Everywhere states, ‘We will continue to move to an increasingly school-led ITT system which recruits enough great teachers in every part of the country, so that the best schools and leaders control which teachers are recruited and how they are trained’ (DfE 2016: 28). The strong drive for a school-led system in England with the rapid expansion of School Direct, Teach First and School Centred Initial Teacher Training is juxtaposed against the strong university-led model in Finland where their teacher training schools are merged into the education departments of universities and where teachers are employed by the universities. As a contrast to what Maguire and George discuss in the previous chapter on Foucault and the idea of ‘taken for granted’ having induced fluctuating, frequent reforms of ITE by the government in England, in Finland ‘the truth’ is, and seems to have been for several decades, to consider teacher education as the key to social progress. This ideal stems from the times when Finns lived in poverty and their educational level was low: ‘People from the woods’ needed to be educated (Rautiainen 2013). ‘The discourse of research-based teacher education, – embodies a redemptive theme that rests on the promise of education and schooling that is to elevate the individual, the nation, and the whole of humanity’ (Sitomaniemi-San 2015). Thus, there seem to be no serious aspirations from any jurisdiction, least from the government, to reduce the academic status of teacher education in Finland and the professional teacher it produces. In Finland, the tradition of relying on academic experts and professionals in political decision-making concerning educational reforms is strong, which contributes to integrated implementation and commitment. All this accounts for the strong teacher autonomy in Finland, and the culture of trust. In ITE, student teachers are encouraged to become effective rather than merely efficient. Initial teacher education in Finland is undertaken in thirteen teacher training schools of which eight provide secondary initial teacher education with some

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individual teacher training schools hosting more than 150 student teachers enabling significant peer interaction and learning. By comparison in England initial teacher education takes place in thousands of schools and it is unusual for one school to have more than twenty student teachers and most having far fewer. It is also possible for student teachers to select from a wide range of training routes. The relative autonomy afforded to the Finland approach contrasts heavily with the compliance model in England where teacher training providers are regularly inspected by an external government body called Ofsted and where the space for innovation is restricted. The chapter explores current policy in both countries and draws upon in particular the voices of school-based mentors linked to one of two large teacher training providers in each country: Sheffield Hallam University in England or Helsinki University in Finland. Key participants in ensuring the success of the models of initial teacher training in each country are these school-based mentors, and their voices about the particular training they help to facilitate are seldom heard.

England context England in 2016 provides a significant range of choices of training routes for the would-be applicant, but increasingly a lack of clarity concerning exactly what each route offers and which one might best suit the prospective student teacher. These various routes include undergraduate three-year degrees with Qualified Teacher Status, university-led Post Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) courses, a two-year Teach First programme for highly qualified graduates to commit to working in challenging schools, School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) which might not involve universities to School Direct, a relatively new route that has expanded exponentially following the implementation of the government’s White Paper (2010) The Importance of Teaching, to name but a few. School Direct is being mobilized as one of the major vehicles to implement the ‘main thrust of British Government policy which is to put schools rather than universities fully in the seat’ (Whitty 2014: 469). School Direct routes might or might not offer master’s-level credits, might or might not involve very close working with a university. The School Direct lead school can ultimately decide. Some schools (e.g. academies), of which there are an ever-growing number, can choose to appoint unqualified teachers and not engage in any of the recognized teacher training routes at all. It is a puzzle for the would-be student teacher

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as they decide on their pathway to become a teacher in England. At the time of publication, the government has suggested that the role of recommending Qualified Teacher Status may be removed altogether from training providers and instead be granted to schools to recommend following a period of teaching after initial training. The government is also aiming to establish Centres of Excellence for initial teacher education, although the metrics for designating these and their remit has not yet been clarified. It will be interesting to see if these have any resemblance to Finland’s teaching schools. The balance between university-led and school-led models of secondary initial teacher training has shifted significantly in the last two years and is now almost evenly divided between the two, although universities are involved in 82 per cent of ITT (NCTL 2014). For the academic year 2014/15, 16,932 places were allocated for the training of secondary student teachers (DfE). It should also be noted that the division between university-led and school-led can be a misleading as many university courses are deeply embedded in school practice, and as School Direct develops, many schools welcome the role that universities bring to the partnership, particularly in terms of research-led and researchinformed practice. It may be several years before there is significant stability and clarity in the training route ‘offers’ for those keen to join the teaching profession. At a time when it appears that there is less emphasis on research during initial teacher training where a ‘craft’-based model is emphasized, ‘critics of the recent reforms to initial teacher education have expressed serious concerns that the shift away from university led programmes will diminish research capacity by destabilising staffing and eroding funding for applied research’ (BERA 2014: 6).

Sheffield Hallam University context Sheffield Hallam University is one of the largest providers of initial teacher education in England and offers a wide range of routes into secondary education. There is a significant emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics subjects at this university with undergraduate routes and postgraduate routes in design and technology, mathematics and science. These are all ‘hard to recruit’ to subjects. The university also offers a wide breadth of at least fourteen subjects at postgraduate level through a combination of universityled and school-led models with over three hundred secondary student teachers qualifying every year. The university is in partnership with over 150 secondary

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schools and thus student teachers can be in a school where they are only one in number or where there are large numbers (10+). Student teachers are supported by a subject-specific mentor in school who will have undertaken at least a day’s initial mentor training with the university. The mentor has a key role in supporting the student teacher not only in a pastoral capacity but also in the capacity of a trainer and assessor using the current Teachers’ Standards to decide whether the student teacher meets the necessary criteria for Qualified Teacher Status by the end of the designated training period. The final judgements will be agreed with a university moderator. Within the school the mentor will draw upon the expertise of other subject teachers and a senior mentor coordinator (usually an experienced mentor, senior member of staff with a responsibility for both supporting and monitoring the quality of mentoring in the particular school). On most routes except Teach First the student teachers will lead on about eight hours of lessons a week after four weeks. By the time they are into the second half of their training programme they will be leading on approximately twelve hours of lessons a week. By the end of their training they will have led on at least two hundred hours of lessons. Teach First begins with a summer school focusing on subject and subject pedagogy and then the student teacher begins a two-year programme as if they are a newly qualified teacher as they train to become qualified. This means high contact hours from week one, much higher than other training routes. The university’s role varies depending on the type of route and expertise within the school or school cluster. On the more established PGCE routes it will involve inputs on subject knowledge, subject pedagogy, professional studies, master’s-level reflection and writing, as well as visits to schools to jointly observe student teachers with the mentor, monitor progress and agree targets. On the more school-led models the university’s role is often reduced to the master’slevel input, some training sessions and quality assuring the wider training programme. The SCITT model is an excellent example of the shifting to schoolled provision where the school cluster has responsibility for awarding Qualified Teacher Status and can purchase university expertise if it desires with, for example, master’s-level accreditation.

Finland context The Ministry of Education has recommended that universities educate 1,070 new subject teachers, 130 student counsellors and 500 special education teachers

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each year in the years 2013–16. Teachers trained in polytechnics (for vocational institutions) are not included in these numbers (Opetus- ja Kulttuuriministeriö: Selvitys opettajankoulutuksesta 2011). Secondary initial teacher education in Finland has been university led for decades. Along with the reforms towards a more decentralized educational system in the 1990s, it was agreed that teacher education should equip teachers with research-based knowledge and with skills and methods for developing teaching, cooperating at school and communicating with parents and other stakeholders (Jakku-Sihvonen and Niemi 2006: 40). Teacher education is thus seen in the reference frame in which teachers are representatives of a highquality academic and ethical profession who take an active role in raising serious questions about what they teach, how they teach and the larger goals for which they strive (Jakku-Sihvonen and Niemi 2006: 45). After achieving their qualification, teachers in Finland enjoy a high degree of professional autonomy and are not subjected to external inspection (Sahlberg 2011: 76–7). All university education in Finland aligns with the Bologna agreement. To qualify as a subject teacher in Finland, one has to acquire a master’s degree (300 ECTS), including one major subject (120 ECTS) and a master’s thesis in an academic discipline, as well as two minor subjects comprising at least 60 ECTS each. In addition, either as part of the master’s degree or apart from it, they have to complete teacher’s pedagogical studies (60 ECTS), which consists of both theoretical studies and practical training and lasts for one academic year. There are no tuition fees in Finnish universities. Since ITC is seen as studying, the student teachers are not paid. The practical teacher training for initial secondary education is provided by seven Finnish-speaking and one Swedish-speaking university teacher training schools, all of which function as independent units within their universities. The schools provide both general secondary (most of them also primary) education to pupils and initial teacher education to student teachers. They are strongly research based and collaborate closely with the subject faculties, the educational department as well as with one another. Together they form an organization called The Finnish Teacher Training Schools (FTTS), whose network eNorssi actively arranges conferences for teacher educators and provides teachers and student teachers with material and teaching tools and also collects systematic feedback from the student teachers as part of selfassessment (www.FTTS.fi).

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Helsinki University context The Faculty of Behavioural Sciences is one of eleven faculties at the University of Helsinki. It comprises the Institute of Behavioural Sciences and the Department of Teacher Education. It has two teacher training schools, Normal Lyceum of Helsinki and Viikki Teacher Training School. At secondary level they comprise 1,000 students, 130 teachers and 340 student teachers. All the teachers work both as teachers for pupils and as mentoring teachers for student teachers. Thus, mentoring is a vital part of the scope of both schools and is seen as no less important than basic teaching by the teachers. Every teachers’ meeting has student teachers on the agenda, and mentors get strong peer learning and support in their own work environment. The university also arranges training for the mentors through various forums, but not systematically. In their teacher training year, the student teachers spend three days observing and analysing lessons at school in September and come back to school for the basic training (October–December) and again for the final training (March– May). During this time they observe 44 lessons, participate in 24 mentor-led group sessions on various issues about teaching and hold sixteen 75-minute lessons for pupils. In addition, every student teacher belongs to a ‘school as a community’ group consisting of student teachers from different subjects. These groups are led by mentors and their purpose is to discuss various phenomena occurring in the school community and thus widen and provide a more realistic understanding of a subject teacher’s scope of work. Each lesson is carefully planned and discussed with the mentor beforehand and afterwards. The amount of time spent on each lesson varies but usually takes several hours. The student teacher is encouraged to come up with their own ways of delivering the lesson and explore various methods in their teaching, but they are guided to understand the link between theory and practice and thus become effective in what they do in the classroom. The pupil is always the focus, and helping the student teacher internalize his or her position as the learner is in the main interest of the mentor. Since there is not enough room for all the student teachers at these two schools, a small number of them do part of their training at normal public schools (known as municipal field schools). Apart from the periods at teacher training schools, all student teachers also carry out a one-month applied training at any educational institution of their choosing. At the end of their teacher training year, all students complete an exit survey. Subject teacher training is subject to the general quality assurance policy of

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Helsinki University. In practice, however, this means a lot of independence and trust compared to practices in most other countries.

Comparison between England and Finland and models of Initial Teacher Education To become a qualified teacher in England, the student needs to demonstrate evidence against a set of standards rather than complete an academic qualification, although they can opt to gain an academic award. It is a graduate profession, but does not necessarily draw upon those with the highest academic qualifications in the country and has to compete with other professions; it does not have the high status as in some countries. All initial teacher education courses in England include at least twenty-four weeks in schools, experience in at least two school/college settings and are led by universities or schools that are graded at least ‘good’ by Ofsted. University and school-led providers are subject to an inspection cycle where the outcome can be ‘outstanding’, ‘good’, ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’. The inspection process focuses not only on ITE students, but also on those in their early years of teaching so that a more complete judgement can be made about the quality of the training provider. By contrast, Finland has retained a model of master’s-level qualification for all teachers (except those working in kindergarten) and emphasizes a very close link between teaching schools and university education departments so much so that the school teachers responsible for training the next generation of teachers are employees of the local designated university for teacher training. In Finland the link between teaching and research is emphasized in the education. The objective is to produce teachers with a research orientation in their work who are capable of independent problem-solving and have the capacity to utilize the most recent research in the fields of education (teacher education in Finland, Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland 1/2014).

Material and method It was in essence this apparent stark difference in approach at a time when global sharing of ideas is so common that provided an excellent catalyst to explore key similarities and differences and to identify some agreement about what makes

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good practice. The writers sought to understand both students’ and mentors’ perceptions of secondary initial teacher training models in their countries to highlight some key perceptions as a lens for comparisons. This small-scale research was based upon two teacher training providers and thus may not represent other training providers in these countries. The writers decided that while it was valuable to capture the students’ opinions, the main emphasis should be on the views of school-based mentors in relation to models of secondary initial teacher training. The rationale for this was that mentors’ roles were considered by both writers as so vital to the success of initial teacher training. In order to identify perceived good practice, student exit surveys from the training providers were used instead of the national surveys because of the high respondent rates. The national survey of newly qualified teachers in England only achieves an approximately 17 per cent respondent rate. At Sheffield Hallam University student respondents at the exit survey were two hundred from a cohort of just over three hundred and thus approximately 65 per cent of all students that could have participated. Two subject areas did not provide data. Data was taken from the cohort leaving in 2014. The questions used mirrored those of the national newly qualified teachers’ survey which focuses on student satisfaction of training. Out of the two teacher training schools at Helsinki University, only student teachers and mentors at Normal Lyceum of Helsinki were included in this study. The exit survey was conducted for all the student teachers finishing their ITE at any university in Finland in May 2014. Out of approximately 160 student teachers at Helsinki Normal Lyceum, 89 responded, representing altogether 17 different subject areas. Thus, the respondent rate was approximately 56 per cent. The method identified for collecting mentors’ perceptions was a qualitative one using sixteen semi-structured interviews with mentoring teachers, eight from each country. This design was chosen to enable the interviewers to explore in more depth particular aspects of good practice identified by the mentors through follow-up linked questions or through requests for further detail in the interview. The subjects selected were geography, biology, mathematics, history, foreign language, mother tongue, religion and chemistry. The reason for choosing these particular subjects was that they were the ones common to both countries’ curricula and thus provided a more valid comparison. The mentors were selected by having undertaken a mentoring role either in the current year and/or in the previous year. A shortlist of potential mentors was

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drawn up by university tutors and then the mentors were contacted to ascertain their willingness to participate. As a result all eight subjects in England were represented even if it was not the first mentor contacted in that subject area. All eight subjects were represented in Finland. University ethics procedures were followed (i.e. right to withdraw, anonymity) and the mentors were sent the key questions in advance of the interviews. The five questions selected all aimed to elucidate mentors’ perceptions about the current models of initial teacher training in the respective countries.

Exit surveys Sheffield Hallam University, England exit survey The exit survey data of 2014 shows that of the respondents 100 per cent felt that their training was at least good in welfare and safety training, 97 per cent for preparing them to teach a range of teaching methods to promote good learning, 96 per cent for promoting good behaviour, 95 per cent for working with teaching colleagues as part of a team, 94 per cent for helping to understand subject knowledge, 94 per cent for teaching their specialist subject, 93 per cent for helping with pedagogy, 93 per cent for accessing educational research in their teaching practice and 93 per cent for their own professional development. At the lower end of satisfaction rates, 74 per cent felt that their training was at least good in preparing them for the role of phonics in teaching Primaryaged pupils to read, 80 per cent for use of data, 80 per cent preparing to work with learners with English as an Additional Language (EAL), 81 per cent in being prepared to teach pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds, 81 per cent for integrating university-delivered and school-based training and 82 per cent working with teaching assistants and other adults to achieve learning objectives. These very positive returns do suggest confidence in training in subject and pedagogy and for accessing educational research, probably in preparation for their assignments. The very positive response in relation to training in behaviour may be linked to an extra two-day behaviour forum that was developed between the university and schools to focus on both theoretical underpinning and classroom practice. Areas that suggest less confidence relate to working with pupils for whom English is an additional language and working with pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds. This is likely to be related to the region where student teachers

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are undertaking their training where schools are increasingly multicultural and where English may not be the first language for many pupils. The role of phonics teaching is a government priority but might be perceived as more relevant for primary education, and this might account for the lower satisfaction score.

Helsinki University, Finland exit survey The exit surveys in Helsinki 2014 indicate that the student teachers considered mentoring in their own subjects of a high standard and that they had gained wide insight into special issues related to teaching their own subject. They also felt they had developed as teachers during their ITE, but more so as instructors of their own subject knowledge than as educators. Initial teacher education was seen as flexible and it had enabled them to bring up their own views and find their own strengths and areas to develop. It had also inspired them to study, develop and evaluate their own work as teachers. Co-operation with other student teachers was found to be beneficial. The vast majority felt they had worked with commitment and high responsibility during the ITE year. Improvement was desired in receiving tools to work in a multicultural school, collaborate with parents and support pupils with different learning styles. Furthermore, the student teachers perceiving the importance of pedagogical science in the teacher’s work remained weak. Also, many student teachers felt that they had not perceived the meaning of ethical responsibility in the teacher’s work. Finally, the difference between basic practice and master’s-level practice seemed to remain vague, and was hoped to be more distinctive.

Summary Student teachers in both Sheffield Hallam University and Helsinki University were pleased with the range of teaching methods to promote good learning they received during their ITE courses. Consequently, the vast majority felt they had received enough tools to teach their specialist subject and support for their own professional development. Student teachers in both countries felt they did not get enough education on how to work with pupils from different ethnic backgrounds. Student teachers in England felt they had learnt how to work with teacher colleagues as part of a team, whereas those in Finland felt they had worked a lot with other student teachers, and appreciated peer support. In England student

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teachers work in schools as part of the staff, while in Finland they are students with about 170 other student teachers.

Semi-structured interviews Eight semi-structured interviews were undertaken with mentors in each country covering eight different subject areas which were common to both countries. The interviews were based on five key questions to explore their perceptions of current national models of initial teacher education. Each of the mentors was mentoring in a different school in England. All the mentors were working with student teachers either this academic year or had worked with them last academic year, and all interviews were taped. QUESTION 1. What are your thoughts about the current models of initial teacher training in your country?

Sheffield Hallam University, England Most mentors interviewed in England were supportive of the current PGCE model being undertaken with Sheffield Hallam University and agreed that the majority of time should be in school but that the university does have a significant role in training, especially in terms of developing reflective practice, current thinking and providing expertise in the subject field. Three of the mentors praised the university’s role for training in behaviour management, a domain usually associated with school-based training. Suggestions for prolonging ITE into a two-year programme were made by several mentors. There was unanimous support for the training to take place in at least two schools. Most mentors liked the balance of eight hours teaching per week on the first school-based training experience to allow time for observing colleagues and lesson planning with a move to twelve hours teaching per week on the second school-based experience. There was, however, a strong view that towards the end of the final school-based training period this should be increased to nearer sixteen hours per week in preparation for the Newly Qualified Teachers first year.

Helsinki University, Finland All mentors regarded the current model of ITE as an excellent system. The combination of the theoretical studies at the pedagogical faculty and practical

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training at the teacher training schools were seen as the main asset, avoiding some of the dangers of over reliance on observational learning and offering a system where student teachers learn to think themselves. The strong prevalence of peer support was also seen as a significantly positive factor. The number of lessons given by the student teachers was considered too small and the proportion of theory too high compared to that of practice. Some mentors also found one academic year too short a period for ITE.

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Mentors seemed happy with the ITE systems in their countries. Most of the mentors interviewed in England were supportive of the current PGCE model being undertaken with Sheffield Hallam University. They thought that most time should be spent in schools and saw the university’s role as important in developing reflective practice, current thinking and expertise in the field. Some wanted to extend the ITE period into two years. The mentors interviewed in Finland considered the Finnish way of providing secondary initial teacher education as an excellent system which grew skilful, committed and independently thinking subject teachers with good knowledge of theoretical framework and an understanding of how to implement it in practice creatively and purposefully. All of them felt that the student teachers should receive more teaching practice during their ITE.

QUESTION 2. What do you think are the most important roles of the university in the current system? How could this be improved?

Sheffield Hallam University, England Key themes emerged with most mentors noting the importance of the university’s role in terms of teaching theory in relation to education and the specific subject area as well as providing new ideas, relevant texts, input on pedagogy and introducing best practice. Some noted the role of the university in providing a ‘hub’ where student teachers come together to critique practice and learn from one another. The role of supporting subject knowledge gaps for student teachers with a degree which might be so specialized that it does not cover the range required for the national curriculum was seen as an important role for the university as was the use of evidence-based practice. Some felt that the role

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of quality assurance was paramount to standardize and validate the work of the mentors across a range of schools. Half of the mentors made a strong request for more connectivity with the university. Suggestions included extra visits, more explicit sharing of the university programme so that they could build on university-based sessions, updates on research and greater use of newsletters and even access to university lectures and seminars for mentors and teachers.

Helsinki University, Finland All the mentors were unanimous that the most important role of the pedagogical faculty at the university is to provide the student teachers with the basic knowledge of behavioural sciences as well as the necessary theoretical framework in subject teaching (didactics). The theories of behavioural sciences were seen as less important than those of didactics. Improvement was needed in bridging the gap between theory and practice with most mentors considering the university tutors alienated from the school life and thus unable to realize the connection between what they were teaching at the faculty and what the student teachers were to face in the classroom.

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Mentors in both countries recognized the importance of the university as the provider of theoretical knowledge in relation to education. In England, the role of supporting subject knowledge gaps was emphasized, whereas in Finland the teacher education department focuses only on pedagogy and didactics. Mentors in both countries felt a gap between theory and practice existed which needed to be bridged. In England half the mentors made a strong request for more connectivity with the university, whereas in Finland all the mentors felt the student teachers should, in addition to their theoretical studies, spend more time in practical training. Quality assurance was considered important in England, whereas in Finland it was not mentioned, which seems to reflect the difference in assessment practice in the two countries. In England teachers, schools and teacher education are subjected to close monitoring and external inspection, while in Finland teachers enjoy a high level of autonomy and are usually unaware of the quality assurance system of the university.

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QUESTION 3. What do you think are the most important roles of the school/s in the current system?

Sheffield Hallam University, England All mentors commented on the importance of practical experience and in their own words how schools provide the holistic experience. The importance of professionalism, observing teachers, identifying strengths and areas to develop and gaining ‘hands on’ experience were mentioned. The recommended contact time of eight hours per week during the early stages of school-based training was seen as valuable so that student teachers could benefit from time for preparation. Gaining access to the wider curriculum in school was highlighted with student teachers being encouraged to support extra-curricular activities. Most mentors commented on the breadth of teaching expertise that could be drawn upon in their schools and how modelling best practice in school was vital. There was recognition from some mentors that schools provide access to the classroom craft and universities to the theory and understanding of pedagogy. Some again noted the disconnect between school-based training and university elements with assignments seen as creating stress for student teachers and mentors not seeing their role as working closely with assignment work and the research aspects of student teachers’ academic work.

Helsinki University, Finland The role of the teacher training school in ITE was seen as the most important of all. The interviewees had a very similar view of its assets: the student teachers receive professional guidance in a safe, well-structured environment, both the student teachers and the mentors gain a lot of peer support and develop more effectively than in a field school where the teachers and student teachers mostly work alone. The student teachers get to work with mentors who dedicate a lot of time and energy for them. In teacher training schools student teachers also get to work with peers training in different subjects. This happens both when observing and discussing other trainees’ lessons and in special groups consisting of trainees from various subject areas, led by mentors. As a contrast, student feedback about training in ordinary field schools is often poor. The main problem expressed by all the interviewees is the small number of lessons that student teachers actually teach. All the eight mentors would increase

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it by 75 per cent–100 per cent. Also, the high number of student teachers was seen as demanding and according to some mentors deprived them of time for both themselves and their pupils.

Summary ●●

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Practical training was seen as the most important part of ITE in both countries, for much of the same reasons: to gain ‘hands on’ experience, reflect on it and identify strengths and areas to develop. Mentors in England also emphasized the importance of modelling best practice in school and providing a wider understanding of the pastoral role of the teacher. In Finland, all mentors saw two main assets in teacher training schools: the student teachers receiving professional guidance in a safe, well-structured environment and gaining a lot of peer support, also beyond their own subject area. All of them considered the current number of lessons given far too small.

QUESTION 4. How important do you think your role is in educating new teachers?

Sheffield Hallam University, England All mentors commented that their role in educating new teachers was incredibly important. What became clear was the commitment from the mentors and passion for their role. Most of them gave a range of examples of working hours well beyond any allocated time for their role. All had a statutory hour a week to meet with their student teacher to discuss progress, set targets, etc. However, ‘being cried on’, ‘e-mailing the student teacher at weekends’, meeting at least twenty minutes every day, ‘being almost a mum’ exemplify the type of comments being made and demands of this role. There was significant inconsistency in how they were remunerated for their role. Some were given one extra hour a week off teaching, some were given no extra time at all and had to use their non-contact time (planning and preparation allowance) to have the hour meeting, some knew of other mentors being paid. Almost all felt that the status of mentoring in their schools needed to be raised. The qualities required to be an effective mentor were consistently outlined with great emphasis on emotional intelligence. ‘Approachable’, ‘caring’, ‘supportive’,

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‘available’, ‘reliable’, ‘understanding’, ‘professional’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘enthusiastic’ were terms which characterized responses. Some also indicated the importance of being a good practitioner, excellent teacher and being reflective. All had undergone one-day initial mentor training, but there was less evidence of engagement in refresher training. There was a general agreement that there should be more refresher training and a more standardized programme perhaps with national recognition. Most commented on the benefits to their own practice of being a mentor. There was evidence of frustration at the lack of a high-level status for mentors, lack of time allocated to help them undertake their role effectively and the demands of having to support a ‘struggling’ student teacher.

Helsinki University, Finland All considered the mentor’s role very important. When asked about the qualities of an outstanding mentor, these were mentioned frequently: ability to listen to and ‘read’ the student teacher’s needs, help them find their strengths and weaknesses and enhance their skills and self-assurance. Other qualities included to motivate and direct on the student teacher’s path to teacherhood. Comments also related to helping them find their own ways to teach by giving exactly the amount of help they need but not a bit more and make sure every student teacher gets at least one experience of success in the classroom. It was noted as important to encourage them to try their own ideas, feel safe about making mistakes and feel that the mentor is there to support, to guide and to share ideas. The mentor should also be able to share the student teacher’s emotional experiences related to the work in the classroom: console, rejoice and praise when appropriate, and yet be honest and dare talk about difficult issues, too. An excellent mentor was seen as someone who spars and opens new angles. The mentor should be well aware of various concepts of learning and approaches to teaching and help the student teacher learn to find well-functioning pedagogical solutions, analyse their own lessons and become able and willing to develop their own teaching independently. Patience in understanding that each student teacher has a different way of thinking was important. Many mentors emphasized the power of groups and peer support among student teachers and found that they themselves also learnt a lot through group discussions. The mentors with long experience (twenty to thirty years) brought up the fact that nowadays as the student teachers are much younger and more fragile than before, the importance of support and encouragement is

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invaluable. The mentor’s feedback must be supportive and constructive in order to guarantee a successful continuation to the mentoring process and the student teacher’s growth into teacherhood. Some mentors emphasized the importance of delivering a realistic image of the teacher’s work and advised the student teachers to invest in their own wellbeing. They also found it important to make student teachers realize that no one becomes ‘ready’ as a teacher in one year. The most rewarding aspects of their role, according to the mentors, were seeing the development in the student teacher’s working with the pupils, his/her ability to analyse lessons and develop lesson plans, as well as the improved self-assurance and enthusiasm towards working as a teacher. Some mentors mentioned the good feeling spreading in the classroom when the student teacher had succeeded, probably after a few failures. The mentors found that the most challenging aspects were working with student teachers who were reluctant to receive feedback and tried to cope with the minimum amount of work. Such cases were estimated to be very rare, though. Even though the mentors enjoyed their work, having a lot of student teachers was stressful at times, and the mentors missed their own time with their pupils. All the mentors received peer support from their colleagues; usually from those of their own subject but also from other colleagues. Many had at least one very close, supportive colleague within the same subject. They found the teacher training school an environment where the employees train each other through collaboration and discussion. Only a few mentors had received training for mentoring. Most thought that a systematic training for beginning mentors would be beneficial. Some mentors wished to have more in-service training; some were sceptical of the quality of the training available and thought that the best training lay in the communication with their colleagues. All the interviewees considered it important for the student teachers to have a good knowledge of the scientific data available on learning and teaching, and that they receive tools for carrying out research on their own teaching. Yet how beneficial theoretical understanding is in the classroom depends much on each individual student teacher.

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The mentor’s role was considered vitally important in both England Finland. The perceived characteristics of an ideal mentor were also very

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similar, emphasizing emotional intelligence, being supportive of the student teacher and being enthusiastic, professional teachers. The most rewarding experiences of working with student teachers seemed alike in both countries: seeing the student teacher’s progress both in planning and delivering lessons and reflecting on their work. Consequently, working with a student teacher who was reluctant to put effort and/or unable to reflect on his/her work was found frustrating. In Finland, all the mentors also brought up the importance of encouraging the student teachers to create new ways of teaching, take risks and overcome the fear of making mistakes. They also emphasized the power of groups and peer support among student teachers. Mentors in England showed some frustration at the lack of high-level status for them and the inconsistency in their remuneration. All the mentors in England had undergone one-day initial mentor training, but there was less evidence of engagement in refresher training. There was a general agreement that there should be more refresher training and a more standardized programme perhaps with national recognition. In Finland only a few mentors had received initial training for mentoring, but all of them received peer support from their colleagues and found the teacher training school an environment where mentors teach one another. Most thought, however, that a systematic training for beginning mentors would be beneficial. This supports A. Hobson’s and A. Malderez’s view to ‘recommend policy changes to stipulate that all practicing mentors have successfully completed an accredited mentor preparation programme’ (http://shura.shu.ac.uk/7224).

QUESTION 5. How important do you consider the role of research is in supporting the development of student teachers?

Sheffield Hallam University, England Most mentors noted that research was important, but that time for any engagement was severely limited. Three mentors had not started a master’s degree with little intention to do so at least in the short term. Three had started a master’s degree and had given it up due to a range of circumstances; in most cases time pressures and family commitments. One was doing a master’s to ‘move up the career ladder’ and noted how she had to give up weekends to undertake the course and

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one had completed a master’s. The latter was incredibly self-disciplined. She said she started work at 5.00 am on Saturday mornings, used Thursday evenings for marking, one night a week for master’s work, used Sunday for further research and was a full-time teacher. She said she came into teaching late from industry, felt research was important and noted how it had impacted positively on her teaching as her research on questioning had improved her questioning practice in the classroom. For most of these mentors there was a willingness and even desire to be more involved in research, but the reality of teaching and its associated demands made it almost impossible without an incredible commitment to scheduling much of one’s ‘home’ time to research work. The research being undertaken by the student teachers was greeted with mixed responses. One mentor felt that the intensity of the classroom aspects meant that academic assignments were not fully valued, while another similarly questioned its value for students at this point in their training. Others said that while the research undertaken by student teachers was onerous, it was nevertheless useful. One mentor felt that student teachers ‘need to know the tried and tested’, while another said that it was important to review articles and to be up to date with latest theories. Some mentors felt that more could be made of student teachers’ research, with some saying the research should be more closely linked to school/ department priorities like marking and feedback. There was an acknowledgement by most that schools are not as well linked into research as they should be. Research was generally seen as the role of the university.

Helsinki University, Finland All the mentors had completed at least two master’s theses: one in their main subject and another in education. One had a doctorate and many were engaged in creating teaching materials/writing school books or undertaking further study. Some were considering taking a PhD but only after their current projects. The opinions on whether mentors should be involved in research were divided. Many thought that in principle carrying out research might be beneficial, because being curious about what happens in the classroom is part of the teacher’s job. They felt that mentors should not, however, be expected to do it in addition to all the work they already have. Many interviewees considered making teaching material more beneficial than carrying out research, because

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while doing so one has to be well aware of the curricula and the theoretical framework of didactics, whereas carrying out research is usually focused on one specific field only. They felt that sharing the scientific data that some experienced colleagues have gained in their research might provide support for mentors as long as it has a connection to practical school life.

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The significance of scientific research was not questioned in either country, but opinions on whether mentors should carry out research were divided. Those who had carried out research found it had had a positive impact on their work, either directly or indirectly. In England, it was greeted with mixed responses. Some saw the benefit of it, whereas some were doubtful of its value at this point of training. Some felt it should be closely linked to school/department priorities. Most acknowledged that schools are not as linked into research as they should be. In Finland where all the teachers have at least a master’s degree and where university teacher training school mentors are encouraged to carry out research, the research undertaken by student teachers was not questioned at all.

Discussion Similarities In both countries the mentors emphasized their importance in supporting the student teacher and the need for emotional intelligence. They felt that the role of the university was to provide external support and expertise in methods of teacher training. Both countries have a growing focus on transition into early years of teaching, yet in both countries most student teachers train on a one-year intensive programme.

Differences The main differences occurred in the academic entry bar, the status of the profession and the level of university involvement, which were higher in Finland. Other notable differences included the much higher number of training centres

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in England, where also a huge variation in the number of routes, providers and expectations existed. In England the issue of significant quality monitoring was brought up frequently, while in Finland strong autonomy was emphasized. In Finland a lot of emphasis was placed on personal development and risk taking, whereas in England best practices were relied on. The Finnish system provides much more time for reflection compared to that of the English system. This is partly due to the significant differences in the expected contact time delivering lessons as evidenced in this study, it being about ten times more in England than in Finland. In Finland there was a view that more real teaching time was needed, but not nearly as much as in England.

Lessons learnt There is general agreement that effective teachers are reflective practitioners (Kolb 1984; Schon 1983) and are able to reflect in action and post action by exploring connections between context and theory. As a result they are able to modify teaching and learning approaches. However, this often requires confronting a student teacher’s own internalized pedagogical thoughts (Tryggvason 2009: 379) in order to facilitate new educational thinking. On the basis of this premise good practice should support student teachers to become reflective practitioners as they move through the stages of a developing teacher and engage critically in educational experiences. Universities in both countries have expertise in developing reflective practitioners and this should not be lost as their role in England is questioned. They also have expertise in training mentors in developing reflective practice in their student teachers. It would thus appear from our research that an ideal ITE system should recognize and support the crucial role of mentors and build upon their passionate commitment to mentoring (evidenced in both countries) by raising their profile and providing them with high status. This can hardly be done without developing standard minimum requirements and high-quality training programmes. The training should address the skills and theoretical knowledge required for effective mentoring. Lead mentors’ roles should be seen on a par with a head of the department’s role. There would be benefits for all teachers to be trained as mentors not just for supporting ITE student teachers but also for supporting those in their early stages of their professional development. This would provide a positive culture of mentoring and staff development.

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A two-year ITE programme seems optimal. There should be a right balance between practical training and the time spent on reflection, observation and planning in teacher training schools, and it should be checked if there is a smooth coherence between the theoretical studies at the university and school practice with a more integrated approach. Opportunities for strong peer support and peer learning should be ensured to facilitate reflective practice as is currently part of the Finnish training model. Training to teach pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds should also be more emphasized. In both countries it is apparent that student teachers feel less confident teaching pupils from diverse backgrounds and the student teachers would benefit from more training and opportunities to work alongside experts in this area. Research should be encouraged and supported but be linked by its relevance to teaching and learning, so that the topics for research would spring from the classroom to improve practice and help student teachers to reflect on their approaches. Initial teacher education should not just be driven by past practice and ideology but should benefit from knowledge exchange with countries sharing and critiquing their own models of practice in a culture of co-learning in a united quest to improve the learning of pupils across the globe.

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Teacher Education in South Africa: Teacher Educators Working for Social Justice Maureen Robinson

Introduction: Towards improving the quality of education One of the most important arenas for social reconstruction in South Africa in the period since the advent of democracy in 1994 was, and continues to be, that of education (Sayed, Kanjee and Nkomo 2013). During the apartheid years, education had been a major site of neglect for poor and black children, coupled with a vastly unequal allocation of resources to schools serving different racial groups. This led to enormous disparities in educational achievement across different sectors of society, a fundamental breakdown of the quality of education and a need to harness massive resources to meet the educational needs of the new generation. Twenty-two years into democracy, there has been much progress in educational provision, with significant improvements in access to education. As part of the global initiative on Education for All, the number of five-year-old children attending educational institutions increased from 39.3 to 85.3 per cent, seven- to thirteen-year-olds increased from 96.7 to 99.3 per cent and fourteento eighteen-year-olds increased from 87.7 to 90.3 per cent (Department of Basic Education 2014). Despite the good progress made towards universal access to schooling, concerns still exist with regard to equity and quality in the education system. Two decades after the formal abolishment of racial segregation, historical disadvantage still persists. There is still a strong relationship between socio-economic status and quality of schooling (Spaull 2013), with the poorest and most marginalized being especially affected by poor-quality education (Motala 2014). Concerns around quality include a low level of basic competencies, as evidenced in national and international benchmark tests in language and mathematics; poor retention,

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attendance, achievement and completion of schooling on schedule; problems of absenteeism, latecoming and disruption to the school timetable; serious gaps in learners’ subject knowledge; uneven coverage of the school curriculum; weak school infrastructure, and challenges for learners whose home language differs from the language of learning and teaching (Motala 2014). Teacher competence has also been under the spotlight with, for example, concerns being expressed around poor teacher content knowledge in mathematics (Venkat and Spaull 2015). These educational problems are compounded by social problems, with an overall unemployment rate in 2016 of 26.6 per cent. (www.statssa.gov.za). This places additional pressure on the need for education and training, particularly of young people in the country.1 It is within this context that this chapter sketches a scenario for teacher education, as one strategy towards seeking to improve the quality of education in the country. Recent key policy changes are described, with the professional and academic expectations and challenges of teacher education being foregrounded. The chapter draws on the insider perspective of a teacher educator with many years of experience in policy reform and curriculum development in South Africa, including fourteen years as a dean of two different Faculties of Education, and presents particular conceptual and strategic issues that teacher educators working in a context of social change have to deal with. The chapter concludes by arguing that teacher educators can use their relative professional autonomy in various ways to contribute to an improvement of education in the country.

Policy reform in teacher education A vast number of new education policies and strategies have been introduced since the 1990s in an effort to break down racial separation, address historical disadvantage, build the capacity of the system and improve learner outcomes (Sayed and Kanjee 2013). The most significant interventions in initial teacher education have been the incorporation of the (formerly racially divided) colleges of education into higher education, the provision of generous merit bursaries in order to recruit academically strong candidates into teaching, and the introduction of a new national framework for teacher education qualifications. In the early 1990s, there were about 105 colleges of education spread across the country, with many being rurally based. During the 1990s, all these colleges were closed, merged or incorporated into 23 universities, mostly located in or

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near urban areas. Although some colleges of education were well regarded for their strong commitment to a practice-based pedagogy, they were criticized for being expensive to run and offering outdated curricula. The incorporation of the colleges into the higher education system was argued to be a way of reducing fragmentation and increasing the status and intellectual demand of the profession of teaching (Council on Higher Education 2010). Since the closure of the colleges, however, there have been loud voices in society who proclaim that university-based teacher education is now too ‘theoretical’ and has lost the close connection that colleges had to schools and to the world of practice, a point I return to later. The introduction of generous merit bursaries for teacher education candidates was motivated by a concern for the drop in numbers enrolling in teacher education (ironically, in part a consequence of the less geographically accessible location, more expensive and higher-entry requirements of universities), a desire to raise the public image of teaching and to attract academically strong candidates into the profession, particularly into the teaching of identified scarce subjects. This campaign has had a profound impact, with enrolments in teacher education increasing by 280 per cent between 2008 and 2013 and the supply of new teacher graduates increasing from about six thousand in 2008 to about sixteen thousand in 2013 (Department of Higher Education and Training 2015a).

Teacher education qualifications framework Public universities offer teacher education either via a four-year Bachelor of Education (B Ed) degree or via a one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). A very small number of student teachers are enrolled for these qualifications in private institutions, and alternative certification routes are not available. The qualifications framework for the B Ed and PGCE drew on findings of an earlier national review of teacher education programmes (Council on Higher Education 2010). This review had highlighted an unevenness of quality in B Ed programmes in relation to both academic appropriateness and contextual responsiveness. Constraining systemic factors were identified, including institutional instability, faculty restructuring, resource constraints and high student-to-staff ratios. Research outputs were shown to be low, with an undeveloped research culture and high teaching loads.

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These findings led to the redevelopment of the teacher education qualifications framework in the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications (Department of Higher Education and Training 2015). Although this framework provides an overall structure and criteria for learning programmes, it ‘allows for institutional flexibility and discretion in the allocation of credits within learning programmes, and encourages teacher educators to become engaged in curriculum design, policy implementation and research’ (ibid.: 10). Both the B Ed and PGCE are higher-education led, with schools participating officially only in the practicum period of the qualification. The minimum expectation is that B Ed students spend twenty to thirty-two weeks of supervised and assessed time in schools over the four-year period and PGCE students eight to twelve weeks of their one-year programme (Department of Higher Education and Training 2015); however, some students opt for distance learning and an internship model of training and thus spend longer periods in schools. The role of schools in teacher education is not formally defined and school– university partnerships, grounded in shared responsibilities, are not part of the qualifications framework. Some investigations have been conducted into strengthening school–university relationships through the possible establishment of Teaching Schools (Gravett, Petersen and Petker 2014) and Professional Practice schools (Robinson 2015; Robinson 2016). Whether the call to establish such schools derives from a commitment to school–university partnerships for mutual learning or from a mistrust of the role of universities in teacher education is not clear. Policy prescriptions also do not exist for how schools and universities collaborate with one another, and no formal policies related to time, contracts, funding, training or career possibilities support teacher mentors, the work of receiving student teachers being simply being part of what schools voluntarily ‘do’. The qualifications framework does not prescribe a particular set of competences or a predefined knowledge base for teaching. It foregrounds an orientation that supports knowledge, reflection, connection, synthesis and research and promotes different types of knowledge for teaching, namely disciplinary, pedagogical, practical, fundamental and situational learning. As long as they adhere to a shared basic structure which gives credence to the purpose of the qualification and to the different types of knowledge expected of teachers, universities are free to design their teacher education curriculum as they so wish. An important principle of the qualifications framework is its emphasis on social reconstruction. As the policy states, teacher education must ‘address

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the critical challenges facing education in South Africa today – especially the poor content and conceptual knowledge found amongst teachers, as well as the legacies of apartheid, by incorporating situational and contextual elements that assist teachers in developing competences that enable them to deal with diversity and transformation’ (Department of Higher Education and Training 2015: 10). That a teacher education curriculum should focus its attention on matters of transformation and redress has never been in dispute. This orientation is consistent with a much broader interest in the country around the contribution of higher education to the public good (Leibowitz 2012). Even within the economic and organizational global pressures of marketization, entrepreneurialism and managerialism affecting universities around the world (Singh 2012), the dominant voice in South Africa has remained a call to promote the social purposes of higher education and for curriculum reform to be underpinned by notions of democratic citizenship and social responsiveness. Varied and often contesting views exist, however, on what this might mean for curriculum and pedagogy in teacher education, a point that I return to later. From the above, it is clear that a strong commitment exists in the country to supporting teacher education in public universities. This is in contrast to developments in a number of other countries, where ‘teacher bashing’ and the ‘war on teachers’(Darling-Hammond and Lieberman 2012: 153) seem to prevail towards university-based teacher education. Official strategy documents have acknowledged and supported the role of teacher education in improving education in the country and the central responsibility of universities therein. The most recent of these was the Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa (Departments of Basic Education and Higher Education and Training 2011). This document – the result of extensive stakeholder engagement – outlines a map of proposed interventions that include national and provincial departments of education, professional bodies, teacher unions, teachers themselves, together with universities. Many opportunities, therefore, exist for teacher education programmes to design curricula that can contribute to improving the life chances of young people in South Africa, and this moral and political imperative underpins the professional identities and activities of many teacher educators. At the same time, however, a number of factors make it difficult for teacher educators to play out this professional role in significant ways, leading to tensions within the work environment, as well as in the ways in which society at large views the contribution of teacher education to social development. It is to these tensions that I now turn.

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Professional and academic expectations Despite official policies and plans that recognize the important role of teacher education, a subtle but troubling informal discourse is still heard around the perceived contribution (or lack thereof) of university-based teacher education to improving education in the country. The critiques resemble those of other international settings: that novice teachers are not socially or academically prepared for the demands of the classroom, particularly in economically challenged communities, that not enough ‘classroom management’ is taught, that teacher education programmes contain too much ‘theory’ and are not sufficiently practice- and school-based, that teacher educators have been out of the classroom for many years, that not enough content knowledge is being taught, that the school curriculum does not receive enough attention, etc. Within a public discourse that is based largely on a conceptualization of quality of education as embodied in test scores, the argument that teacher education is not making a difference gains traction through the fact that, as indicated earlier, test scores for poor learners remain weak. The expectation that teacher education can be the panacea for poor educational outcomes, of course, fails to foreground key related issues like conditions of schooling or support for beginner teachers (Mills and Mitchell 2013: 87). Many of the claims of inadequate teacher preparation are anecdotal. However, a study into the curricula of five teacher education institutions has revealed a very wide variation in all dimensions of the curricula examined. As the study argued: ‘And while there are some excellent practices, it is clear that, as a whole, none of the five institutions studied is rising fully to the challenge posed by the country’s low quality school system, particularly with respect to those student teachers not specialising in maths or English’ (Taylor 2014: 23). There is also an element of nostalgia, as older educators hark back to the days of the colleges of education, claiming that they were closer to schools and thus did a ‘better job’ of training new teachers. At the same time, some research contradicts this argument. Armstrong (2015), for example, has shown that younger teachers outperform older teachers in their own performance on mathematics and language tests, as well as in their ability to elicit stronger performance from their (school) students – a finding she attributes in part to younger teachers receiving their training at universities rather than colleges. Teacher educators have nothing to gain from being defensive about their programmes and should always be open to professional engagement. The

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risk exists, however, that generalized suspicions about the quality of teacher education programmes (whether evidence based or not) might lead to a call for more external regulation and greater monitoring of the sector. This would overbureaucratize and de-professionalize what is currently still a relatively open and flexible teacher education system.

Socioinstitutional factors Many who are vocal in their critique of teacher education are not aware that certain structural and material constraints in the way that higher education is resourced have contributed to these negative perceptions of university-based teacher education. Two such socioinstitutional factors are described here: the funding formula for higher education and incentives and rewards for academics. State or public funding for higher education in South Africa is one of three streams of funding, the others being student fees and various types of grants. State funding is based on a complex formula that includes teaching input and output funding, research funding and various earmarked strategic grants. The amount of teaching input and output funding per discipline varies and depends on the expected cost of offering teaching and research supervision in that field of study. Public funding of universities has been the focus of a number of reviews and much dispute over the years; in 2015 this was thrust strongly into the spotlight through vehement student protests around the affordability of student fees, as well as contestation from university vice chancellors about a diminishing state contribution. Of relevance to this discussion is the fact that teacher education falls into the lowest of four categories in the funding grid, in other words receives less public funding than most other disciplines, including subjects like journalism and philosophy. Education deans have for years contested this location in the funding grid, arguing that the move from the expensive college model to universities has not been matched with sufficient consideration of the costs of a professional programme like teacher education, a point already raised in the 2010 review of teacher education programmes. Where this becomes most apparent is on school visits, with financial limitations restricting the number of times that university supervisors are able to visit schools during the practicum period, as well costs of student and lecturer transport, student accommodation, employment of additional supervisors, etc. This has resulted in some schools criticizing universities for a perceived lack of communication, insufficient

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mentoring and overdependence on already hard-pressed teachers to support student teachers (Robinson 2015). The increased enrolments of student teachers relative to the number of university staff in Faculties of Education also often mean that school visits are outsourced to external contract staff. This diminishes the potential to build curricular links that respect the knowledge base of both academics and practitioners, and minimizes ‘relational expertise’, where ‘the resources from different practices are brought together to expand interpretations of multifaceted tasks’ (Edwards 2011: 34). The net effect of this experience can lead to reduced opportunities for constructive engagement and dialogue between schools and universities, with implications for the building of trust relationships and the development of a ‘democratic epistemology’ (Zeichner, Payne and Brayko 2015). A second structural constraint relates to the incentives and reward system of higher education in South Africa. At present, promotion criteria and grant funding for university academics are predominantly linked to the number of research outputs in recognized journals and the number of postgraduate student supervised, with less attention given to more elusive criteria like quality of teaching and/or social engagement. The demanding and time-consuming work involved in building relationships with schools, or in supporting teaching and learning in general, is less visible and less rewarded, and is often the domain of younger and more junior academics, who at the same time face the pressures of building an academic career. This tension resonates with research in Canada (Broom 2015) as well as in the United Kingdom, where teacher educators were found to be positioned within ‘a hybrid category of academic worker requiring both research and professional credibility’ (Ellis, McNicholl and Pendry 2012: 690). The tension is not just personal, but is structurally sustained. Higher education and schooling reside within different government departments, each of which has different expectations of teacher educators. Higher education expects scholarly productivity from its academics and schooling expects professional engagement; the tensions associated with navigating these different professional and academic expectations are not always appreciated or understood by those outside of teacher education (Bosetti 2015, for a similar account in Canada). This chapter has thus far outlined the dynamic and somewhat contradictory position that teacher education finds itself in in South Africa. On the one hand, teacher education is characterized by a well-established location in the public sphere, strong state recognition, high levels of curricular autonomy, little external regulation and an acknowledged role within educational networks. On the other

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hand, teacher education faces significant resource constraints, critiques of its curriculum, high expectations for improving educational outcomes for learners from poor socio-economic backgrounds and an anticipation of professional engagement that contributes actively to social and educational development. Within this lies the expectation of producing research outputs that ‘meet multiple tests of rigour and relevance in intersecting settings’ (Ellis, McNicholl and Pendry 2012: 692) and that are able to convey their research findings in appropriate and accessible ways to both academic and more general audiences (Zeichner and Conklin 2017). Singh (2012) has argued that the reinsertion of public good issues into the notion of higher education responsiveness requires the identification of a series of strategic choices for higher education. As she puts it, ‘[The task of] making social justice issues explicit and real within the notions of higher education responsiveness and accountability … requires not only tenacious commitment but also clarity of conception about what is required and the mobilisation of a range of roleplayers around it’ (Singh 2012: 15). In the next section of the chapter I suggest some conceptual considerations and strategic interventions that might strengthen the contribution of teacher education to the imperative of social justice in South Africa.

Conceptual considerations The task of teacher education can be approached conceptually from many angles. I would argue that two conceptual considerations are particularly relevant to affirming the contribution of teacher education to issues of social justice in this country. The first of these relates to the meaning of social justice itself and the second to the politics of accountability.

Social justice Fraser’s (2008) three-dimensional theory of justice helps us to foreground a social justice conceptualization for teacher education. Fraser distinguishes between the economic, cultural and political dimensions of social justice, namely recognition (the who), redistribution (the what) and representation (the how). Each of these interconnected categories helps provide a conceptual orientation to the activities of teacher education.

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The notion of recognition supports respect for the knowledge contribution of all partners in teacher education, including teachers, student teachers and academics, and encourages dialogue across these sectors. Such conversations should, ideally, be constructed around transformative rather than functional notions of professionalism (Mitchell 2013: 52); as difficult as this is when teachers are so chased by pressures of time, work demands and the immediacy of coping with difficult conditions of work. In a country characterized by vast inequalities, the notion of recognition also affirms the contribution of a diversity of social contexts to learning to teach. For example, while better-resourced schools might display stronger pedagogical practice, schools in poor and rural areas are more likely to offer opportunities for student teachers (as well as university lecturers) to learn important lessons like resilience and agency, key aspects of being a successful teacher. The notion of redistribution alerts teacher educators to the importance of including an advocacy role in their work, as part of countering the effects of an unequal distribution of resources and capacity across the system. In a culture of performativity ‘where we are required to spend increasing amounts of our time in making ourselves accountable’ (Ball 2013: xv) and where high value is placed on counting numbers of research outputs, the notion of redistribution provides an alternative discourse in valuing intellectual outputs. The focus then becomes less on how many articles an academic has published and more on the way in which research and teaching are able to contribute to a more equitable social order (with the obvious caveat that this in itself is not a simple consideration). The establishment of formal and informal networks for communication and dialogue between schools, departments of education, teacher unions, professional bodies and universities about the goals and activities of initial teacher education is an example of representation. The complexity and interconnectedness of the challenges in education in South Africa calls for a recognition of the complementary nature of different sectors and forms of expertise in the discussion about the ‘how’, the ‘why’ and the ‘where to’ (Edwards 2011) of education. Such discussions open spaces for both theoretical and practical deliberation on what is meant by ‘good teachers’ and what such teachers should be and do in a South African context. Representation does not assume a naïve commonality between the different positions and interests of different stakeholder groups; however, such an approach encourages an understanding among teacher educators that they are but one component of a broader ‘ecology of interconnected practices’ (Kemmis et al.

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2012: 37). By locating themselves as part of a bigger network, teacher educators are more likely to appreciate the interdependence of their practice with those of school organization, curricula, policy, resources, families and histories, and, in concrete terms, to do not only the talking, but also the listening.

Politics of accountability At a systems level, Cochran-Smith, Piazza and Power (2013) have shown how debates in the United States about accountability mechanisms for teacher education are firmly lodged within the politics of policy and how different political orientations give rise to particular discourses. At the level of the classroom, Brodie and Shalem (2011) argue that accountability is about the nature of the practice as well as about the criteria of the practice. They see accountability as a shared process, where teachers (and one could say teacher educators) hold themselves and others to account, that is, require that they account for their ideas and actions in terms of their experience and their professional knowledge, identify constraints and show openness to new ways of thinking. Accountability conversations, Brodie and Shalem (2011: 423) further explain, can give participants imaginations for possibilities that they do not yet see and can help to make tacit knowledge explicit and shared, thus creating new professional knowledge and expanding the practice. Accountability mechanisms, at both systems and classroom level, are very relevant for teacher educators in South Africa, who work within different (and sometimes competing) discourse frameworks. For example, the expectation to prepare teachers who are able to raise test scores in a very prescriptive school curriculum may feel like anathema to those who support a more critical orientation to schooling; however, in a country where test scores are the gateway to furthering the life chances of young people, it is difficult for teacher educators to argue that they should ignore these prescriptions. A similar concern might be how one reconciles the formation of teacher professional learning communities with increased forms of bureaucratic accountability in the schooling system. Such dilemmas need to be openly confronted and discussed. Through scholarship, policy engagement and public forums, teacher educators need to seriously debate how they can remain accountable at all levels of their profession – to advancing knowledge in their discipline, to promoting powerful forms of pedagogy, to building the confidence and competence of novice teachers and to contributing to the overall goal of social justice. Individually and collectively,

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teacher educators need to ask themselves questions about what they do, who they are, what is it all for and whether they are making a difference (Ball 2013: xvi). Critical and open reflection can be stimulated by questions like – What do we ourselves expect of teacher education? What forms of accountability do we aspire to? What forms of evidence would help us ‘know’ when we are making a difference? What does the public expect of us, and are we able to meet these expectations? And how do we confront conflicting discourses and expectations of teacher education? Greater public evidence of reflection on their own professional accountability and more ‘transparent dialogue about the outcomes that all children deserve’ (Zeichner and Conklin 2017) would strengthen an argument for internal selfregulation and help resist threats of external regulation and prescription, as teacher educators will be able to show how they are actively using their professional autonomy to link to broader educational imperatives. Such reflections need to be also embodied in pedagogy, as teacher educators explore ways in which programmes can promote moral inquiry (Martin 2015), agency, innovation, student engagement, improved practice and an understanding of the complexity of teachers’ work (Reid and Brennan 2013). Such discussions could become more publicly visible through the articulation of professional standards, as has happened in some countries (Darling-Hammond and Lieberman 2012); the development and implementation of such standards is, of course, in itself a political process.

Strategic interventions Singh’s (2012) exhortation for the mobilization of role players in higher education towards the public good provides a backdrop to this section of the chapter, which outlines some of the more recent strategic interventions under way in South Africa to enhance teacher education. Material conditions and institutional capacity are central to enable the affordances or potentialities of the system. Universities, schools and communities in South Africa all operate under constrained conditions. The Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Education and Development in South Africa (Departments of Basic and Higher Education and Training 2011) identifies collaboration, coherence and coordination, as well as adequate time and sufficient funding, as being essential requirements for successful implementation of the various elements of teacher development.

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Notwithstanding the poor state subsidy to teacher education, it is noteworthy that the Department of Higher Education and Training (responsible for teacher education) has managed to mobilize significant investment from external funding agencies to strengthen existing measures to improve initial teacher education. Examples of such interventions were presented in late 2015 to the portfolio committee on Basic Education in the country’s parliament, and include: ●●

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Understanding and planning for teacher demand and supply Advocacy and recruitment for teaching as a viable and attractive career choice Provision of study bursaries for academically strong candidates who wish to enter teaching and who plan to teach in scarce subject areas Sharing of good practice, through conferences, summits, colloquia, academic communities of practice Promoting dialogue and engagement between policymakers and research Better infrastructure on campuses Support for research Support for programme development and course materials Support for improving school–university collaborations.

Although grant funding contains the endemic weakness of not being sustainable, the interventions included here are all couched within an intention to strengthen the overall capacity of the system. How this will play out in the future, and what the long-term impact will be for teacher education, and for the education system more generally, remains to be seen. The mobilization of these resources and the public commitment to supporting teacher education are indeed cause for optimism. As per the intended strategies, enrolments in teacher education have doubled in the last six or seven years, there is a greater interest from potential recruits to teacher education, numerous conferences have been organized, policy research has been supported and a range of communities of practice and inquiry have come into being. Provincial teacher education development committees have been established to encourage communication and coordination between different education stakeholders; this structure has, however, not been very effective up to now. Typical problems of shared participant-governed networks (Provan and Kenis 2007) have emerged, like lack of efficiency, capacity and commitment – a sobering reminder of the operational constraints contained with the conceptual category of representation, as discussed earlier.

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The issue of professional standards is another important strategic consideration that has not really taken root. Accountability for the quality of teacher education in South Africa currently resides in the initial process of applying for accreditation of a new programme. Approval of a new programme is done by peers at other universities and depends on factors like internal coherence and adhering to the criteria of the teacher education qualifications framework (e.g. allocation of time, credits and combinations of subjects). Once approved, the programme does not need further reviews, other than those generated internally by the university itself. Despite comments about teacher education not ‘doing its job’, it is noteworthy that there are no external bodies with the capacity to regulate the sector. Teacher education is, thus, still self-regulated; maintaining this independence will depend in the future on the sector’s ability to demonstrate high levels of professional practice.

Conclusion This chapter has outlined the dynamic nature of teacher education in South Africa. Although it faces some criticism about the contribution of its programmes to improving the quality of education in the country, the university remains recognized in policy as the only institutional type offering teacher education. Unlike the United States, for example, where the political discourse has been more overtly on individualism, free markets and outputs (Cochran-Smith, Piazza and Power 2013), policy documents still work within a broad framework of historical redress and the public good. This vision, however, is a generalized aspiration that says little about the form that teacher education should take. Conceptual and operational challenges still come in the way of advancing teacher education as a contributor to social justice in South Africa and some of the dilemmas and contradictions in this regard have been outlined. Kemmis et al. (2012) have argued that practices (like that of teacher education) are part of a nexus that is shaped by the intentional actions of participants as well as by circumstances and conditions that are external to them. Drawing on the categories cultural-discursive, material-economic and social–political (ibid.), the chapter concludes by summarizing the intentions, circumstances and conditions of teacher education in South Africa twenty-two years into democracy, as outlined in this chapter. At the level of the cultural-discursive, it has been shown that different discourses exist in relation to university-based teacher education, with some

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arguing that this offers greater status to teacher education and others decrying a loss of school-based connections. Implicitly, this speaks to the need for more debate around a model of teacher education, and specifically the relationship of theory to practice and context. A call for this debate does not imply a call to return to the more conservative view of education as embodied in the former colleges of education; rather it supports the continuous exploration and development of a ‘practice sensitivity’ (Landri 2012: 97) that understands teacher education as grounded in a nexus of interrelated practices, institutions and social conditions. An example of this would be an exploration of the different roles and responsibilities of teacher unions, employers and universities in supporting novice teachers. At the level of the material-economic, it has been shown how institutional factors like low state funding and an incentive system for academics that favours research outputs and postgraduate studies mitigate against the professional expectations of teacher education. The challenge exists for teacher educators to advocate for institutional systems and practices that encourage, support, value and reward the scholarship of practice, for example, through professional associations, communities of inquiry, symposia on key issues or reading and writing circles. The chapter has not discussed the difficult material conditions at the level of the school; these too will need serious attention, as the current context of low teacher morale has severe implications for teacher education. At the level of the social–political, it has been shown that high expectations exist, both in government and among teacher educators themselves, for teacher education ‘to make a difference’. At present, teacher education still has relative autonomy within the ‘interaction of governmental regulation, professional influence, public advocacy, and local agency’ (Cochran-Smith, Piazza and Power 2013: 23). It will be incumbent on the sector to work smartly to ensure that its professional voice retains respect and to be able to show (as all teacher educators would probably wish) that its research and teaching can indeed make a difference.

Note 1 www.statssa.gov.za

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Dutch Teacher Educators’ Struggles over Monopoly and Autonomy (1990–2010) Anja Swennen and Monique Volman

Introduction The profession of teacher educators in the Netherlands is relatively well developed and has its own association, a journal, annual meetings, a standard which is developed by the profession and a system for registration of teacher educators (http://www.lerarenopleider.nl/velon/about-velon/). As elsewhere in Europe (European Commission 2013), teacher educators are recognized as a distinct professional group within the larger educational profession. Yet, more than ever in history, the Dutch government interferes with teacher education, apparently without involving teacher educators explicitly in decisions that affect their profession (Swennen 2012). In this chapter we discuss the struggles around three important innovations that have affected Dutch primary teacher education in the past decades: the move of teacher education into the field of Higher Education, the rise of schoolbased teacher education and the implementation of compulsory subject content in the curriculum of teacher education. We focus on how these struggles affect the monopoly and autonomy of teacher educators as a professional group. To analyse the data, we make use of a theoretical framework that analyses professions and professionalization in terms of autonomy and monopoly (Abbott 1988). We define monopoly as the degree to which teacher educators have the (sole) right to educate and examine teachers and autonomy as the control that teacher educators have over various aspects of their work, especially the degree of influence that they exercise on the structure and contents of the curriculum

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of teacher education. In our analysis we draw on two types of data: written primary and secondary sources concerning the three innovations and extensive interviews with three teacher educators from different generations.

Monopoly and autonomy of teacher educators, and the struggle for teacher education Within traditional views about professions and professionalism, medicine and law were among those regarded as ‘real’ or ‘full’ professions. Prestige was seen to be the most important characteristic of these professions (Brint 1994; Svensson 2006). Prestige relates to the regard and trust the public has for the profession, but also to the degree to which the profession is able to regulate the remuneration of its members. Thus, prestige is reflected in income and other tangible and intangible benefits enjoyed by members of a profession. Other important characteristics of ‘real’ professions are the monopoly, the (exclusive) right to exert certain professional activities, and autonomy of the professionals. Monopoly concerns the (legal) powers of the members of the profession to engage in a particular profession to the exclusion of others. Whether a profession is able to acquire this exclusive right will depend on the extent to which professionals can convince the public and the government that its members are best able to render specific services required (Evetts 2006). Freidson (2007) states that monopoly is the most important characteristic of professions. Autonomy of professionals relates to individuals and to the professional group collectively. As individuals professionals are autonomous in the sense of being able to regulate the contents of their work. As a professional group they have the autonomy to regulate access to the profession, the training of its own members and the exclusion of members who do not meet the requirements (Abbott 1988). The education of new members of a particular profession is important in maintaining, developing and transferring the knowledge necessary to properly equip the members of the profession. Autonomous professions determine quality standards for their work and take care of the further development of their members. Professions like those of teachers, nurses and civil servants that have characteristics of a profession, but did not reach the status of real professions, or as a consequence of their nature will never reach this status, were seen as semiprofessions (Etzioni 1969). This view of teaching as a semi-profession is considered

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one of the reasons why little attention is paid to teachers – and even less to teacher educators – within traditional views on professions and professionalism. If there was any attention for semi-professions, they were compared to ‘real’ professions such as medicine and law and described in terms of what was lacking: Their training is shorter, their status is less legitimated, their right to privileged communication less established, there is less of a specialized body of knowledge, and they have less autonomy from supervision or societal control than ‘the’ professions. (Etzioni 1969: v)

After the Second World War, the professions changed, implying a certain loss of autonomy. Members of ‘real’ professions increasingly work in large organizations. For example, doctors nowadays work for a salary in hospitals, while lawyers are often employed by private companies. Also, the impact of governments and clients on traditional professions increases. Governments now regulate the work of doctors and lawyers by law and clients, especially in the health sector, organize themselves to influence the tradition of a profession (Svensson 2006). Therefore, in more recent views, often referred to as ‘new professionalism’, the concept of expertise, together with the traditional prestige, autonomy and monopoly, became important (Brint 1994). The distinction between professions was no longer regarded as an absolute difference, with one occupation being superior to another, but as a relative difference between various occupations. Vocabulary that was earlier restricted to that of the ‘real’ professions is now widely used for professions such as teacher and teacher educator. For example, in Dutch policy documents from 1990 onwards, professional, professionality and professionalism are dominant notions and these words are now used by policymakers, practitioners and researchers alike when speaking and writing about teachers and teacher educators (Swennen 2012). When referring to the teaching profession (and social workers, nurses and civil servants), the developments towards greater professionalism did not coincide with an increase in status and did not result in the autonomy that the ‘real’ professions previously enjoyed. These developments were also mainly initiated by governments rather than by members of the profession (Eraut 2003). In education, governments initiated and supported changes such as school-based teacher education through laws and regulations and by creating structures (e.g. the inspectorate and accreditation bodies) to implement those laws and regulations and monitor their implementation. Typical, also, of the new professionalism in education is the introduction of national or common curricula, prescribed standards for (future) teachers, an imposed culture of

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testing and accountability (Ball 2003). Eraut summarizes the current position of professionals in the new professionalism as follows: Thus the work of professionals can be viewed in terms of several interconnected sets of power relations: with service users, with managers of service-providing organizations, with government, with a range of special interest groups and with other professions. Increasingly, however, all these relationships are being framed through a complex web of state regulations. (Eraut 2003: 5)

However, the introduction of such laws and regulations does not happen as a matter of course as their precise form is the outcome of struggle and public debate, in which several stakeholders are involved, varying from teachers, students and parents to advisory boards and interest groups. Struggles over teacher education are characterized by claims of stakeholders about how teachers are best educated and how teacher education should support this (Kliebard 2004). They include debates about where teacher education should be situated, who should educate future teachers and what the structure and contents of teacher education needs to be. Struggles about the where of teacher education relate to teacher education as separate colleges or as part of Higher Education Institutes, to the position of teacher education within Higher Education and to the academic degree – bachelor or master’s – that teachers need. Debates are also taking place about who may educate future teachers, and they focus on issues such as the work of mentors in the workplace and that of teacher educators in teacher education institutions (Darling-Hammond 2012). Struggles concerning the what – the contents of teacher education – concern the much-debated, ongoing and ever-changing balance between theory, practice and personal development. They are also, but until recently not as a major international debate, about the quality of school-based and institutebased teacher educators (Swennen and Van der Klink 2009). Ultimately, it is the result of these struggles between various stakeholders that shape teacher education and the profession of teacher educators (Abbott 1988). In his book The struggle for the American curriculum, Kliebard (2004) argues that the notion of ‘struggle’ is primarily a symbolic one over whose fundamental beliefs shall occupy centre stage in a continuing drama. He emphasizes that while this struggle is primarily symbolic, it also has practical implications as the result of the struggle for the curriculum is the change of the curriculum. The struggle over teacher education can also be understood as an interprofessional one (Abbott 1988). It is the struggle of different professional

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groups for dominance. The outcomes of an inter-professional conflict can be settled in five different ways. The first outcome is that one group enforces total monopoly over another: ‘Every profession aims for a heartland of work over which it has complete, legally established control’ (Abbott 1988: 71). In teacher education this happened when at the beginning of the twentieth century in several European countries the Normal Schools lost the struggle with the Teachers Colleges. The Teachers Colleges became the only route for student teachers to become primary teachers. The second possible outcome is that distinct hierarchical sub-professions are established, such as doctors and nurses in medicine, teachers and support teachers in education and institutebased teacher educators and mentors in teacher education. In this case, the ‘lower’ professional group will emphasize the similarities and the ‘higher’ group the differences between them. Thirdly, the struggle may also lead to a more equal distribution of work. The example Abbott gives is that of neurologists and psychiatrists who developed distinct professions. A fourth way to resolve the conflict is claiming intellectual jurisdiction of a profession, in which one group claims the exclusive right to develop academic knowledge, but permits – or allows – another professional group the right to practice the profession. In education this happened when education as an academic discipline was introduced at universities and a specific group called educational researchers came into existence, researchers who were not themselves practising the teaching profession. Finally, the outcome of an inter-professional conflict can be that one group will have an advisory role in relation to another. This was the case for example when, in the Netherlands in the 1950s, special (national) institutions for the professional support of teachers and schools came into existence and often played an important part in the implementation of innovations in teacher education.

Context: Teacher education in the Netherlands For the greater part of the twentieth century primary teacher education in the Netherlands was situated in relatively independent Teachers Colleges that by and large resembled secondary schools. Each Teachers College had its own head teacher and teachers who taught their own subject in a traditional way. Most of the Teacher Colleges had ties with or were governed by representatives of the religious or social denomination by which they were established. These influenced,

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for example, the choice of learning materials such as books. The so-called ‘public’ Teachers Colleges were governed by local governments. The autonomy of teacher educators was restricted as they had to prepare students for national examinations that were prescribed by law. Aside from these limitations, teacher educators were autonomous in what and how they taught in their classroom. Nowadays, primary teacher education and lower secondary teacher education are situated in Higher Vocational Education Institutions, which are called ‘hogescholen’ in the Netherlands and resemble ‘Hochschuler’ in Germany or ‘høgskoler’ in Norway. In this chapter we call them Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The emphasis in teacher education in general is on the future work of teachers and much time is devoted to teaching practice in schools. Teacher education institutions have full monopoly as they have the sole right to examine students. The Dutch government, as most governments, is legally responsible for the quality of education and teacher education. To achieve changes in teacher education that represent its views, the Dutch government uses means such as laws and regulations and financial incentives. However, there is a long tradition of constant negotiation (called the ‘polder-model’) between the government and stakeholders about all aspects of education. The Netherlands is a relatively small country with 17 million inhabitants, which means that policymakers and representatives of stakeholder groups tend to know each other in person. As a rule, policymakers consult a wide range of stakeholders in order to legitimize their decisions. The stakeholders involved in the struggle over teacher education are different groups with a wide variety of views and interests. The first group of stakeholders is that which is directly involved in teacher education, and this group comprises student teachers, teachers in schools, teacher educators, managers, parents and employers of teachers. A second group of stakeholders consists of groups and institutions in the field of professional development in education, such as the Dutch National Curriculum Institution, The Dutch National Testing Institution and numerous larger and smaller institutions for professional development of teachers and teacher educators. These institutions are often involved in designing the curriculum or in the implementation of new curricula. A third and influential group of stakeholders constitutes institutions indirectly related to teacher education who advise the government, such as the Dutch Education Council, the Association of Higher Education Institutions and the DutchFlemish Accreditation Commission. Fourthly, stakeholders are also a wide

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range of interest groups that have various interests in (teacher) education, such as religious, social and political groups. There is a fifth category with connection to the fourth group that also tries to influence teacher education: public opinion and the media in all its forms. The sixth group is, of course, the government and other policymakers.

Method In order to understand the three major innovations that have affected Dutch primary teacher education in the past decades, we draw from a larger sociohistorical study about the development of the profession and identity of primary teacher educators in the Netherlands. Data for this study were collected in two ways. First, primary and secondary sources about the development of primary teacher education and the profession of teacher educator were collected and analysed. These included reports and papers from the government and other stakeholders as mentioned in the Introduction. Second, extensive interviews were held with three teacher educators from different generations (see Table 6.1). During these semi-structured interviews questions were asked about three stages of development during the careers of the teacher educators: becoming a teacher, becoming a teacher educator and further development of the teacher educators. All three teacher educators were former school teachers in primary education and worked, or continue to work, in institutes for primary teacher education. On the basis of each interview we constructed a life history of each teacher educator. We use segments of these life histories to illustrate the perspective of the teacher educators on the three developments in teacher education that are the focus of this study. The interviews were transformed into life histories in which the narratives of the teacher educators were described within the context of the developments within teacher education. We also analysed the data in terms of Table 6.1  Characteristics of the Participating Teacher Educators Year of Birth Working as Teacher Educator m/f Ben 1950 Hilde 1958 Inez 1961

1975–2007 from1984 from 1991

Subject

Male History Female Dutch Female Music

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struggles about monopoly and autonomy and focus on the position of teacher educators in these struggles.

Three struggles about the profession of teacher educators (1990–2010) In this section we describe three developments that took place in primary teacher education in the Netherlands over the past thirty years and that impacted, and still impact, the work of teacher educators. These developments were all initiated by the Dutch government in the last decade of the twentieth century: (1) the move of primary teacher education into HEIs, (2) the development from institute-based teacher education towards school-based teacher education and (3) the increasingly prescribed subject matter and national examinations in teacher education. These developments were enforced by laws and regulations and by agreements with formal bodies within Higher Education and Teacher Education and were stimulated by large subsidies.

The struggle between primary teacher education and Higher Education Institutions (HIEs) In 1968 an important law for primary teacher education was issued by which primary teacher education became part of Higher Vocational Education. The general feeling was that primary teacher education had to become more academic, with content and methodology fit for Higher Vocational Education, and hence a change of names from Teachers College to Pedagogical Academy (Wubbels 1992). During this period there was a strong emphasis on subject matter, subject pedagogy and theory of educational science. Although primary teacher education institutions became legally part of Higher Vocational Education, teacher education was still situated in the same school buildings as when they were Teachers Colleges and still had their own school heads. Following Hargreaves (2000), this period can be characterized as a period of relative autonomy for teacher education in the Netherlands. State examinations were still in place, but teacher educators had more freedom than before to determine the contents of the curriculum and the final exams. As in the United Kingdom, the United States and many other countries, teacher education in the Netherlands moved into Higher Education during the 1990s (Labaree 2008; Murray 2012). Teacher education and other institutes of

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higher vocational education, like medical, technical, economical studies, merged into large non-academic HEIs – now increasingly called Universities of Applied Sciences (http://www.vereniginghogescholen.nl/english). As elsewhere, Higher Education was deregulated and the autonomy of HEIs increased and they became powerful institutions. As part of these large institutions, teacher education had to comply with the educational vision of the HEIs to which they belonged. The visions of the HEIs resembled the educational visions for higher vocational education that were dominant at the end of the past century: competency based, market driven and practice driven. These educational views were proclaimed in policy documents, but also attacked by some scholars (Korthagen 2004). The educational vision of the HEIs was developed by policy staff and teacher educators had little voice in the decision-making process, nor had the lecturers from other departments, for that matter. The once important and sometimes famous headmasters became managers within a large management system and had to fight their own battles for autonomy (Fraser 2007; Swennen 2012). Ben, one of the teacher educators who we interviewed, was the head teacher of a Primary Teacher Education Institute. When primary teacher education moved into HEIs, he became the manager of the Primary Education Department within the much larger HEI. He resigned as manager after a few years because his decisions were questioned by his superiors and this felt to him like a loss of trust. He went back to teaching and adapted to the changes that had been implemented. He talks about his teaching with mixed feelings, and with a touch of bitterness. He felt a loss of autonomy as he could no longer decide what to teach. To him teaching history as a subject was very important for the students and he was of the opinion that students could learn how to teach during school practice. In Ben’s eyes the intellectual level of primary teacher education had diminished to almost zero. Yet, Ben acknowledged that the traditional subjectbased curriculum needed change and that the practice-based curriculum was good for student teachers: I think a good teacher is someone who knows how to find a good balance between the theory and practical requirements. Someone who is able to explain to the students what they really need to know and why. So a teacher in teacher education is now someone – much more than when I started – who can make clear to the students the importance of his subject in specific situations in teaching. That is very important.

While the autonomy of the HEIs increased, the control of teacher education and teacher educators over the structure and content of the curriculum decreased.

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The monopoly of teacher educators over teacher education increased, however. In 1984 the national examinations were abolished and as part of the deregulated HEIs, teacher educators now had the legal right to develop the contents of the exams and certification of teachers. The inter-professional struggle between HEIs and teacher educators is hardly visible in the literature. On the whole, teacher education and teacher educators integrated the visions of the HEIs into their work without much struggle. The result of the struggle, therefore, was not so much that HEIs took away all autonomy from teacher education, but that they imposed a general vision on all departments from which teacher educators also had to work. Over the last ten years primary and secondary teacher education, within the HEIs, merged into larger Schools of Education. These Schools of Education have more control to incorporate their own vision in the teacher education curriculum, but also the schools need to adapt to the ever-changing visions of their HEIs.

Educating teachers in partnerships: The struggle between teacher education institutes and schools One of the oldest discussions in teacher education is that between advocates of (more) theoretical or academic teacher education at institutes and those of more practice-based teacher education situated in schools. In the 1990s the general feeling was that teacher education had drifted too far away from schools and the work of teachers. Simultaneously, the move into Higher Education, SchoolBased Teacher Education and Professional Development Schools (DarlingHammond 1994) was also introduced in the Netherlands. Over the years these two approaches merged into a Dutch version called ‘Opleiden in de School’ which can be translated as Educating Teachers in Schools (ETiS). ETiS is the education of student teachers in partnerships of teacher education institutes and schools. The government promoted ETiS in the numerous policy documents that were published over the last two decades (for an overview of these documents, see Swennen 2012). New laws were issued to make ETiS possible and large sums of money were, and still are, invested in projects that promote this kind of teacher education. In the Netherlands it is now the common way to educate student teachers (http://www.steunpuntopleidingsscholen.nl/). Schools are eager to participate and increasingly claim the right to be serious partners in the education of their future colleagues. Teacher education as well as schools embraced the partnerships and, supported by funding from the government, established ways of collaboration. Teacher education also found new tasks, for

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example, in training school-based teacher education and supporting research in schools (Koster, Korthagen and Wubbels 1998). The movement towards ETiS created a new group of teacher educators, the school-based teacher educators (Van Velzen, Bezinna and Lorist 2009). Schoolbased teacher educators are not ‘just’ mentors who mentor their students in their own class; they (also) have a formal position in the primary or secondary school to supervise future teachers. They coordinate partnership activities in the school, teach and supervise student teachers, supervise the mentors and communicate with the teacher education institutes. Increasingly, the schoolbased teacher educators are involved in the development of the curriculum of teacher education and teach part of the curriculum in schools (Van Velzen et al. 2012). Inez, one of the teacher educators in the research who started working as a teacher educator in 1991, is convinced that teacher education and schools need to collaborate, in terms of both workplace learning and the professional development of school teachers. She is prepared to give up part of her autonomy as she thinks the curriculum of teacher education should be developed in dialogue between teacher education and schools: We are becoming more and more convinced that teacher education institutes should not be ‘here’ and primary schools ‘there’, but that the development of education and primary schools should take shape in interaction.

Hilde who specialized in subject pedagogy for her subject, Dutch, somehow managed to avoid being too much involved with ETiS. She identifies strongly with her subject or subject pedagogy and feels that giving away too much of the curriculum to the schools diminishes her autonomy and could lead to a diminished quality of teacher education: The head of a primary school wanted a large subject that would take place almost entirely in the school. I was convinced that by doing that the level could no longer be guaranteed.

The inter-professional struggle between schools and school-based teacher educators and institute-based teacher educators was initiated by the Dutch government. As the influence of school-based teacher educators increased, their influence over parts of the teacher education curriculum also increased. The traditional institute-based teacher educators had to give up some of their autonomy and influence. The outcome of the struggle was a shift in the power balance between schools and teacher education. As the influence of schools over

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the curriculum is increasing, the final outcome of this struggle in the future could be the existence of two distinct hierarchical sub-professions. The monopoly of institute-based teacher educators was not affected as they still have the sole right to examine and certify future teachers.

Compulsory content and knowledge tests in teacher education The move towards competence-based and practice-based teacher education and ETiS led to – real or alleged – concerns about the quality of teacher education when it comes to ‘knowledge’. In 2005 the Dutch Education Council (Onderwijsraad 2005), a prestigious body, published a document with the message that teacher education was too practical, too competency based and lacked knowledge, that is to say, subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (Onderwijsraad 2005). The Dutch Ministry of Education’s response to these concerns has been an increase in the control over the content of the teacher education curriculum. Within a short period of time money was available and teams of specialists (also some teacher educators) were assembled, who developed the so-called ‘knowledge base’ for each subject and subject area in primary and secondary teacher education. Each knowledge base consisted of subject knowledge, subject pedagogy knowledge and teaching methods which are characteristic of each subject or subject area. Tests were also developed to assess the subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of student teachers, which are compulsory (for an overview in Dutch of the knowledge bases of all subjects and subject areas in primary and secondary education and information about the knowledge tests, see https://www.10voordeleraar.nl/). While some teacher educators regard these developments as a reduction of autonomy, others see the interference of the government as support for what they saw as valuable knowledge for their students: subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (Swennen 2012). Hilde, the teacher educator of Dutch language who started to work in primary teacher education in 1984, is devoted to teaching primary student teachers how to teach Dutch to primary school students. Over the years she has developed into an expert of mother tongue language learning and teaching. She felt teacher education had focused too much on the immediate needs of students and therefore more theoretical knowledge was needed to underpin teaching. She expressed doubts about the knowledge base, especially the knowledge tests. The knowledge test for Dutch language in her opinion was too much based on

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instrumental knowledge and did not represent the way student teachers learn about teaching Dutch in primary schools. The development of the knowledge bases has evolved. The government supported the founding of a central institution, called ‘10voordeleraar (10fortheteacher)’, which coordinates the development of all knowledge bases and knowledge tests (https://www.10voordeleraar.nl). As a result of critique of teacher education, 10voordeleraar has taken it upon itself to involve more teacher educators (almost always institute-based teacher educators) to take part in the development of the knowledge bases and tests. Teacher educators no longer develop the curriculum on an individual basis or as part of a small institute-based team, but they do so with their colleagues from different teacher education institutes on a national level. This means that some of the autonomy of teacher educators as a professional group is restored. The same is true of their monopoly. The teacher educators still have the sole right to examine student teachers, yet, the knowledge tests are compulsory. The tests are developed by groups of teacher educators and other experts. However, 10voordeleraar still has control over the knowledge bases and the tests, not the teacher educators. The outcome of this struggle seems to be an increase of central control by the government through 10voordeleraar and a change in autonomy of teacher educators. According to the website of 10voordeleraar, teacher educators who are involved in the development of the knowledge bases and tests are satisfied, but the majority of teacher educators just have to work with the compulsory knowledge base and tests that are made for them. We do not know how they use the material and how they feel about it. Recently, the Dutch Inspectorate and the Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Commission published favourable reports about the quality of primary teacher education. However, the same Council of Education that held a plea for more ‘knowledge’ in teacher education recently criticized the focus on measureable knowledge outcomes in education (Onderwijsraad 2016). The Dutch Ministry of Education (http://www.utnieuws.nl/nieuws/61284/Bussemaker_wil_meer_ Bildung_in_lerarenopleiding) and various individuals and groups of stakeholders want to reintroduce concepts like Bildung in education and teacher education (Biesta 2013; http://www.han.nl/onderzoek/nieuws/bildungsconferentie/). It will be interesting to follow up on this development and study how the concept of Bildung is going to be understood and implemented in Dutch and international teacher education and what the impact of more focus on Bildung is for the autonomy of teacher educators.

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Final remarks In this chapter, we explored the (inter-professional) struggles around recent developments in teacher education in the Netherlands, in particular the position of teacher educators in these struggles and the outcomes of these struggles in terms of the monopoly and autonomy of teacher educators. The study shows that the autonomy of teacher educators has reduced and changed. It has decreased in the sense that they have less influence on the curriculum of teacher education as a result of the move into Higher Education, Educating Teachers in Schools and compulsory knowledge bases for teacher education. It has also changed as teacher educators found new tasks in the collaboration with schools and groups of teacher educators collaborate with other experts to develop the knowledge base for teacher education and knowledge tests. While their autonomy has to be shared with school-based teacher educators, they may gain autonomy in newfound aspects of their work. The teacher educators in our research acknowledge that the interference of the government reduces their autonomy, but they accept the government-initiated changes and incorporate them in their work in ways they find acceptable. The monopoly of university teacher educators did not change. Only teacher educators who work at teacher education institutions have the right to examine and certify student teachers. However, a part of the tests in teacher education is compulsory. The introduction of compulsory tests may influence the monopoly as these tests can be issued by parties outside teacher education as was the case until 1984 and is still the practice with final examinations for Dutch secondary education. The struggles for the teacher education curriculum are not just interprofessional ones. The Dutch government plays an important role by initiating changes in teacher education. The government gives legal and financial power to stakeholders they favour and are, therefore, able to increase their influence over the curriculum. Policymakers do not always include teacher education management and teacher educators in their consultations about innovations in teacher education (Swennen and Lorist, 2016). At the same time the Dutch government keeps a distance from the struggles that are taking place between HEIs and teacher education, between teacher education and schools and between institutions like 10voordeleraar and teacher education. More research among a larger number of teacher educators is needed to find out how teacher educators deal with the interference from the government, HEIs and the increasing autonomy of schools and how it affects their work. A main question for further

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research is whether recent government-led innovations have contributed to better teacher education. Equally important are the questions: In whose eyes did teacher education improve, or not, and who benefits from recent developments? From the study it becomes clear that teacher educators play a minor part in the struggle for the curriculum. Managers of teacher educators and teacher educators (the primary stakeholders in teacher education) and members and leaders of the Association of Teacher Educators sometimes participate as individuals in public discussions about teacher education, but seldom as a (formal) group. The restricted participation in discussions about teacher education by teacher educators may be caused by the fact that the government is responsible for the quality of teacher education and is able to and should steer innovations through laws and regulations and financial incentives. By doing so, they reduce the need for teacher education and teacher educators as individuals or as a group (through the Association of Teacher Educators, for example) to actively engage in debates about teacher education and the teacher education curriculum at large. The reason for the restricted participation may also lie in the low status of primary teacher education (Ellis et al. 2014; Maguire 2014). This low status may influence the image that the government has of teacher education and teacher educators and perhaps of the influence teacher educators think they have on policy and policymakers. Two practical recommendations, then, result from our research. The first is that teacher educators recognize that it is important for them – as individuals and as a group – to actively participate in ongoing discussions about the future of teacher education. Secondly, the government needs to recognize that they need the teacher educators’ voice to give an insider’s perspective on the changes needed and to ensure, in discussion with management of teacher education and teacher educators, the successful implementations of the agreed innovations.

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Learning Sciences: Reconfiguring Authority in Teacher Education Tobias Werler

Introduction: Norwegian teacher education and pedagogikk Over the last two decades Norway has carried out three teacher education reforms (1998, 2003, 2010); a fourth reform cycle implements a five-year-long master’s for teachers’ studies (beginning in 2017). The reforms between 2003 and 2017 had their main impact on structures as well as on the content of pedagogikk. Norwegian teacher education is not only following international trends explored later in this chapter, it is determined by the Bologna Process (modularization, BA/ MA structure), the emerging European Higher Education Area and European Union strategies in education and research (Pantic 2012; Aydarova 2014; Zgaga 2014). The main characteristics of the reforms are the 1) commodification of teacher education which conceptualizes students as customers, 2) buying and selling course modules as well as 3) describing learning as labour (Werler 2016). With regard to teacher education reform in Norway, at the beginning of the new millennium one can observe a contrasting development. In the first reform cycle, governmental efforts (1998, 2003) provided more space for traditional pedagogy (Norwegian: pedagogikk). The term ‘pedagogy’ works as a synonym for teaching especially in the Anglo-American world (Simon 1981). However, in the case of Central European education research it describes more than teaching (van Manen 1999). First, pedagogy is the act and discourse of teaching developed by the science of teaching. Continental European scientific theories developed those concepts. They are collective, generalizable and open to public scrutiny. Second, following the argument of Alexander (2004), pedagogy brings together the act of teaching, the body of knowledge, arguments and evidence as well as justification of classroom practices.

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The subject of pedagogikk is the conceptual core of Norwegian teacher education (Hagemann 1982; Skagen 2007). Despite the word’s close semantic relationship to the standard English translation ‘pedagogy’, it is characterized by major differences. Following Gray (2008: 5), ‘Pedagogy is about learning, teaching and development, influenced by political, social and cultural values and principles.’ It originates from psychology and a strong tradition of educational sociology (Burton 2007). Here, pedagogikk is different; it is part of the humanities research tradition (Kvam 2014; Sæverot 2015). Following Waterkamp (2008) as well as Haugen and Hestbeck (2012), one can define pedagogikk as a collection of knowledge (related to the phenomenon of upbringing and schooling). Such knowledge is focused on practitioners, that is, practical science developing theories for praxis. Here, research is related to epistemic, social and communicative structures of reality. Research as well as teaching of pedagogikk in teacher education makes use of mainly hermeneutic procedures. It conveys the interpretation of practice. This tradition is linked to the idea that such research will help teachers decide on basic educational issues such as curriculum and assessment. Nevertheless, pedagogikk applies scientific principles to investigate educational phenomena and creates theories on upbringing, teaching and schooling. This part of pedagogikk follows the tradition of German Science of Education (Erziehungswissenschaft) (Løvlie 2003; Jarning 2012) and has its focus on finding answers for theoretical and empirical problems. Content originating from this tradition was used in teacher education to build up student teachers’ scientific skills as well as their understanding of concepts regarding education. Second, a few years later (since 2010), concepts like learning, content knowledge, school subject knowledge and subject matter-specific didactical knowledge were emphasized. Structurally, the reforms pushed teacher education from the seminar tradition with its focus on practical training towards ‘universityfication’ (Werler 2014: 116) focusing on scientific academic knowledge. In the following, I will draw attention to the transformation of knowledge concepts reflected in teacher education since they influence how teachers will teach and determine what students will be able to do and to be. The chapter discusses the hypothesis that a new understanding of pedagogical knowledge – according to the OECD outline of learning sciences – is taking over the traditional core subject of Norwegian teacher education pedagogikk. Beyond that, the stakeholder-supported transformation seems to influence how teacher education can reflect on its traditions, its core knowledge and how teachers can help pupils to become citizens. Here, I ask how the learning sciences govern

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teacher education in order to achieve pupils’ learning outcomes defined in places other than teacher education. In this section, I have argued that the historic core of teacher education in Norway is under pressure from mainly political agents. I continue with a discussion of productivity growth in teacher education in relation to teacher effectiveness. Next, I discuss the significance of teachers’ pedagogical authority and how it relates to teacher education. I then outline the analytical tool – boundary work –, which informs the analytical work in order to understand how the learning sciences have been forced into the Norwegian teacher education curriculum. Following that I show how learning sciences have replaced pedagogy in teacher education. I then show the way in which the conceptualization of learning sciences has the effect of dissolving national knowledge traditions. Finally, the chapter discusses what changes the new curriculum content on learning sciences causes in Norwegian teacher education.

Productivity and teacher education This section seeks to explore why governments put so much effort into teacher education reform. Following significant pupil assessment studies (mainly PISA) stakeholders (OECD, the Norwegian Government, the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO), the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (Nokut)) complained about the quality of education provision arguing that it does not meet expectations. Both teacher education programmes and teachers were labelled as inefficient and putting the nation’s economic strength at risk due to pupils’ poor performance results. In other words, politicians were dissatisfied with the costs of (teacher) education versus the sector’s productivity. In 2012 about 1,686 million students (out of 18.8 million students)1 were enrolled in teacher education in the European Union (including Norway and Switzerland, no data available for Denmark, Croatia). These numbers represent a large future workforce, accounting for about 70 per cent of all costs in education in their respective countries (see Figure 7.1). As the Figure 7.2 shows, public expenditure on education has increased in many countries over a long time. At the same time the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) studies of the last decade indicated a need for school quality improvement in many countries (Hopmann 2008). Contrary to this, the business sector made improvements in productivity through technological progress and innovation.2

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If one applies Baumol’s concept of cost disease (Baumol 1967) to education, growth in the sector was poor in comparison with industry. Few governments can tolerate such a situation. Several studies showed that a school system’s quality – in terms of pupils’ measurable learning outcomes – depends on the quality of its teachers (Barber and Mourshed 2007). Even if these findings might seem obvious, they paved the way for governments and politicians to argue that an improvement in the quality of teacher training would result in an improvement in the efficiency of schools. In order to improve teacher effectiveness (measured by pupils’ learning outcomes) to a level that mirrored the progress in productivity seen in the business sector, governments demanded bvoth rationalization and improvement in the quality of teacher education. In Norway this was outlined in the government’s Productivity Commission (NOU 2015: 340; 354–5). Internationally, Haunshek et al. (2014) as well as Chetty et al. (2014) came up with the same demand. In general, governments may tend to argue for reforms of teacher education since they expect that more efficient teacher education programmes will result in more efficient processes of teaching and learning. In short, teacher education reform is used as a governmental measure that is intended to improve the quality of teacher education and school efficiency. Obviously, governments perceive teacher education programmes as a powerful learning arena to develop the competence of teachers and the identity of professionalism. Nevertheless, teacher education is at the same time a contested public sphere (Habermas 1989; Fraser 1991; Sassen 2006) due to manifold critique from the stakeholders. The fact that governments reform teacher education shows that it is used as a strategic sphere for improving entire education systems (Payne 2008; Hess 2010; Ravitch 2010). On the basis of this

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Figure 7.1  Proportion of teachers in Lower Secondary Education (ISCED 2) who have completed ITE (2013) IN %; graph based on data provided by European Commission/ EACEA/Eurydice (2015): 10

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one can conclude that if stakeholders want to change the quality of schooling and rationalize it, they will begin reform efforts by focusing on a shift in ‘teacher productivity’. However, curriculum-focused reforms are implemented in teacher education because they have the power to potentially frame the mindsets of future teachers. Teacher education reforms that change the curriculum can determine how teachers conceptualize their work as well as providing a range of teaching methods. Conversely, the Norwegian reform moulds and governs what student teachers can expect from teacher education. In summary, the concepts and epistemology of teacher education reform in Norway define how teacher educators and teachers can work, how they will teach and what both student teachers and pupils will learn. Viewing teacher education reforms from a social–epistemological position (Mannheim 1952), the reforms project what powerful stakeholders outside of teacher education (OECD, government) accept and render as valid knowledge for teacher education in order to raise school standards.

Pedagogical authority and teacher education In the previous section, I argued that stakeholders of teacher education judge its current attainment as insufficient. However, at the same time teacher education

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Figure 7.2 Total public expenditure on education as a percentage of total public expenditure (1995, 2005, 2011) Source: World Development Indicators, The World Bank Group: http://databank. worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=2&series=SE.XPD.TOTL.GB.ZS&country.

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is utilized as a tool which has to be improved by reforms. In this section, I explore pedagogical authority and argue that it is a necessity for teachers’ autonomous and professional actions. I will show that this competence was the main objective of teacher education in Norway. Teaching and learning at school is a social endeavour and not a private one. It forces both pupils and teachers to work together, to be together. Such a community is dependent on patience, listening, acceptance of contrasting views and responsiveness to other people. It is the teacher’s responsibility to fulfil his or her central task to ‘recognize and cultivate the emergence of personhood in the young’ (Hansen 2001: 24). Teaching creates intellectual and moral relations. Taking such a responsibility involves a teacher’s pedagogical authority.

Pedagogical authority Pedagogical authority creates a complex and manifold teacher role. For example, a teacher has to take responsibility over the lives of others when deciding on curriculum, modes of instruction, giving response to different learning styles or a student’s individual challenges. In addition, teaching conceptualized as a teaching-studying-learning interaction (Kansanen 1999) creates scope for many possible actions and learning outcomes. Teachers’ work is, therefore, complex, contingent, uncertain and characterized by managing antinomies like closeness and distance or freedom and compulsion (Werler 2013). Within that, teachers help pupils to ‘perceive and realize what they want to become’ (Hansen and Laverty 2010: 225). Therefore, teachers have to be able to find and apply viable solutions to help pupils – by teaching – to develop their capacities and capabilities (Nussbaum 2000, 2006). Since teachers cannot have perfect knowledge to achieve standardized expectations of schooling, they are in need of pedagogical authority to provide good teaching. Such pedagogical teaching (Hansen 2001) is marked by enriching pupils’ understanding of self, others and the world. It expands pupils’ knowledge, insight and interest; it deepens pupils’ ways of thinking and feeling. Further, it does ‘not imply moral and intellectual apathy, indifference, or inattentiveness to students and the curriculum’ (Hansen 2001: ix). Following Freidson (1986), teachers employ pedagogical authority when they make decisions concerned with substantial teaching issues. Then, teachers’ decision-making as well as their reflection upon teaching is neither defined by key policies nor are teachers’ decisions regarding individual pupils controlled by a stakeholder. Pedagogical authority allows teachers to create individually

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meaningful opportunities for learning by those people who are closest to the classroom and have most knowledge about individual pupils. Teachers’ pedagogical authority can be defined as their capacity to exercise both content knowledge (the discipline), school subject knowledge (the discipline in the school), philosophy of a school subject, subject matter-specific didactical knowledge as well as pedagogical knowledge with discretion and proficiency (Campbell 2006: 111). Hansen (2006: 179) points out that a teacher’s pedagogical authority derives from commitment to all students in their care. In summary, pedagogical authority embodies the power and knowledge asymmetries in the teacher–pupil relationship (Pace and Hemmings 2006). The way in which teacher education reforms define teachers’ work structures how teachers can exercise pedagogical authority in their classroom practice. In general, teacher education curriculum content will determine how they plan, organize, perform, regulate and control schooling (van Manen 1999; Reichenbach 2007; Harjunen 2009, 2011). In Norway, additional curriculum documents regulate, frame and determine the teacher education programmes.

Teacher education and pedagogical authority Because of the high level of challenge and the complexity of teaching it could be argued that teachers needs a considerable degree of pedagogical authority in order to make decisions in contingent and complex classroom situations. Teachers have to learn to be aware of the diverse needs of learners as well as to show a strong ethical commitment. Historically, teacher education prepared teachers to meet these demands by teachers’ professional preparation (Hagemann 1992). Therefore until 2003, teacher education in Norway had its focus on the cultivation of the student teacher’s humanity: it formed the student teacher’s thinking, their feelings and their ability to communicate (Skagen 2007). In general, Norwegian programmes of teacher education focused on student teachers’ ability to establish schooling as a public good while being well aware that schooling is not feasible by obvious means or methods (Fraser 2007; Akiba 2013). However, student teachers learnt that there were no commonly agreed answers on the question of good teaching. Rather, they learnt that they had to come up with immediate, but temporarily valid, solutions on the basis of a pedagogical understanding of a situation. Following Oakeshott (1989: 23), Norwegian teacher education enabled future teachers to help pupils to become citizens. This idea is important since seeing both student teachers and their

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future pupils as people means to accept them as beings for whom schooling can constitute a shared adventure of joining the larger world. So far, this section has argued that it is teacher education’s main concern to educate discerning professionals who are able to justify their decisions. Consequently, learning about pedagogic knowledge in teacher education helps future teachers to cope with uncertainty. Having the opportunity to learn about pedagogic knowledge in teacher education enabled trainee teachers to make responsible and smart decisions in a situation that is often unforeseeable and characterized by dilemmas. The embodiment of pedagogic knowledge enabled student teachers to reflect on their decisions in the light of educational theory, ideological concepts and organizational and institutional structure (Englund 2000; Biesta 2005; Noddings 2013).

Boundary work – analysing conceptual changes This section outlines the methodological framework for testing the hypothesis that the learning sciences are increasingly used as a tool of governance in teacher education in order to improve teacher efficiency. Applying Gieryn’s analytical approach – boundary-work analysis (Gieryn 1983) – allows focusing on the epistemic change in Norwegian teacher education. The analysis looks mainly for curriculum change dependent of stakeholder’s declarations about teacher education. When it comes to curriculum reform, stakeholders of teacher education undertake efforts to redefine curriculum texts by disputing content on the basis of their powerful status and monopolized resources. Therefore, boundary-work analysis (Gieryn 1983) asks how stakeholders (like OECD) attribute characteristics of science (i.e. knowledge production) to teacher education programmes and how they make ideological efforts in order to distinguish their ideas from what they label as ‘non-scientific’ (Gieryn 1983: 782). The approach suggests studying actors, their interests, their proposed concepts of knowledge with regard to the very recent teacher education reform in Norway (2010). The material to be analysed are central evaluation reports (NOKUT 2006), OECD documents on teacher education pedagogy (OECD 2002, 2007) and the framework curriculum for teacher education in Norway (KUD 2010). For the purposes of this chapter, the scope of the study is limited to the field of pedagogy.

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Learning sciences: replacing pedagogy In this section, I explore the principles that shaped teacher education in Norway. I will then demonstrate how the focus on pedagogy (pedagogikk) was replaced by the recent reform focused on learning sciences. At the end of the section, I will show how this boundary work was achieved by changing regulatory documents. Teacher education’s boundary work in Norway in the twenty-first century with regard to pedagogy started from an epistemology naming philosophical foundations of education, educational psychology, school theory, general didactics and curriculum theory as the basis for the profession. Such content, aiming at normative and ethical questions was confirmed by two governmental reports (NOU 1988, 1996). More specifically, it was required that teacher education placed the ‘professional content’ of the entire education programme in a ‘pedagogical framework’ (NOU 1988: 42). Pedagogy in teacher education was thus recognized as teacher education’s leading framework, binding the entire programme together. A decade later, the Norwegian parliament demanded the strengthening of educational foundational thinking as well as the philosophy of education (NOU 1996: 144). With regard to pedagogical authority, the programme’s content was conceptualized as both knowledge and a scholarly mode of reflection about teaching. In other words, pedagogy offered constitutional frameworks for ‘good teaching’. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the PISA follow-up discourse and the previously mentioned growth discourse stated that pupils’ underperformance was caused by poor teacher education quality (NOKUT 2006). However, an expert panel (NOKUT 2006) revealed that teacher education programmes in Norway were characterized by qualitative shortfalls such as lack of coherence, inadequate concepts of knowledge and a lack of anchoring teacher education in current research. The panel argued that pupil performance was at risk due to teachers’ weak educational knowledge base and lack of key pedagogical competencies (NOKUT 2006: 16). In other words, there were many arguments for politicians to roll out a teacher education reform. The resulting white paper on teacher education (St.meld 11 2009) recommends, consistent with OECD recommendations (OECD 2004), the introduction of differentiated teacher education programmes (according to age groups) and the replacement of traditional pedagogy with research-based knowledge on learning and pupils. The corresponding reform was introduced as a governmental initiative in 2010.

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The main objectives were to improve the quality of both teacher education and schooling. Here, the white paper follows OCED’s recommendations to introduce the so-called learning sciences (OECD 2002) which are judged as necessary requirements for ‘effective learning’ (ibid.: 17) since they are the ‘source of health, wealth and happiness’ (ibid.: 17). The learning sciences are valued as powerful enough ‘to shed new light on questions about human learning’ (ibid.: 27). The document shows the OECD’s belief that both ‘brain science’ and ICT (ibid.: 25) will suggest how ‘the practice of teaching can better help young and adult learners’ (ibid.: 27). The quotation reveals that the OECD views teaching developed over hundreds of years as well as its knowledge base, as insufficient. The OECD replaces pedagogy with a new epistemological narrative merging methodology and the theory of neuroscience, psychology and medicine.

Changing reality by documents On the basis of a governmental regulation (KUD 2010) and the more detailed curriculum guidelines (KUD 2010) the standard-based reform was rolled out at institutional level between 2010 and 2014. According to the idea that the ‘pre-scientific discipline’ pedagogy (OECD 2002: 10) should be replaced with content from the so-called learning sciences (KUD 2010: 22, 26, 88, 90), the new subject Pedagogy and Student Knowledge (PSK) was introduced. The subject was divided into 3(4) modules (15 credit points) focusing on: ●●

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(Year 1) the teacher as facilitator of students’ learning and development, (Year 2) students’ academic, social and personal learning and development and (Year 3) the development of teachers’ professional role and identity.

The first topic emphasizes that teachers have to be able to plan, implement and evaluate their own teaching. The respective learning outcomes are anchored by the following themes (KUD 2010: 17–18): planning of learning activities, learning theory, classroom management, learning environment, professional ethics, legislation, beginner training, basic skills, assessment, digital tools and observational knowledge.

Throughout the second year, focus is on students’ learning and that students should understand the significance of pupils’ social, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity. Substantial themes in this topic are (KUD 2010: 18–19):

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socialization in different social, linguistic, religious, cultural and media contexts, adopted teaching, cultural, linguistic and gender-related heterogeneity, the child as school beginner, children’s language and concept development, gender identity, children in difficult life situations as well as learning strategies and meta-cognitive understanding.

In their third year students are supposed to learn about the foundations of schooling, school development and professional ethics. It is expected that students learn to (KUD 2010: 19–20): analyse interactions in classes, stimulate student democracy, carry out development talks, create aesthetic experiences, use local context for student learning, understand teacher roles.

An overview of the curriculum for PSK is striking in that it shows that there is a clear focus on training of student teachers’ attitudes towards understanding teaching as indistinguishable from with learning. Furthermore, students have to learn skills to help pupils achieve learning outcomes. Therefore, they learn about psychologically based concepts of learning. Pedagogy in this setting is reduced to ‘educational diagnosis’ identifying learning disabilities or learning obstacles. In view of the strong indications, the Ministry of Education conceptualizes the task of the PSK-discipline to enable teacher students to interpret pupils’ educational needs. The learning outcome descriptors of the teacher education curriculum suggest that Norwegian teacher education institutions have to accept the idea that teachers must be ‘equipped’ with learning science knowledge. Beyond that, teachers shall learn to administer pupils’ learning since the guidelines put much emphasis on future teachers being trained in ‘craftsmanship’. Therefore, the ministry demands that student teachers acquire the tools to manage, organize and evaluate pupil learning. (KUD 2010: 17).

Engaging with reality The analysis of all Norwegian teacher education programmes (n: 19) based on the course syllabus shows that about 80 per cent of learning outcome descriptions according to European Qualifications Framework regarding learning science knowledge, competences and generic skills have been implemented in teacher education programmes (Werler et al. 2012). Almost all institutions have implemented learning outcomes regarding: planning of learning activities, theory of learning, classroom management, learning environment, socialization in different social, linguistic, religious, cultural and media contexts, adopted

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teaching, cultural, linguistic and gender-related heterogeneity. About 50 per cent of the institutions have introduced topics such as planning of learning activities, professional ethics and evaluation and assessment. In order to understand whether the changes were only superficial, a bibliometric analysis of reading lists collected from all ITE institutions was carried out. The analysis was looking for literature linked to certain learning outcomes. Surprisingly, the analysis reveals that the literature needs of PSK in teacher education are covered with about 200 different titles (mainly book chapters, articles and papers). But topics in the central group of approximately 80 per cent of all institutions make use of one major anthology (Livet i skolen 1/Life in schools 1, Manger 2013) authored by researchers dedicated to topics like learning, behaviour, development, socialization and teacher role. The main characteristic of this text is that the chapters correspond to the learning outcomes.

Learning sciences: dissolution of national knowledge traditions In this section, I argue that it was mainly the curriculum of Norwegian teacher education that was the object of substantial reform measures. Compared to former reforms these mainly text-based measures had the power to change an entire education system. Forces of commodification of education have seemingly affected Norwegian teacher education (Werler 2016). They present and legitimize new knowledge forms through an expectation-based construction of learning outcomes. The implemented curricula present teacher education as something technical, accountable and measurable. It signifies to student teachers as well as to stakeholders that achieved learning outcomes in accordance with the learning sciences give teachers authority. As the analysis showed, one finds a learning outcome-based reconceptualization of the subject of pedagogy in teacher education. It was changed into an instrumental subject that currently goes under the umbrella name Pedagogy and Student Knowledge. However, the implemented reform causes teacher education institutions, lecturers in teacher education and even teachers to become producers of the commodity (i.e. learning outcomes), while the student teachers (the learners) are transformed into (expectant) consumers of those commodities.

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Beside these structural transformation processes, one can identify a new terminology implemented in teacher education. In Norway, the commission working on teacher education reform developed new terms for what was formerly named as pedagogy (KUD 2003). The new name Pedagogy and Student Knowledge is a hybrid construction. In the light of its semantics, it appears as both traditional and new at the same time. That it connects already established national concepts (pedagogikk) with the learning sciences is its greatest achievement (KUD 2010a,b). Secondly, this implies that both non-governmental and governmental bodies show respect for national science traditions in order to implement the content of the learning sciences. This is done in order to prevent resistance from the academic world, from trade unions and from inside the teacher education institutions (Werler et al. 2012: 74–102). However, the naming policy cannot hide the fact that PSK is essentially determined through knowledge concepts of learning and behavioural psychology. The PSK subject provides not only a new conceptual frame but also a new knowledge architecture for teacher education. An analysis of the new curriculum for teacher education from a contentrelated point of view reveals that the curriculum’s central characteristic is ‘learning’. Here, student teachers approach pupils’ learning from multiple perspectives, including cognitive, social and contextual. Beyond that, it is noteworthy to highlight that the new curriculum follows the KSC structure (knowledge – skills – competence) of the EQF (European Commission 2008). It can be shown that the conceptual order of the curriculum content was changed: personal attitudes (learning to learn, Year one of study) have priority over technical skills and knowledge (Years 2 and 3 of study). This relates back to the OECD’s statement that a ‘learning society requires an ASK (attitude-skillknowledge, my supplement) curriculum’ (OECD 2002: 23). Such consideration neglects a central pedagogic aspect of teacher education: that teaching about pedagogy allows teachers to choose what person they want to become and what they will use as their constitutional framework for good teaching.

Pedagogy in teacher education – lost in translation In the final section, I sum up the analysis and discuss consequences for teacher education. Finally, the text argues that the recent reform conceptualizes teacher education as both technology and a mode of production.

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Generally, in the Norwegian teacher education curriculum the learning sciences stand out as a new mode of knowledge use and reflection in teacher education. Driven by external stakeholders (OECD, Norwegian Government) the concept of learning as well as research in education focusing on pupil learning (see Norwegian Research Council) ignores approved knowledge traditions. It is worth noting that the forced implementation is carried out without showing evidence for the claims made (OECD 2002, 2007). Instead, OECD demands a substantive renewal of pedagogy in teacher education to reverse the traditional link between classical pedagogy and teacher education. The reason given is that today’s ‘education … is a pre-scientific discipline’ (OECD 2002: 10). Furthermore, pedagogy in teacher education is judged to be an art: ‘Education is not an autonomous discipline. Like medicine or architecture, it relies on the other disciplines for its theoretical foundation. However, unlike architecture or medicine, education is still in a primitive stage of development. It is an art, not a science’ (OECD2002: 9). In general, it is apparent that learning sciences as a stakeholder construction build on the idea that there is a homogenous corpus of scientific approaches belonging together. Beyond that, stakeholders seem to believe that this new knowledge might have a tremendous effect on pupils’ learning once it is anchored in teachers. Such master ideas exclude the fact there are different scientific traditions as well as various epistemological and methodological approaches for teacher education (see chapters of Ávalos, Brant & Vincent in this book). The arguments brought forward by a powerful stakeholder – to influence mainly politicians – present credible reasons to innovate the ‘outdated’ and dysfunctional scientific pedagogikk. As shown, a functional replacement of pedagogikk by the learning sciences is seen. The pedagogical approach to teacher training is replaced by learning sciences, a transdisciplinary field (OECD 2002: 81), with the brain as fulcrum. Naturally, it has neuroscience, psycho-medical and pedagogic-diagnostic content (OECD 2002: 88, 90). Such psychologydriven decoupling of teacher education and pedagogy does not differentiate between (research) object and (research) methods. The dissolution of national knowledge traditions has the power to remove the curriculum content reflecting upon pedagogical authority and fundamental issues of teaching and learning. Further, this new movement will dissolve student teachers’ ability to process educational topics historically and systematically in order to understand why a political situation or pedagogic action occurred and

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what its contemporary significance is. Since powerful players, mainly the OECD, present statements as irrefutable facts, teacher education is in danger of putting democratic rules aside. The learning sciences – as implemented by the recent teacher education reform – treat learning of teaching as technically manufacturable. Furthermore, teacher education institutions create by the implementation of the learning sciences a contract between teacher education and government regarding rationalization and industrialization of teacher education (Werler 2016). Competence descriptions are used as a link between governmentality and a technological perspective on pedagogic actions (Peters et al. 2009). Having ‘science’ in the new concept of teacher education puts it on equal footing with traditional academic university science. Systematic replacement of pedagogic knowledge (generated by pedagogy’s concepts and methods) with psychologic knowledge separates teacher education from its original knowledge base (Løvlie 2013). Psychology, labelled as research on learning, stands out as the respected scientific research area looking for effective if-then-laws (Biesta 2007; Werler et al. 2012). Then, teacher education is turned away from the development of the person (Hanson 2001); it is turned to the concept of the permanently learning pupil (Richardson 1997; Sæverot and Torgersen 2012). It is central for the concept of the learning sciences in teacher education that it supports the development of both student teachers and pupils’ technologies for self-governance (Damsa and Nerland 2014; Nerland 2012). Then, the purpose of teacher education is to create in student teachers a corresponding technological understanding of their future role in school. Student teachers learn that the (ultimate) objective of teaching is the production (of learning outcomes) (Connell 2013; Werler 2016). Then, pupils might be treated as objects of proper technology use (Apel 1973: 14). However, the learning sciences of Norwegian teacher education programmes portray teachers as teaching technologists. An extreme consequence of this development might cause the pedagogic relationship to disintegrate into that of manipulator and manipulated. This implies that one dissolves the professionalization project because teachers will act as users, applying ‘correct’ knowledge in the ‘right’ way to produce planned learning outcomes (Tatto and Mincu 2009; Page 2015). Future professionals seem to be at risk of losing their pedagogical authority, since they will become experts in the application of the concepts of scripted teaching (Sleeter 2008; Zeichner 2014).

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Notes 1 Own calculation on basis of EUROSTAT data for 2012/2013 (last data available, see: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database) (accessed 06 December 2015). 2 See: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&plugin=1&language=de &pcode=tec00115.

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Teacher Education in South America: A Problem or a Solution?1 Beatrice Ávalos-Bevan

Introduction Teacher education has been signalled out as a key influence in the improvement of educational opportunities and results in international education policy documents and extensively cited reports on teacher quality (EFA Global Monitoring Report 2013/2014; Barber and Mourshed 2007; OECD 2004). However, just as teacher education is seen as a key factor for educational quality, it is also viewed as an impediment due to perceived weaknesses in its institutional forms and processes. In this respect, most of the teacher education provisions of the Latin American countries have been subject to long-standing critique regarding their effectiveness in preparing competent teachers and contributing to education quality. More recently, an analysis of teacher education in seven countries in the Latin American and Caribbean Region carried out by the UNESCO Regional Office (OREALC/UNESCO 2014a) highlighted the following as key persistent ‘critical’ areas in need of attention: (a) low scholastic entry levels of teacher candidates; (b) weaknesses in teacher education curricula and preparation processes; (c) inadequate teacher educator capacity; (d) insufficient relevance for different and disadvantaged populations; (e) tensions between practical versus academic emphases in its processes and (f) insufficient regulation over teacher education institutions. Before and after this assessment several countries in the region have undertaken reviews of their teacher and teacher education policies and supported various forms of change or innovation (UNESCO/OREALC 2014a). These may have had an effect on improvement in the quality of new teachers and on student learning, but as yet there is not much solid evidence for this.

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This chapter will use the case of six South American countries to examine the extent to which the problem areas noted above apply to their teacher education programmes and in what ways these countries may be attempting to improve on them, either by macro or by micro reform policies. The countries considered are Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú and Uruguay all of which share Hispanic culture and Spanish as their common main language, but differ in their income levels, proportion of the population with indigenous origins and languages, characteristics of their education systems and learning results as measured by the Latin American Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study known as TERCE (OREALC/UNESCO 2015a,b) and by the OECD-conducted PISA 2011 test (OECD 2012) in which five of the six countries participated. The selected countries serve to illustrate forms of teacher education institutionalization ranging from mostly privately administration to mostly public institutions, as well as variations in the way in which they are attempting to reform its provisions. The main question that guides this chapter is the extent to which teacher education continues to be seen as a key problem for the improvement of education results and quality or the extent to which it may be moving towards improvement and thus offering a solution for inadequate learning results in the education system of the selected countries. In what follows, the chapter begins by presenting some facts about the countries studied and their educational systems, including teacher education and what can be deduced in the light of existing data about its impact on school learning. The main section looks at the problem areas discussed in the OREALC/UNESCO (2014a) review and how they are being addressed in each of the countries: institutional characteristics of teacher education programmes, quality of intake, teacher education processes (curriculum) and quality assurance mechanisms in place and the extent to which these are standards-based and externally rather than internally conducted. The final section discusses whether the improvements described foreshadow solutions or are closer to encompassing new problems.

National educational contexts and school achievement The six chosen countries are similar as well as different in several ways in terms of their educational contexts. Table 8.1 provides descriptive information on the

*Current US$, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator.

Gross enrolment (%) 2012 c. Lower secondary d. Upper secondary Annual education expenditure as % of government expenditure

Population (millions) GDP per capita (2014)* % indigenous population Gini coefficient (2010) Net enrolment (%) a. Pre-primary (2012) b. Primary (2012)

Table 8.1  Characteristics of countries studied

98 85

19.07 (2013)

15.09 (2013)

87 93

74 98

114 70

18 14,528 11 (2012) 0.52

Chile

43 12,509 2.4 (2010) 0.44

Argentina

(2014)

15.86

101 76

44 86

48 7,904 3.4 (2010) 0.55

Colombia

(2015)

10.35

96 77

81 97

16 6,346 7 (2010) 0.49

Ecuador

(2014)

16.24

100 74

74 96

31 6,541 24 (2010) 0.46

Perú

(2011)

14.93

110 71

78 100

3 16,807 2.4 (2011) 0.45

Uruguay

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economy, population and proportion of indigenous groups, equity, net preprimary and primary enrolment, gross secondary enrolment and educational expenditure in relation to income. As shown in the table, the countries vary significantly in terms of population and proportion of indigenous people. Colombia, Argentina and Perú have the biggest populations, as opposed to Uruguay with only 3 million people, while Perú has the largest number of indigenous groups. There are important differences in income per capita, with Argentina, Chile and Uruguay having the highest income per capita among the six countries. They are also countries with high levels of inequality as per their Gini coefficients, especially Chile and Colombia. All countries have full enrolment in primary and lower secondary education but less so in initial and upper secondary levels. The six countries also differ in their expenditure on education, with Chile spending the highest proportion of its national budget and Ecuador the lowest. In terms of the education system organization, Argentina has a federal system in which education and teacher education is managed at provincial level. All the other five countries have unitary systems with strong central governments that define and broadly manage the education and teacher education systems, although they have or are increasingly devolving school management to decentralized authorities (for example, to municipalities in Chile since the 1980s and in Colombia since the 1990s). The target countries differ in the public/private ratio of ownership and management of schools as well as of teacher education institutions. Thus, Chile funds both public and privately owned and managed schools and an important proportion of future teachers are prepared in private universities. On the opposite side stands Uruguay with a largely publicly funded and centrally managed education and teacher education system. Perú and Colombia have an equal share of public/private provisions of schooling and of teacher education, while Ecuador is engaged in a strong movement to reinstate the quality and coverage of public education versus increasing privatization and to decentralize the management of the system and schools. All the countries discussed with the exception of Ecuador2 participated in the PISA 2012 international examination centred on students aged fifteen, and all participated in the applications of the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Studies known as TERCE 2013, which was conducted by the Latin American Regional Office of UNESCO for third and sixth grade students. As far as PISA results are concerned, the five participant countries performed below the OECD mean (see Table 8.2), but the better performers on all three tests (mathematics, reading and science) were Chile and Uruguay. Compared

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Table 8.2  Mean scores in PISA 2012 of participating countries Countries Argentina Chile Colombia Perú Uruguay OECD mean

Mathematics

Reading

Science

388 423 376 368 409 494

396 441 403 384 411 496

406 445 399 373 416 501

Source: OECD PISA 2012 Results.

820 Third grade Sixth grade

800

Mean Pisa score

780 760 740 720 700 680 660 640 620

Argentina

Chile

Colombia

Ecuador

Perú

Uruguay

Regional Mean

Figure 8.1  Performance in the TERCE evaluation, third- and sixth-grade reading Source: OREALC/UNESCO (2015a)

to PISA 2009, Uruguay lowered its performance on all tests, while Chile did not vary significantly. The TERCE evaluation covers language (reading), mathematics and also science, although not every country took this test. As shown in Figure 8.1, all countries with the exception of Ecuador performed above or on the TERCE regional mean on the third- and sixth-grade reading tests. In the mathematics test, Colombia and Ecuador performed around the regional mean in sixth grade. Chile and Uruguay, in turn, clearly were the better performers, as shown in Figure 8.2. Besides data on student learning achievement, the TERCE evaluation includes information on teachers and their teacher education opportunities, based on a questionnaire administered to those in charge of the target student groups examined. Some of the relevant facts are presented below.

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Mean Pisa score

152 820 800 780 760 740 720 700 680 660 640

Third grade Sixth grade

Argentina

Chile

Colombia

Ecuador

Perú

Uruguay

Regional Mean

Figure 8.2  Performance in TERCE evaluation, third- and sixth-grade mathematics

Teachers and their preparation: Evidence from the TERCE study (OREALC/UNESCO, 2015b) Teachers in the Latin American countries are mostly female (around 80 per cent), of middle-low to low socio-economic background, and a large proportion come from families where they are the first to have access to tertiary education (Bruns and Luque 2014). All teachers in the selected countries should have been prepared in tertiary and/or university-level institutions, requiring for entry a successful completion of upper secondary education. However, as reported in the TERCE teacher questionnaire, in several of the target countries a proportion of practising primary teachers had only primary education (3.4 per cent) or only secondary education (2.4 per cent). As shown in Figure 8.3, and consistent with the characteristics of their teacher education systems, teachers in Colombia reported having mostly a university-based teacher education, while those in Argentina and Uruguay attended non-university tertiary institutions. In the other countries teachers had either a predominantly university-based preparation as in Ecuador or predominantly non-university as in Perú. As for being certified according to country requirements, there was a higher proportion of non-certified teachers in Perú (9.5 per cent), Colombia (11.5 per cent) and Ecuador (15.5 per cent) compared to teachers in the other countries. The TERCE study included three questions that provide some indication of the quality of the teacher education experiences to which the participating teachers had access: face-to-face versus distance mode, length of teacher education studies and exposure to practical experiences.

Teacher Education in South America 100

98.7

153 100

93

91.8

90 80

68.2

Percentage (%)

70

65.6

60 50 40

34.4

31.7

30 20 10 0

1.3 Argentina

8.2

7

Chile

Colombia

Tertiary institution

0 Ecuador

Perú

Uruguay

University

Figure 8.3  Type of teacher preparation institutions attended by TERCE teachers

Over 40 per cent of the teachers in Colombia and Ecuador who responded to the questionnaire stated that they had been prepared in distance or semidistance programmes and 23 per cent in Perú had the same experience. This could be taken as a factor against quality judging from the experience in Chile where such programmes were discontinued due to the inadequate conditions in which they were offered (Ávalos 2015). Length of studies seemed to vary by country and within countries. Thus, almost all primary teachers in Perú (92 per cent) had three or more years of teacher preparation, as did also 58.3 per cent of teachers in Uruguay. On the other hand, a majority of teachers in Argentina (76.3 per cent) and 37.3 of Uruguayan teachers had been prepared in shorter two- to three-year programmes. Teachers were asked about the duration of their fieldwork or practicum experiences. In this respect almost all Uruguayan teachers had more than a year of practicum, followed by teachers in Perú. In the other countries, teachers reported a varying amount of time dedicated to fieldwork ranging from half a year to a year, with a small proportion in Perú, Ecuador, Colombia and Chile indicating no experiences of this type at all. Responses are shown in Figure 8.4. The TERCE study also inquired about teacher opportunities for continuing professional development and learning once they were posted in schools. As shown in Table 8.3, while most teachers had opportunity for general professional

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Uruguay

1 0

Perú

96

3

3

25

Ecuador

66

23

9

28 41

6

Colombia

24

10

38

24

Chile

35

2 16

Argentina

37

29

29

55

0 0

20

40

More than one year

60 One year

80 Half a year

100

None

Figure 8.4  Teacher reports on opportunity for fieldwork or practicum experiences during initial teacher education (% of teachers). Source: OREALC/UNESCO (2015b) Table 8.3  Teacher participation in a continuous professional development activity over their last two years of experience (% indicating participation)

Argentina Chile Colombia Ecuador Perú Uruguay Total

In general Focus in Language

Focus in Mathematics

80.6 77.8 74.8 77.8 94.1 70.7 80.3

34.7 21.4 7.9 27.4 45.4 29.6 72.4

44.5 24.1 10.4 30.0 51.6 33.6 67.8

Source: UNESCO/OREALC (2015b).

development, there was less opportunity for some to participate in subjectspecific activities, especially for those focused in mathematics teaching. On the other hand, almost 60 per cent of teachers in Argentina and around 50 per cent in Chile and Colombia declared to never having received support or being supervised by another teacher. While it is not possible to assess directly the impact of teacher preparation experiences on student results in the international tests referred to here, there

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are some factors that stand out as possibly relevant from teacher descriptions in the TERCE questionnaire regarding their preparation. These include the effect of having a university versus non-university preparation, duration of teacher preparation studies, length of fieldwork or practicum experiences as well as the main teacher education delivery form (face-to-face or distance mode). A comparison of the teacher education programmes of Chile and Uruguay, the two countries with better performance in PISA and TERCE, shows that the countries are quite different. Chile prepares their teachers largely at universities in four or more years, while Uruguay does so at tertiary-level teacher training institutions for three years. Also, Uruguayan teachers spend more than a year in practicum experiences compared to just over a third of Chilean teachers. The only common feature found in both systems seems to be that most of the teachers surveyed attended face-to-face teacher education programmes. On the other hand, 40 per cent of teachers in Ecuador and Colombia whose students were among the lowest performers in the TERCE mathematics tests had attended distance teacher education programmes. Teachers in these two countries had also experienced variable amounts of practical experiences ranging from including none to more than a year (see Figure 8.4). Thus, we may conclude that a key factor in the relationship between teacher education and learning results of the target countries may be the nature of the programme itself (face-to-face versus distance modes) and sufficiently long opportunities for practicum experiences. These facts may be important, although not sufficient, in considering where the focus of improvement needs to be in order to move teacher education away from being a problem and towards being a solution for improved student learning. In what follows, we examine more closely what are considered to be critical aspects in the teacher education systems of the target countries.

Critical situations recognized as problem areas in the selected countries At policy discussion level, in all of the selected countries there is a strong sense that teacher education is not providing the kind of teachers needed. The problem areas detected are in line with the consensus about what defines a sound teacher education system: its institutional basis and quality of intake, its

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teacher educators, curriculum and practicum experiences and what is known as quality assurance mechanisms. We consider here how these areas are taken to be problematic in the selected countries and how these problems are being addressed in the recent change scenarios of each education system.

Institutionalization of teacher education programmes The distinctive character of teacher education institutions in the target countries as well as throughout Latin America is the degree to which they are university or non-university based, and public or privately owned and managed. As noted earlier, there are three main types of teacher education systems: (a) predominantly university ones as in the case of Chile and Colombia, (b) mixed systems with university provisions prevailing over tertiary ones (Ecuador) or with tertiary institutions prevailing over university ones (Perú) and (c) predominantly nonuniversity as in Argentina and Uruguay. Leaving aside the case of these two countries to which we will return later, in the others the tendency has been to regard non-university provisions as problematic in terms of quality and as not appropriate to the preparation of teachers as professionals. Thus, Chile has recently passed a law3 that requires all teacher education to be offered by universities. The government of Ecuador has moved towards a universitybased teacher education system closing non-functional tertiary institutions and establishing a national pedagogic university, which will gradually incorporate existing teacher education tertiary institutions (Bruns and Luque 2014). In Colombia the decision to have a predominantly university-based teacher education system was endorsed in the 1994 General Law of Education. Argentina and Uruguay are the only countries that have not modified their teacher education structure. According to Rivas (2015), Argentina has maintained a dysfunctional system of 1,260 teacher education institutes managed at provincial level, while there are 61 universities that have some teacher education preparation. Conditions in the provincial institutions are very different in that some are quite small and located in less populous towns of the country. Uruguay, in turn, prepares all of its teachers at tertiary-level teacher training institutes and contrary to Argentina these are regulated and managed under a National System of Teacher Education. There are signs, however, of wanting to move teacher education institutions towards a closer link with the university system. Thus, in recent years, the government prepared for the establishment of a national pedagogic university that would serve as a coordinating body for teacher

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education, but its establishment has been recently postponed (2015). Also with the intention of improving the preparation of secondary-level teachers, which is largely undertaken by a national institute and several regional centres, there are moves to produce a closer association of secondary education institutions with the national university (Universidad de La República). Besides the issue of tertiary versus university teacher education, the extent to which provisions are predominantly public (Argentina and Uruguay) or predominantly private in terms of student numbers (Chile) is an important one. In Chile, as a result of market policies in place since its military dictatorship period (1973–90), private provisions grew with little regulation and control, especially during the 2000s (Cox, Meckes and Bascopé 2010; Ávalos 2015). This was considered to have mainly affected the preparation quality of pre-school and primary teachers, many of which have been trained in private programmes that were either not accredited or accredited for a short period of time. Concern about the quality of teacher education in Perú, with a mainly private teacher education system, led to a comprehensive review of teacher policies in 2002 that highlighted an ‘irrational’ output of new teachers, many of which came from private institutions. A drastic decision to reduce new intake into teacher education resulted in the closure of over a hundred private teacher education institutions (Rivas 2015).

Intake quality of teacher candidates Who applies for teacher education and for what purposes is a key area of policy concern expressed in international policy documents (OREALC/UNESCO 2014a; OECD 2004). In all the Latin American countries and particularly in the ones we are examining more closely, teacher education has been an option for the children of less educated families who were not able to access some form of higher education (Bruns and Luque 2015). The traditional secondarylevel Normal School that prepared teachers in Latin American countries took promising students at the end of their primary education and provided them with a mix of secondary schooling and skills for teaching. While this arrangement worked to an extent in the past century, all the countries studied have recognized that it is not appropriate for the twenty-first century. However, efforts to upgrade teacher preparation from secondary to tertiary level beginning in the 1980s and early 1990s (Messina 1997) and the current move towards university teacher education have highlighted the issue of entry

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qualifications and capacities. Applicants with low-entry qualifications are not always able to cope with university-level demands and reach the knowledge level and skills required today for competent teaching (as measured for example in national and international tests). But reversing the situation in order to attract more qualified candidates requires changes in the status and working conditions of teachers, which is unsatisfactory in practically all of the countries considered in this review (Ávalos 2013; Cuenca and Stojnik 2008; Vaillant and Rossel 2006). There are complications with policies that substantially seek to improve entry qualifications of teacher candidates. Drastic policies to raise entry requirements for teacher education like those that took place in Perú in 2006 produced an enormous lowering of admissions from 22,000 in 2006 to 305 in 2008 (Rivas 2015), and as noted earlier, resulted in the closure of over a hundred private teacher education institutes. It also meant that there was an insufficient number of teacher education candidates to serve indigenous bilingual and rural communities (Bruns and Luque 2014). A similar problem was experienced in Colombia in terms of insufficient coverage of teachers in some geographical regions as compared to others (Ministerio de Educación de Colombia 2013). There is also concern in Chile that the raising of the university entry qualifications for future teachers endorsed in the 2016 new law on teachers may affect the intake into teacher education programmes located in the remote north and south regions of the country as well for the difficult-to-staff areas of teaching such as secondary mathematics and sciences. A different form of attracting better candidates into teaching is through use of incentives such as scholarships. Chile has had such a programme in place since 2010, covering payment of university fees for good candidates who enrol in teacher education. The scholarship requires new teachers who benefitted from the scholarship commit themselves to at least three years of teaching in the public school system. However, after an initial success the number of applicants for these scholarships has diminished (Ávalos 2015).

The teacher education curricula and its quality Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s to date strong criticisms have been coming from various sources, including civil society movements, regarding the quality of teacher education provisions. Much of these criticisms tend to

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be general and associated with the assumed effect of teacher education over student results in standardized tests. This has been particularly evident in opinions appearing in Chilean media but also in the discourse of politicians, policymakers and ad hoc reports (Ávalos 2015). Beyond this kind of critique there are substantial concerns regarding the delivery of teacher education. For example, a recent report from the National Institute of Teacher Education in Argentina that examined the teacher education curricula offered by provincial institutions produced a list of problem areas which are applicable to other programmes in our target countries. We list them below: (a) An excessive number of curricular subjects to be covered in the four-year programme of studies (b) Impact of curriculum overload on low completion rates of student teachers (c) Inadequate balance between contents related to the school curriculum and contents of other professional subjects (d) Shortfall in practical knowledge and capacities and on how these need to be developed through fieldwork experiences in accordance with school-level and school contexts (e) Insufficient elective courses and the use of information technology resources in learning. (Instituto Nacional de Formación Docente, 2014: 24–9)

Similar problem areas were reflected in a report commissioned by the Ministry of Education of Colombia and two universities (Ministerio de Educación Colombia 2012). The report highlighted issues connected with the teacher education curriculum, styles of teaching and use of research. In particular the report noted the need to develop knowledge and capacities for handling different contexts and student populations, including the diversity of indigenous groups in Colombia (also a concern in Chile and Perú). Other concerns pointed to insufficient links with continuous professional development activities and with the use of information communication technologies. An insight into the effect of different types of institutions over the teacher education curriculum was provided by a study of teacher education in Ecuador circa 2010 (Fabara 2013). The study contrasted the teacher education curricula of two of the most prestigious teacher education institutions, an institute and a university, in terms of time allotted to content knowledge and professional theory (i.e. psychology, sociology, pedagogy) versus time allotted to practical experiences. Both institutions devoted around 16 per cent of total preparation time to the equivalent of ‘liberal arts content areas’ but strongly contrasted in

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the time allocated to ‘professional theory’. In fact, while the university set aside almost 60 per cent of time for this area, the higher education institute only gave it 14 per cent. On the other hand, as far as time for field experience was concerned, the relationship was reversed. Thus, the university left only 2 per cent of time for practicum compared to 47 per cent of time at the institute. In other words, the ‘university’ was high on what one might be regarded as theoretical professional studies and low on practical experiences, while the ‘institute’ clearly emphasized practical learning experiences. This situation illustrates what tends to be usual in university preparation, which in Ecuador is high on theoretical contents and very low on field experiences (Fabara 2013). Curriculum overload is as much a problem as are its contents and the proportion allotted to theory and practice. Uruguay is one of the countries with better performance in the TERCE evaluation, and to some extent, this may be due to long-standing recognized quality in the preparation of preschool and primary teachers (Mancebo n/d). Currently, the Institutes of Teacher Education jointly prepare pre-primary and primary teachers through a common core of professional subjects offered in the first of a four-year programme after which candidates may select the school level for which they wish to prepare. According to Mancebo (n/d), teachers are prepared ‘to face the multiple challenges of primary education with appropriate technical capacities’, have ‘clear professional rules and a clear idea about education being their central remit’ and have good practical experiences (Mancebo 2006). However, more recently, fluctuations in the size of enrolment, and especially a drop in the number of teachers who effectively complete their studies, have become a matter for concern. New student-teacher enrolment fell from 1,007 in 2007 to 835 in 2012 and to 713 in 2013, mainly affecting institutions in the capital city of Montevideo as compared to other locations in the country (MEC 2014). Among possible explanations for this situation is the fact that teacher education candidates tend to be older than other higher education students and need to work part-time while studying. However, another interpretation suggests that there may be problems related to curriculum overload and its effects on students falling behind. This, in fact, was the finding of two surveys of students attending primary teacher education institutes in 2005 and 2008 together with evidence on changes in perceptions regarding the difficulty level of the curriculum and its requirements. Over the period, the proportion of those who thought the curriculum was ‘very heavy’ had increased from 41 per cent to 51 per cent (CIFRA 2012).

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Improving the curriculum via standards setting and competitive funding One of the most recommended ways of establishing appropriate curriculum for teacher education is through linking it to a system of standards or competences associated with expected learning results on the part of future teachers. Among our target countries, Chile and Perú, in different ways, have used a standards system to improve the curriculum and delivery processes. In Perú, the teacher education curriculum for public non-university teacher education programmes was reviewed in 2010–11, following recommendations from an earlier examination of the state of teachers and teacher education (Ministerio de Educación Perú 2002). The review recommended that the curriculum be guided by competences reflecting the tasks teachers perform in classrooms and schools. This led to the development and approval of a national profile of competences for the teaching body and teacher education (Ministerio de Educacion Perú 2013). However, a recent book (Díaz 2014) that examines the situation of teacher education in Perú is hard on the competencybased curriculum and the capacity of teacher educators to enact it. Díaz (2014) considers that the competency framework is low on higher-level competencies to handle imaginatively more complex teaching situations and overloaded with competencies requiring more content knowledge than manageable in the available timeframe. It is also not sufficiently relevant for multi-grade schools and intercultural bilingual education. On teacher educators Díaz (ibid.: 30) was even more critical in terms of their capacity to work with a competency-based curriculum: Teacher educators are resistant to change and tend to reproduce the manner of teaching of those who taught them. Such an attitude tends to perpetuate practices of copying, dictation and repetition, a low level of complexity and depth in the contents taught and scarcity of relevant information provided in relation to what is taught. This is partly due to insufficient pedagogic preparation and the lack of a professional basis for their work.

In order to influence the quality of the teacher education curriculum in both public and private institutions, Chile has been using two main policy instruments: standards setting for teacher education and competitive funding for the improvement of the curriculum and processes. The standards, intended to guide processes of teacher education curriculum review, cover content and methods’ knowledge related to all school subjects (pre-primary to secondary) as

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well as general pedagogical knowledge. They have been gradually developed since 2010 and have only recently been completed. The system of competitive funding has been in place for almost ten years and has benefitted consortia of university teacher education programmes focused mainly on curriculum improvement. The projects have provided scope for institutions to review their curriculum including the quality of their field experiences and introduce relevant change. There has not been an external evaluation of these projects, but a study of the collaboration links within these consortia around the country shows that they are poor, especially in those institutions that are closer to the centre or metropolitan region of Chile (Urbina, Cárdenas and Cárdenas 2012). More recently, competitive funding to improve teacher education has taken the form of Performance Agreements that tend to place emphasis more on quantitative indicators as evidence of success of the projects than on the quality of teacher education processes such as teaching and the use of practical knowledge and experience (Ávalos 2015).

Quality assurance Over the last twenty years concerns about the quality of teacher education in terms of the solidity of its institutions and academic programmes have influenced the development of different measures of quality assurance. These include external accreditation of teacher education institutions and their programmes (Chile, Colombia and Perú), evaluation of teachers’ knowledge at the end of their studies (Chile and Perú) and various forms of coordination and institutional support (Argentina and Uruguay). In Colombia, accreditation of teacher education programmes was regulated in 2012 for all teacher education programmes in universities and non-university institutions. It is managed by the National Council of Accreditation and is not compulsory. Perú, in turn, has had a system of standards-based accreditation in place since 2008 for both the teacher education institutes and the university programmes. In Chile the government secured legislation in 2009 that made programme accreditation obligatory for all institutions offering teacher education. Over time the institutions have been progressively accredited, but until recently about 50 per cent of them had achieved less than five of a possible total of seven years’ accreditation. Despite there being only assumed evidence of the effect of accreditation on new teachers’ knowledge (Domínguez et al. 2012), its role as a quality assurance mechanism has been reinforced in the new 2016 law on Teacher Professional Development (see Note 3).

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Evaluation of the knowledgebase of graduating teachers is being used as another way of verifying the quality of teacher education institutions. Perú established such an examination for new teachers applying for posts in public schools. Results of its first application in 2006 served as a warning light about the low quality of the teacher education preparation. The test continues to be used and measures school curriculum knowledge, logical reasoning and understanding of written texts. More recently, in 2013, the Ministry of Education administered a similar test to final-year students of teacher education institutes also with highly unsatisfactory results (Díaz 2014). Similarly, since 2008 Chile has had a voluntary-based test for new teachers administered immediately after completion of their studies. This assessment has suffered from not being properly aligned with the teacher education standards for most of the period of its application (Ávalos 2015) and as placing the responsibility for learning on the graduating teacher rather than on the institution that prepared him or her (García-Huidobro 2010). In view of these shortcomings, the test is being replaced by a diagnostic examination to be administered one year before completion of studies, and is expected to have a formative rather than a summative purpose. Argentina and Uruguay do not have systems of quality assurance based on accreditation or examination of graduates. However, the National Institute of Teacher Education in Argentina has taken on an important role in coordinating and supporting quality improvement in the over 1,200 teacher education institutions that are under provincial management. In Uruguay, the quality of teacher education is firmly under centralized government control. All institutions share the same curriculum structured under a common set of competences, but there are no procedures for the evaluation of these institutions. In pro of a better coordination and quality development of teacher education institutions, the 2008 General Law of Education provided for the establishment in Uruguay of a National Pedagogic University, similar to those in Ecuador and Colombia. However, despite advanced plans for the university, the government has decided to postpone its opening.

Concluding thoughts Over the last fifteen years there have been diverse diagnostic analysis of the state of teacher education in Latin American countries, particularly in relation to the provision of qualified teachers, the institutional basis of teacher education (from tertiary to university level) and the quality of its curriculum and preparation

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processes. The evidence or part of the evidence discussed in this chapter suggests that despite advances in the direction of improving in these areas, teacher education continues to be regarded as a problem. This has been particularly true of the public image of teacher education, for example, in Chile (as evident in letters to the editor of key newspapers during the discussion of the new law on teachers). Following international recommendations, all the countries included in this review have examined in recent years the status of their systems, either through formal government sponsored reports or through taking stock of data provided by independent studies. Resulting from these reviews, some countries have undertaken difficult structural changes such as the closing of non-functioning teacher education institutions in Ecuador and distance teacher education programmes in Chile. Some countries such as Uruguay have directly reviewed their teacher education curricula while others such as Perú and Chile have established standards or competencies to guide a curriculum review. There has been a general trend towards raising all teacher education to university level in Chile and Colombia, but also in process in Ecuador and Perú. Some of these measures are very recent and hardly can be reflected in achievement test results until a reasonable period of time elapses. But, others have been in place since the early 2000s and should be having some effect on current school teaching practices and student learning, although little evidence has been gathered on this. Practising teachers have different views about the quality and impact of teacher education. For example, in Chile, teachers attribute difficulties in handling inclusion in classrooms and their student differences to shortcomings of their teacher education programmes (Ávalos 2013). On the other hand, a recent teacher survey in Perú found that teachers had more trust in their teacher education institutions than in the education system’s administrators (Consejo Nacional de Educación Perú 2015). To assess with fairness the role of teacher education over teaching practices and student learning, we need to remember that it is part of a system in which each of its constituent elements needs to be considered. Thus, the quality of teacher education per se depends on a composite of factors operating in a relational manner. Seen from the inside of the teacher education processes, these factors include an appropriate institutionalization, relevant and demanding curricula and technology, links with research evidence and rich field experiences. Quality also rests on competent teacher educators who are experienced practitioners interacting with able and committed student teachers. These elements of quality are present in all the systems we have examined, but partially and with varying degrees of shortcomings and limitations.

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While the move towards a more solid system of teacher education, mostly university based as in Chile, Colombia and Ecuador, is commendable, it also entails a loss of direct government vigilance over its quality like the one that now exists in Uruguay and more reliance on external controls such as accreditation and examinations as in Chile. External policies such as raising the entry level for new teacher trainees while important in terms of the knowledge base and higher-order capabilities these candidates will bring to the teacher education process, also restrict the availability of those from certain geographical regions as in the case of Chile or from indigenous groups as in Perú, Colombia and Ecuador. These facts are acknowledged by the systems we have studied and explain why it is not always possible to follow international recommendations about teacher education as rapidly as might be desirable (OREALC/UNESCO 2014a; OREALC/UNESCO 2014b). Regarding teacher education processes themselves (curricular balance and relevant theoretical and practical activities) we found dissatisfaction, particularly in Chile, Ecuador and Perú (Ávalos and Matus 2010; Díaz 2014; Fabara 2013). This is leading those system authorities to engage in different types of curricular reforms but may be lacking in explicit actions to secure an appropriate balance between content knowledge, pedagogic content knowledge as well as adequate teaching strategies and practical experiences.4 It would seem, as Vaillant (2015) using the case of Uruguay notes, that the ‘black box’ of teacher education remains in need of more privileged attention and coordinated work among teacher education academics and practitioners and not just legislation and decrees from government authorities. Initial teacher education is only the first link in the teacher education continuum. Data from the TERCE teacher questionnaire indicate that while a high proportion of Latin American teachers have taken part in in-service professional development activities, a much lower proportion has participated in courses focused on language or mathematics teaching (see Table 8.3). In some of the countries there are no provisions to mentor new teachers, while in others induction is starting to be recognized as a valid stage in a teacher’s career. Perú has provisions for formal induction of new teachers in the public schools, Argentine teacher education institutions provide support to their graduates when they begin to teach and Chile has recently enacted legislation that will gradually implement induction for all new teachers in subsidized schools. It will be important for other countries to follow suit in the understanding that teacher education cannot prepare for all the particularities of the school contexts in which new teachers begin their professional life.

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A large part of the prevailing critique of teacher education quality derives from dissatisfaction with school student performance on national and international standardized tests, especially in PISA. However, there is a strong effect of socio-economic status interacting with teacher work and impacting on performance, especially in the case of Chile, Colombia, Perú and Uruguay as per a recent OECD report based on PISA 2012.5 In Chile, which is the Latin American country that ranked highest in the OECD’s inequity scale, a disadvantaged child is six times more likely to perform poorly at school and four times as likely to fail his basic education level. This child needs very wellprepared teachers who are committed to working with him. However, the ‘very well-prepared teacher’, if given the choice, will tend not to teach in that child’s school for reasons of working conditions. Not only do teacher education programmes have to work with their good trainees, developing capabilities to teach disadvantaged children and commitment to want to do so. There also is need for policies, such as monetary incentives for new teachers who are willing to work with disadvantaged school populations, as some of the countries studied are beginning to use. What we learn from these experiences of change and their limits is that teacher education cannot be evaluated only in the light of what happens inside its institutions or in school classrooms, but also in the light of the broader society and its needs, including the policies that govern the education system as a whole. Thus, to conclude, and returning ‘the relational’ nature of teacher education, we should like to highlight the following: ●●

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The quality of teacher education depends on and is connected to the professional status and working conditions of teachers, especially if we are to attract the ‘best’ into the profession. The ‘best’ are found not only among those with high scholastic qualifications but also among those who are part of or closely committed to the culture and language of the students they will teach, even if their entry portfolio appears to be less ‘impressive’. Academia and practice are not necessarily opposites. They can join ranks in the task of improving teacher education processes. And finally, Teacher preparation is only the first link in a teacher’s formative path. Its progress needs to be supported by policies, which include new teacher induction and subject-focused professional development.

We thus conclude this chapter noting how the six-country teacher education cases discussed illustrate existing tensions between teacher education as a

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problem and teacher education as a lever for educational quality improvement. It will never be ‘the solution’ because teachers are part of a system with many interacting elements, all of which need to function reasonably well. But if the nature of teacher education’s problematic conditions are not well identified and dealt with, a key factor in the educational system’s well-being will be failing. Each one of the countries reviewed was attempting to improve on perceived problems or failures. However, while the solution of one country may not be the solution for another, learning from each other’s experiences can contribute to improved teacher education policies, structures, processes and practices.

Notes 1 With assistance from Sebastián Araneda. Acknowledgment is due to support funding from Basal Funds for Centres of Excellence, Project FB003. 2 Ecuador, however, has announced its intention to participate in the next administration of the PISA test. 3 Law 20.903 ‘Crea el sistema de desarrollo professional docente’ (Establishes the system of teacher professional development) (1 April 2016). 4 Chile is trying to do this through legislation. The recent teachers’ law (2016) rules that to be accredited, teacher education programmes, among other requisites, must provide evidence of having established cooperation links with schools for practicum experiences as well as evidence of improvement actions related to results of student teacher diagnostic tests. 5 This information was extracted from newspaper reporting: El Mostrador, 10 February 2016: http://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/pais/2016/02/10/informeocde-chile-en-el-top-ten-de-los-paises-con-mas-desigualdad-educativa/.

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Teacher Education in England: Professional Preparation in Times of Change Jacek Brant and Katharine Vincent

Introduction This chapter explores what we understand by good teachers, good teaching and the elements necessary for appropriate teacher education in a time of change and uncertainty where the reform of teacher education is en vogue worldwide. This is particularly the case in England, which has seen a fundamental change in the landscape of schooling and the preparation of new teachers in the last forty years. The famous 1976 ‘Ruskin speech’ by the then British Prime Minister Callaghan can be seen as a turning point in educational policy in England; Callaghan criticized the way in which education had become a ‘secret garden’ in which the practices of teachers and other educational professionals had become shrouded in mystery. At that time in England, there was no National Curriculum, no parental choice as to which state schools their children would attend and no league tables of examination results. The Ruskin speech ignited a public debate that helped generate a political climate in which it was seen as acceptable for the government to take a proactive role in determining what should happen in schools. This included, in succeeding years, the introduction of a national curriculum, greater diversity in types of schools and what they offer, a reduction in the role of local authorities, new forms of examination and assessment, Ofsted1 inspections and the publishing of examination league tables, as well as the introduction of a degree of parental choice in relation to school admissions. The preparation of teachers was not exempt from radical overhaul during this time. Despite a political climate of distrust of schools and teachers, schools were increasingly given a larger role in teacher preparation, which had moved

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under the aegis of universities during the post-war period. The distrust of universities by successive Conservative governments since 1979 was evident and steps were taken to dilute their influence by giving schools more power and influence during the 1980s (Whitty et al. 1997). For example, in 1984, the government made university–school partnership mandatory, stipulated that teacher education programmes should be developed and run in close partnership with schools and, significantly, specified the minimum number of days that pre-service teachers should spend in schools during the PGCE2 programme (DES 1984). In 1989, the Licensed Teacher Scheme (LTS) was introduced; unqualified teachers could be employed by schools as ‘instructors’ and later gain Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)3 via on-the-job training, with the school being responsible for the training arrangements. In 1993, School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) introduced the idea of teacher training being delivered by consortiums of schools operating together and sharing their expertise. Yet despite the LTS and SCITT, the vast majority of initial teacher preparation remained within universities. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a detailed explanation of the reasons for the changes to both schooling and teacher preparation in England, but given that legislation was not based on research evidence and there was little or no consultation of stakeholders, it is fair to conclude that the radical changes to the educational landscape were ideologically driven. During this period of unprecedented reform in initial teacher education (ITE), Circular 9/924 (DfE 1992) addressed three areas: the amount of time spent in schools, the relationship between university and school and Competences (later renamed Standards) that student teachers were required to display in order to be awarded QTS. Teacher education programmes leading to QTS stipulated a minimum of 120 days in schools during a one year-long course. For many universities, this required a major rethinking of course content, with less emphasis on learning theory and more on the necessity of preparing student teachers for ‘survival’ in the classroom. A significant element of Circular 9/92 was the requirement for student teachers to demonstrate a number of competences before being awarded QTS. The competences were far-reaching and prescriptive and, while it is beyond the scope of this chapter to debate in depth the merits of competency-based assessment, it is widely accepted that the stated competences represented a movement away from a focus on the idea of teacher education as a complex and holistic endeavour rooted in intellectual and academic concerns.

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One way in which schools were encouraged to become more involved with teacher education was through the ‘Training Schools’ initiative which, when it was introduced in 2000, was seen as a way of encouraging schools to specialize in professional development and teacher preparation, in addition to their main raison d’être of teaching pupils. The Teaching Schools and Teaching School Alliances which exist today can be seen as a development of this, with a similar focus on groups of schools working together to improve the quality of initial and ongoing teacher professional development.

The good teacher and good teaching Teaching at its best is a highly skilled, dynamic and creative process that involves utilizing a whole range of different types of knowledge and acquired professional expertise. The demands made by society for our education system are not easy for teachers to fulfil: we expect our students to be knowledgeable and to demonstrate this by passing examinations; we expect our students to be equipped with ‘twenty-first century’ skills that go beyond traditional schoolbased learning; we expect our students to be motivated, enthusiastic and engaged in their school-based learning. Yet teaching is often undervalued and underestimated, perhaps because politicians, parents and other professionals do not understand the demands of the classroom, the complexity of the knowledge and skills on which teachers have to draw and the difficulty of developing the level of expertise required to be a successful teacher. Ofsted, when discussing the quality of teaching, uses adjectives such as ‘competent’, ‘effective’ and ‘outstanding’ both to describe individual teachers and to refer to the quality of teaching in particular lessons, schools and groups of schools (Turner-Bissett 2001). But what do ‘competent’, ‘effective’ and ‘outstanding’ mean in relation to a good lesson? Does the lesson need to be relevant and worthwhile? Does the lesson have to be well paced and engaging for students? Does the lesson need to develop students’ subject knowledge and understanding? One would imagine that a good lesson would have all of these qualities, but even if we agree on this, a further question remains about how an observer evaluates the ‘effectiveness’ of a lesson? Should an observer focus on the teacher and what is taught or on the learner and what is learnt? Research evidence (e.g. discussed in Hattie and Yates 2013) suggests that there is a strong relationship between good teaching and good learning. That relationship,

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however, is complex and multifaceted and often underestimated by those seeking to make judgements about teaching and teachers. The DfEE (2000) Hay McBer report into teacher effectiveness identifies three groups of factors that influence pupil progress: teaching skills, professional characteristics and classroom climate. However, while the report acknowledges that ‘competent teachers know their subject’ (DfEE 2000: 8), it makes little reference to the kinds of subject or other specialist knowledge that teachers may need. There is a growing literature that signals the crucial importance of domain specific knowledge in good teaching and learning (e.g. Young and Lambert 2014), not only in relation to teachers’ knowledge of the particular academic subject they may be teaching but also their knowledge of classrooms, learning and learners. Ellis (2007) argues for the importance of taking teachers’ subject knowledge seriously; he sees it as complex and dynamic and avers that, although subject knowledge is important and prerequisite, there is a special category of teacher knowledge that exists between subject knowledge and effective teaching. Ellis’s arguments are a logical development of Shulman’s (1986a,b, 1987), who discusses categories of knowledge that are important for good teaching; pedagogical content knowledge being of special interest – the blending of sound subject knowledge together with an understanding of pedagogy. Although subject to critique (e.g. Sockett 1987 and McEwan and Bull 1991 cited in Ellis 2007 and by Shulman himself (Shulman and Shulman 2004)), Shulman’s concept of pedagogical content knowledge is now part of the educational vernacular. If theory was ‘a dirty word’ in the 1990s (McIntyre 1993), educational research and theorizing has now experienced something of a renaissance, with Hattie’s (2009) meta-study of educational research well received and influential with policymakers. In 2011 the Department for Education financed the Sutton Trust to establish the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) as a new charity to improve the educational attainment of the poorest pupils in English schools (EEF 2015). As part of the EEF’s remit, Coe et al. (2014) produced a report articulating ‘what makes great teaching’; the report reviewed over two hundred pieces of research to identify the elements of teaching with the strongest evidence of improving attainment of pupils. The report specified six factors that contribute to learning gain. The two most significant factors were ‘content knowledge’, that is, teachers with strong knowledge and understanding of their subject make a significant impact on students’ learning and ‘quality of instruction’. ‘Instruction’, an Americanism, includes effective questioning by teachers and their use of assessment for learning. Coe et al. (2014) explain that the other four elements

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of effective teaching evidence a moderate gain in students’ learning. They are: classroom climate, which includes the quality of interaction between teachers and students as well as teacher expectations; classroom management, which includes ‘efficient’ use of lesson time and managing behaviour with clear rules that are consistently enforced; teachers’ beliefs, the reasons why they adopt particular practices and their theories about learning; and professional behaviours which relate to professional development, supporting colleagues and communicating with parents. One way to judge whether teaching is ‘effective’ is by measuring the impact of teaching on students’ learning, but this is difficult to achieve, not least because the relationship between teaching and students’ learning is complex and not fully explained by educational researchers. While attempts to delineate this relationship have been made, it is accepted that they are problematic, partly because all of them involve making judgements about teachers’ performance by measuring students’ educational outcomes. What constitutes good teaching is, therefore, contestable and open to debate. This is important because the question of how ‘good teaching’ is conceptualized is bound to influence how one thinks teachers should be educated or trained. Moore (2004) describes three teacher discourses. One is the media conceptualization of the charismatic or ‘Saviour teacher’ (56) who wins over his or her pupils through inspirational teaching ‘against the odds’. Such teachers are usually ‘outsiders’ who make teaching look easy and natural and by implication they do not need ‘training’ as their subject knowledge, high expectations and enthusiasm apparently suffice. Another discourse is that of the ‘competent craftsperson’ (75). Such a teacher can learn the ‘craft of the classroom’ from an experienced practitioner and his or her competence can be measured against predefined competences or standards. Moore’s third stated discourse is that of the ‘reflective practitioner’ (100). Here the teacher is a ‘professional’ who engages in scholarship and who reflects on his or her own teaching as a way of ongoing self-improvement. So we may ask: Is teaching a craft, a science or an art? If it is a craft, then it is something that can be learnt ‘on the job’ from a master craftsperson – in this case an experienced teacher in school. If it is a science, then it should be studied methodically and meta-studies may uncover the best approaches so that teachers can learn from expert researchers and try to replicate what they have learnt from empirical research in their own classrooms. If we think about teaching as an art, then we are likely to believe that, like a work of art, it can’t

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be reduced to component parts or rationally explained in the way that science may demand. But art is not a free for all either; or rather, it doesn’t need to be. There are rules and theories and boundaries, even though sometimes the best work strays beyond them. Good teaching, surely, has elements of craft, science and art.

Teaching as a professional activity The difficulty of conceptualizing teaching as a bounded activity, and defining what we mean by ‘good teaching’ or a ‘good teacher’, means that it is always going to be difficult for teaching to be perceived as a professional activity with the role and status of other professions. There is also, of course, a difference between professionalism and professionalization, with the former relating mainly to regulation and standardization and the latter to increased autonomy and independence. Hodgson and Spours (2003) argue that, in twenty-first century Britain, the teaching profession is conflicted, contested and confused, partly as a result of the ‘piecemeal, divisive’ (5) nature of education policy since 1988, which has imposed teacher professionalism through increased regulation, standardization and accountability without delivering increased professionalization. Professionalism requires teachers to abide by particular sets of rules and regulations; professionalization would involve them having a central role in determining what these rules and regulations should be and how they should be implemented. English schools are characterized by the preponderance of externally determined accountability measures, including league tables and Ofsted inspections, which teachers have few opportunities to influence. In the early 2000s, increased regulation and control of the teaching profession was introduced through the Teacher Training Agency (later the Teacher Development Agency) and the General Teaching Council, which explicitly aimed ‘to contribute to improving standards of teaching and the quality of learning, and to maintain and improve standards of professional conduct among teachers, in the interests of the public’ (GTC 2004). Teachers, however, did not have full control over these bodies, in contrast with the classical professions in which entry, training, knowledge and conduct are all controlled by members (Davies 2005). In addition, the language of the standards documents was paternalistic, setting out ‘the professional characteristics that a teacher should be expected to maintain’ and reminding teachers of their ‘professional responsibility to be

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engaged in effective, sustained and relevant professional development’ (TDA 2007: 3). This period also saw the introduction of various new alternatives to traditional teacher preparation programmes, including ‘leadership development programmes’ such as Fast-Track teaching, Teach First and Future Leaders, which introduced a particular model of elitism into teacher education, aiming to recruit and train teachers with the potential to rapidly progress to senior leadership roles (CfBT 2009). All of these programmes appeared to share the belief that it is possible to identify, at an early stage of their careers, those with the potential not only to teach but also to be a school leader, reflecting the meritocratic tendency central to the New Labour project5: the underlying assumption that some are inherently more professional than others. This was also reflected in changes to school structures, which left schools with differing levels of scrutiny and oversight in relation to key areas of practice. Those designated as academies were not only exempt from any requirement to adhere to the national curriculum but also exempt from the requirement to employ teachers only with QTS. Hargreaves et al. (2007) argue that changes in the extent to which teachers are seen (and see themselves) as professionals reflect wider changes in the nature of public sector work during the early twenty-first century, with many other occupations experiencing ‘de-professionalization’ and loss of autonomy, partly owing to changes in the nature of work and the introduction of ‘new managerialist techniques’ (Hargreaves et al. 2007: 24). This leads to teachers being given responsibility for the implementation rather than formulation of new policies and strategies, in the process becoming ‘technicians rather than professionals’ (Leaton Gray 2007: 194). In practical terms, this means that teachers more likely to be expected to ‘deliver’ a curriculum rather than design it, to implement an assessment policy rather than to develop it, to be judged by a set of exam results rather than determining the contents of the syllabus. As a result, many teachers feel de-skilled and lacking in autonomy, with low morale linked to changes in policy direction at national and local level which are significant, sudden and often self-contradictory.

Initial Teacher Education and the role of university Widely publicized and acknowledged research suggests that teachers matter (OECD 2005) (and more recently that the quality of teaching matters, Sutton Trust,

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2014). Connell (2009) reasons that ‘this consensus might suggest that governments wanting to improve education would be pouring vast resources into teacher education’ (214). She notes that this hasn’t happened but that in wealthy countries there has actually been an imposition of new regulations and certifications instead within a school culture of national testing and league tables. Her explanation for this state of affairs is in terms of the growth of a market-orientated neo-liberalism that is ‘profoundly suspicious of professionalism’ (217). Within the current English system, some teachers are required to obtain QTS, while others are not; some are involved with curriculum design and others only with ‘delivery’; some are responsible for designing assessment systems, while others must simply implement them. While some attain a level of power and status that would have been unthinkable in a previous generation, others are reduced to ‘functionaries on an education production line’ (Cole 2004: 153) whose main responsibility is to read from a script which someone else has prepared. Within this context, the question of how to design and put into practice programmes of initial teacher education which prepare student teachers for the classroom appropriately and effectively becomes ever more difficult to answer. Brindley (2013) argues that one reason that the future of teacher education in the UK is in a state of flux is because of problems around its core purpose. Although this core purpose appears clear (the development or production of ‘good teachers’), the reality is problematic because there is no common or shared understanding about what this means. Teacher education is, therefore, ‘placed in the unenviable position of deciding whether its future lies in compliance or critique – or compromise’ (Brindley 2013: 394). Determining the answer to this question is imperative for those working in teacher education. If we want teachers to be involved with curriculum design, shaping the curriculum in response to the needs of their students and the context in which they are working, then they will need certain knowledge and skills. If, on the other hand, we want the main role of most teachers to be the delivery in a prescribed way of a predetermined curriculum, then the teacher education that they need will look very different. If we do not want, or need, teachers to interrogate and potentially shape research, government policy and the work of key educational establishments, then they may not need the kind of knowledge and skills which are taught within universities as part of teacher education courses. If, on the other hand, we do want them to be able to do this, we need to think carefully about how we help them acquire this knowledge and these skills and the importance of the role of universities within this process.

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The question of whether or not teachers should, at the beginning of their careers, be encouraged and taught how to question and interrogate current practice in schools is central to the debate about the impact of the School Direct programme. Introduced in 2012, School Direct represents a huge expansion of previous ‘school-led’ programmes such as the GTP6 and SCITTs, which involve initial teacher education being predominantly designed and led by a school rather than a university. Teaching School Alliances and academy chains have been encouraged, and financially incentivized, to introduce School Direct by a government which has claimed that the aim is to improve the quality of teacher education and also the quality and quantity of those coming into the profession. There are essentially two variants of School Direct; one is where student teachers pay tuition fees and are enrolled at a university for a PGCE but, significantly, have to apply directly to schools and are interviewed by them before being considered for a place on the course. Schools were initially asked only to bid for School Direct places if they believed they were going to have a vacancy in a particular subject area and therefore potentially a job for the student teacher after their training year, creating a link between school-based training and employment, though this is no longer a requirement. There is growing evidence, though it is largely anecdotal at present, that one way in which School Direct has changed the landscape is in the way in which student teachers perceive their relationship with the schools where they undertake teaching practice. Although many School Direct student teachers are fee-paying university students with the same rights and responsibilities as other students, it appears that for some there is a difference in the way they perceive their roles because of their relationship with the schools which have recruited them. It is not difficult to imagine that a student teacher might perceive differently a request made by a school to which they have been sent for teaching practice by their university tutor, and the same request made by a school which has recruited and interviewed them and suggested they might be offered a job at the end of the course. If a student teacher, for example, is given a timetable which requires them to teach more than the recommended hours, or to cover lessons for an absent teacher, they may be less likely to question this if they already have a relationship with the school and a sense of responsibility towards it. Many schools offering School Direct choose a different model of teaching practice placements compared with the traditional university model involving two long placements. For School Direct, many students instead spend most of the year at their ‘home’ school and a period of only around six weeks in another school for a contrasting placement. This

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kind of arrangement, it seems, may be more likely to lead to the production of student teachers who are familiar with a particular school and who, if employed in the same school at the end of their training year, may be more able to adjust smoothly to that school environment. But will they be able to teach in another school successfully if, in a few years’ time, they decide to do so? Will they be able to reflect in a critical and informed way on the policies and procedures of their ‘home’ school, helping to improve and develop them? While some may be able to do so, it seems likely that others may learn to comply rather than to critique. The second variant of School Direct is where teachers are employed and paid by the school and learn ‘on the job’ (but with dedicated time in a Partner Higher Education Institution, but much less than a traditional PGCE). This variant is essentially an adaptation of the earlier GTP scheme. As Brown et al. (2016) observe, ‘Teaching is conceived in craft-based, technicist terms strengthened by increasing prescription and performativity measures, which require teachers to present and shape knowledge in particular ways. Within this context, conceptions of the relationship between theory and practice have been progressively replaced by conceptions of practice that integrate situated conceptions of theory responsive to the needs of practice’ (7). There is also an important question about moral and ethical purpose. It is generally accepted that most teachers are driven by an awareness of the impact which education can have on a young person’s life, and feel a sense of responsibility for shaping young people’s future life experiences. As Hargreaves et al point out, ‘Very few teachers enter their profession for its status or image: most become teachers to work with children, to give children a good start in life, and/or to give something back to society’ (2007: 22). This commitment to trying to make things better for young people and society in general is something which has always underpinned the teaching profession. Part 2 of the current English Teachers Standards codifies this by setting out in a series of bullet points the expectations for the kinds of ‘behaviours and attitudes’ which teachers are expected to demonstrate in their ‘personal and professional conduct’ throughout their careers. This part of the Teachers Standards also, however, politicizes the profession by the inclusion of the requirement for teachers to support ‘British values’ (DfE 2015). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore this issue in any detail, we argue that the university offers the ideal ‘space’ for student teachers to reflect on the ethical dimensions of the teaching role in all its complexity. The emergence of formal partnerships between universities and schools since the 1990s had a positive effect of breaking down the artificial division of theory and practice in teacher preparation. Universities had to be explicit about the

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roles and responsibilities of both parties and schools took on an obligation to provide some ‘training’ of student teachers, and the monitoring and overseeing of this enhanced role helped the process of integrating theory with practice. In recent years, the system within which teachers are educated has undergone radical change which has left many working within it destabilized and demoralized. Within this context, those working as teacher educators, and particularly those working within universities, must find a way to operate on a daily basis which makes some kind of sense for them and for the student teachers with whom they are working. At the same time, policy changes in line with the current government’s stated desire to bring about a move towards a ‘school-led’ system mean that teacher educators increasingly feel the need not only to explain their ways of working but, in some cases, to defend and justify their existence. Shifts in the ways in which schools work with universities, driven partly by changes to the allocations and funding system, have resulted in wideranging changes to the location, structure and content of teacher education programmes, with schools increasingly taking on a commissioning role which involves them negotiating with universities about the services they wish to purchase, rather than simply receiving what they are given. Brown et al. (2016) observe the significant change in power in the relationship between school and university and the consequent prioritizing of practical components of learning of how to teach at the expense of theory and reflection. Changes to teacher education systems have been taking place in many other places around the world. It is outside the scope of this chapter to explore in any detail the kind of developments that have happened in other jurisdictions; suffice to say that it is not the same everywhere. In some places, we also find teacher education being adversely affected by the increasing marketization and fragmentation of the system. In others, the professional status and role of teachers has increased. This seems to go hand in hand with an increase in the status of professional qualifications and therefore in the role and importance of initial teacher education.

Principles of a successful Initial Teacher Education Programme If teaching were merely a craft, then an apprentice model of teacher training would be appropriate in the preparation of teachers. But we have argued in this chapter that teaching is a complex activity that has elements of craft, science and art.

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This being the case, we argue that we require a programme of teacher education, for student teachers to understand their classrooms in all their complexity and to understand pupils’ learning so that they can plan and if needed modify their teaching strategy accordingly. For most prospective teachers, we see the PGCE as the preferred route into teaching and such courses should offer conceptual understanding of teaching and learning in addition on drawing on research evidence and the practical application of learning theory. For some prospective teachers, an apprentice model may be appropriate. The problem with the English system as it stands is its complexity and uneven funding and as a result it may lead prospective teachers down an inappropriate route. We now offer six principles that we argue underlie any successful teacher education programme and which must be supported by universities, partner schools and policymakers. First, coherence. The differences between the various existing routes into teaching must be clear and easy to understand. At present there is a great deal of room for confusion, for example, between the School Direct Salaried and Unsalaried routes. Furthermore, the differential charging of fees and the availability of bursaries (or not) leads to inequity, further confusion and frustration. A lack of understanding of the requirements, fees and bursaries of each route leads to difficulties for student teachers and schools and contributes to problems with recruitment. Secondly, stability. For any system to succeed, there needs to be the appropriate balance of stability and change, innovation and conservation. The teacher education system in England has undergone such a sustained period of rapid change that this balance has been lost. This is important for those working both in schools and in universities, who should be encouraged to invest in high-quality provision and staff development rather than trying to keep up with the latest significant policy change. Thirdly, responsiveness. The teacher education system must respond to the needs of key stakeholders within the system, including the changing needs of young people, their parents and future employers. It is essential that we do not have a system within which universities are perceived as existing in an ‘ivory tower’ divorced from what is happening in the real world, but one in which we understand and acknowledge the pressures and demands of the ‘real world’ outside the university walls. Fourthly, critical engagement. It is essential that teachers do not simply accept the system in which they are working but are able to interrogate and challenge the status quo on the basis of their knowledge of theory and practice. We argue that this is one of the key reasons that universities must continue to have a key role in teacher education, in partnership with schools.

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Fifthly, developmental. We need to consider the development of teachers throughout their careers, rather than focusing solely on the initial training year or the NQT7 year in isolation. Teacher education, teacher professional development, teacher learning: these should be things which happen throughout a teacher’s career, rather than just at one particular time. We argue that new entrants into the teaching profession should be qualified at master’s level and existing teachers should be incentivized to complete a master’s-level qualification as part of their ongoing professional development. Finally, research informed. A key question for teacher educators working within universities is how to improve the link between research and practice. Teacher educators have always used research to inform their practice, and most teacher education programmes include at least some element of research training for student teachers. As well as using research to support the ongoing development of teacher education programmes, however, there is now an urgent need for teacher educators to utilize research as a way of providing ‘credible evidence’ of the effectiveness of their practice (Grossman 2008). Grossman argues that there are three kinds of research which need to happen in order for this to succeed: (1) Well-designed and well-executed studies examining the outcomes of different teacher education programmes, using clear, credible procedures for data collection and analysis. (2) Comparative studies teasing out the effects of different programmes, based on characteristics of entrants or the specific effects of particular pedagogical approaches. (3) More ‘programmatic research’, focusing on a critical set of questions that build on their own findings and provide better, clearer answers. Maguire (2014) argues that this kind of research is important because of its potential role in combating what she refers to as the ‘technology of erasure’ (Maguire 2014) by recording and potentially celebrating the work of ‘progressive and reforming teacher educationalists’. Ellis and McNichol (2015), meanwhile, argue that we must ‘rebuild the research programme in teaching and teacher education around theory building, cross-setting intervention research’ (147).

Conclusions Teaching at its best is a highly skilled, dynamic and creative process that involves the utilization of a range of different types of knowledge and acquired professional expertise; so becoming a ‘good’ teacher is not an easy undertaking.

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In addition to technical expertise that can be learnt ‘on the job’, we argue that teachers need to be able to understand how to apply their subject knowledge in a way that makes sense to their pupils; to understand what empirical research can offer them (and what it can’t); understand how they can research their own classrooms to improve their own teaching and to have a sound conceptual framework for understanding educational issues. At a time of increasing fragmentation and marketization, teacher education operates within a contested field which makes the role of teacher educators more complex and difficult to navigate. To succeed and survive in this context, teacher educators working in universities must: ●●

●●

●●

Continue to engage with schools and teachers, contributing to the development of a research-informed and research active profession, and developing even stronger, more constructive relationships with schools. Design, undertake and disseminate research which provides credible evidence of the effectiveness of their approaches to teacher education. Continue to challenge the ‘erasure’ of contributions made by progressive and reforming teacher educators; continue to emphasize the extent to which teacher education has always been rooted in schools.

Notes 1 The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skill (Ofsted) is a non-ministerial department of the UK government responsible for regulating and inspecting education, care and skills services. 2 The Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) is the most common route into teaching in England; normally taught at master’s level (since 2007), it is a year-long programme for graduates. 3 Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) is the basic requirement for qualification as a teacher in England. Until 2012 it was a requirement for all teachers in statemaintained schools; since that time academies have been exempt from this requirement. 4 Circulars are official government documents that communicate new requirements; 9/92 signifies the issue date: September 1992. 5 ‘New Labour’ refers to the government elected in 1997 under Prime Minister Tony Blair, during which the party was presented as a reformed entity which had

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rejected some of the left-wing principles which had previously characterized the party and which had endorsed market economics. 6 The Graduate Teacher Programme allowed graduates to work as unqualified teachers and train ‘on the job’ to gain QTS. 7 Newly qualified teachers undergo a year’s probation before their QTS is ratified.

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10

Reform as a State of Exception Tom Are Trippestad, Anja Swennen and Tobias Werler

Through the chapters, we have identified global as well as national crisis narratives as being driving forces in recent struggles of reform and governance of teacher education. We have identified political responses in different countries and analysed how these political reactions and actions represent new conditions, dilemmas and struggles for teacher education institutions, their arrangements, work and identity. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his book The State of Exception (2005) makes an influential argument regarding modern governance. On the basis of his legal philosophy he shows how political reception or creation of crisis – real or imagined – give governments power to expand their rights over the phenomena on which the crisis is built or from which it is derived. Sovereignty or political power lies in the ability to proclaim a state of exception on the basis of a certain ‘crisis’. A state of exception gives sovereigns power to transcend current law or arrangements in the name of the public good. Through proclaiming and addressing a state of exception, governments gain and expand power and authority in a non-democratic way beyond the arrangements made in the past. Former positions, arrangements and rights can be rejected or excluded. In governing a state of exception, some knowledge becomes more important and true for governments than others do. Some interests are valued over others. This double-faced drive of obtaining and producing the ‘right’ knowledge and at the same time ignoring or not valuing other forms of knowledge makes powerful distinctions – with the effect of marginalizing some interest groups while promoting others. Proclaiming and addressing a state of exception may restructure and change the power relations in institutional and social arrangements in a fundamental way. Agamben’s work resonates with insights gained through many of the different chapters. The concept of struggle used in this book bears resemblance to the war-

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like state of affairs in teacher education. Agamben’s argument that governments create a state of exception provides us with a useful metaphor to understand recent reforms and helps us to understand the expanding political power or jurisdiction over teacher education. Reforms resemble a state of exception being declared because of certain ‘crisis’ that requires politically generated extraordinary action. Several chapters show, in particular, how narratives of economic emergencies are used politically to proclaim reforms whether they are motivated by competition, developing a skilled work force, national identity, developing twenty-first-century abilities, dealing with poverty, innovation or making a closer relation with investment and learning outcomes through efficiency discourses. Economic crises of some sort are global narratives underlying teacher education reform in many countries. These crises may be real crisis or imagined, as analysed by Maguire and George in their chapter. Some are based on the political use of dystopias, as analysed by Trippestad in his chapter; of a rhetoric trying to persuade us though the threat of future economic or social crisis if immediate action in education is not taken. Decades of these economic emergencies and the vital function that education and teacher education is given in the economic narrative have produced waves of reforms affecting the work of teacher education substantially, both putting pressure on teacher educators and giving them new forms of support. The continuous crisis constructs have become the basis of policies constantly declaring a state of exception. The state of exception expands the need of governance and demands reform. These rhetorical mechanisms underlie an increasing political primacy over education and teacher education. As analysed in the chapter by Green, Reid and Brennan, this policy primacy seems to be a global phenomenon. The rhetorical use of crisis results in a political hyper activism, a speed policymaking and a chaotic state of contemporary policymaking. The political use of economic, moral and social crises situates governance and reforms in superior rational, moral and social positions. On the basis of economic and social crisis, education becomes problematized of not being just, of not distributing knowledge or opportunity equally, of not succeeding with social mobility or addressing vital economic needs such as having a competent work force. The education system and its actors become constructed as causes of these crises or as barriers solving them competently. Governance based on a state of exception therefore puts pressure on former arrangements and values new or different knowledge that may challenge former influences and promote new interests. From a multitude of crisis

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constructs imposed on teachers’ education, new stakeholders and educational policymakers in the countries explored have gained a more powerful, privileged and intrusive position than before. This is, in part, being described as a policy primacy in reforming teacher education by Green, Reid and Brennan. The chapter by Maguire and George demonstrates how, in England, policy itself has come to define the perceived problems in order to gain a tactical or strategic space for implementing political and ideological solution at the cost of former arrangements and routes. The neo-liberal policy construction of crisis are analysed, demonstrating new stakeholders’ influences and a political expansion of power though former bureaucratic structures and yet new marketization mechanisms. Trippestad analyses how politicians have become positioned in superior epistemological roles in reforms and how professional competence and motives have come to be questioned. Werler analyses how new sciences gain influence at the expense of the primacy of pedagogy in former arrangements. Very seldomly there seems to be dramatic controversy between different political parties over reforms in teacher education. Rather it seems that the most dramatic conflict lines have emerged between politics and profession (Trippestad and Roos 2015), between politics and its former arrangements and institutions. Politics has gained privileges and sovereignty together with its increasing power to define crisis, gain emergency powers, promote a state of exceptions and then initiate reforms. These challenge the former arrangements and previous professional privileges in improving and developing teacher education. From the chapters we also learn that politicians are rarely held accountable for the results of former reforms. The state of exception gives politicians the privileged position of being outside the problem, of having powers to define core problems and being positioned in the primary role for solving the problem. The trend of controversy between policy and profession seems common in most countries explored. Different chapters of this book show, through different examples, how governments have expanded their power and authority at the expense of former professional power. Swennen and Volman demonstrate in their chapter how professional autonomy and authority is under pressure by government in the Netherlands. The government challenges the value of former understandings of autonomy and expands its authority over the curriculum and content of teacher education. An exception – as Dickinson and Silvennoinen show – is Finland where the space for political crisis constructs may be more limited due its perceived success and high international ranking often explained by their skilled and academic teacher educators with high status.

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The ‘crisis’ constructs coming out of the technique of governing though comparison internationally are good examples of how the power relation between policymakers and professions has changed substantially. International comparison provided national ‘shocks’ on how students performed, challenging the status, autonomy and expertise of teachers and teacher educators. In order to cope with the problem, policymakers value new and other forms of knowledge, as analysed by Werler, supplanting primacy of pedagogy with learning sciences as a new and preferred knowledge. Teachers, teacher educators and schools were defined in the peculiar space of both being the illness and cure – in need of reforms as deficits yet being the key instrument on which reform and governance success depended. The causal relationship between learning outcomes, the efficiency of schools, teachers and the qualities of teacher education has given way to a range of different reforms making professional competence desired and yet the object of governance at the same time. Although facing many of the same ‘crisis’ constructs internationally, the structure, arrangements and contents of teacher education in the countries that are covered differ distinctly from each other. Teacher education is strongly rooted in the economic, social and cultural history of countries (Snoek, Swennen and Van der Klink 2011). This fact challenges globally travelling governance and reform ideas which often give way to overconfident, simplistic and reductionist concepts of reforming. As analysed by Ávalos, the travelling reform ideology of learning outcomes is seen as a measure to avert teacher education emergencies in Southern American countries. Although the governments face different historical and economic circumstance in the South American countries investigated, they all introduced learning outcome descriptors to govern their teacher education. In some countries, standardized curricula, increased accountability of teachers, accreditation of teacher education institutes and the increased role of inspections are typical traits of the sphere of political sovereignty expanding at the cost of professional influence. Following Brant and Vincent, Dickinson and Silvennoinen as well as Maguire and George, England has become an extreme example for politically steered de-academization of teacher education, bringing it under the rule of a certain political practice – ideology. The complete opposite to England seems to be Norway, where a comprehensive strategy of implementing a scientific mechanism on and within teacher education has occurred, making teacher education more academic, longer and more research based. These mechanisms also challenge professional identities and competencies in a radical

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way. In the South African example, given by Robinson, teacher education is also being positioned under Higher Education, dealing with the challenging task of healing society after apartheid. In this hybrid space teacher educators must balance the dilemma between professional commitment to the world ‘out there’ and institutional arrangements demanding more academic work and research. Agamben (2005: 10–11) suggests an important strategy for those who come under policies using states of emergencies, setting law or former arrangements aside. It legitimizes active resistance if no other remedies are possible. The controversy between policy and profession seems unproductive and subversive even to policies’ own claim or aims of solving challenging circumstance. A parallel to the situation would be generals trying to win struggles through a strategy of fighting their own soldiers. The paradoxical situation of being positioned as both problem and solution, yet not being heard or having sufficient influence gives way to a challenging situation of being a teacher educator. Teacher educators seem to lack the will to guide teacher education in the desired direction and transform it in accordance with the constructs of ‘good’ teaching, as analysed by Brant and Vincent in their chapter. The political construction of good teaching seems to be in a conflicting and game-changing struggle with the concept of the good teacher that exists within teacher education and the teaching profession. According to Abbott (1988) struggles for and within professions shape the professions. As analysed, the struggles over teacher education by the various stakeholders are important as they shape fundamental premises of teacher education. Inspired by Agamben, we argue that teacher educators must use their right to resist when policies supplant valued, experienced and research-based professional knowledge formed by ‘out there’ problems experienced every day, which bear imperatives of being addressed as practice, in practice in a socially encompassed room. Teacher educators should not cover a monolithic canon of knowledge and practice or become scripted actors by authors of government or outside sciences. To solve the challenging task of educating teachers to educate their pupils to deal with the shifts and drifts in a fast-changing world, teacher education must be able to generate productive knowledge for unique and unrepeatable situations that arise in teaching. Today, teachers and teacher educators as practitioners are deeply affected by demanding situations of local, national and global character (Trippestad 2016), making the practice and institutions of practice complex. It is counterproductive to govern this

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complexity in simplistic ways. Professional knowledge, sufficient space for professional judgement and action and initiative towards external, ‘out there’ problems must be part of reform. Successful transformation of teacher education will not happen without the active involvement and resistance of the practitioners (teacher educators, teachers and student teachers). While in most countries a system of professional development of teachers is often part of the reform strategy, teacher educators are an absent group in teacher education reforms. When we compare the magnitude of the reforms of teacher education globally and nationally, it is difficult to understand why scant attention is paid to teacher educators. One important reason may be that teacher educators are not regarded as a separate professional group in most countries, and their numbers are few compared to teachers. It is, therefore, suggested that governments do not think about a provision that aims at improving teacher education by strengthening individual teacher educators and the profession of teacher educators at large. As argued by Ellis and McNicholl in Transforming Teacher Education (2015: 151), paying attention to what teacher educators do and how they work with student teachers matters. It reveals the vision and transformation of education as a discipline and the agency that is available to the profession. Giving more attention and voice to teacher educators, however, should not mean an uninformed withdrawal to former power or professional monopoly. Ellis and McNicholl (2015) suggest three courses of progressive action. Teacher educators must more fully enter into the public discourse. They must create conditions for positive change by making their knowledge known through powerful arguments in the public sphere. Oversimplistic concepts must be challenged by the design of professional learning around complex understandings of practice. Teacher education must rebuild research programmes, engaging with relevant theory building and cross-setting intervention research that connects and engages with the outside world and the complexity in relations on which a good teacher education is positioned and dependent (Ellis and McNicholl 2015: 141–50). These arguments bring academic, professional and practical knowledge together as necessary elements in empowering teacher educators to transform teacher education. Sufficient attention to research in teacher education will enable teacher educators to form arguments critically and address political agendas and professional practices with authority. The creation and promotion of complex understandings of teaching derived from both research and practice

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should strengthen their relation and thereby promote a more influential voice of practices, schools and teachers in public discourse. Public participation must challenge the political climate, the crisis constructs and the perspective and language of reform when these become counterproductive or a threat to vital educational aims of a just and open society.

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Index Abbott, A.  119, 189 accountability conversations 109 politics of  109–10 Agamben, Giorgio  185, 189 Alexander, R.  131 aporia 52 Argentina 150 characteristics of  149 education system organization in  150 income per capita in  150 indigenous populations in  150 National Institute of Teacher Education 159 outcome-oriented teacher education system in  15 performance in TERCE evaluation 152 scores in PISA 2012 of  151 systems of quality assurance in  163 teacher education structure modification in  156 teacher preparation institutions in  153 ARK chain of schools  61 Armstrong, P.  104 Association of Higher Education Institutions 120 Australia government policy in  54 performance on international PISA results 45 professional self-regulation in  45 teacher education reform in  42–7 autonomy reasons for the erosion of  14 of teacher educators  116–19 Bacchi, C.  58, 70 Ball, S. J.  41, 62 Bates, R.  44 Bergen University College, Bergen, Norway 4

BI 26 Biesta, G.  42–3, 52–5 Bildung 127 Bourdieu, P.  49–50 Brindley, S.  176 Britzman, D. P.  52 Brodie, K.  109 Brown, T.  11, 178, 179 Cameron, David  59 Carlgren, I.  46 Chetty, R.  134 Chile  15, 148–59, 161–6 Clarke, M.  40, 42 Clegg, Nick  59 Cochran-Smith, M.  109 Colombia  150, 152–9 accreditation of teacher education programmes in  162 characteristics of  149 Hispanic culture and  148 indigenous populations in  150 mean scores in PISA 2012 of  151 National Council of Accreditation  162 outcome-oriented teacher education system in  15 performance in the TERCE evaluation 151 schooling in  150 Command Humanism  22 Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO) 133 Connell, R.  44–5, 176 consumer, of new forms of teacher education 64 curriculum, improving via standards setting and competitive funding 161–2 Derrida, Jacques  52 Devos, C.  45 Drucker, P. F.  17

Index Durkheim, Émile  20 Dutch Education Council  120, 126 Dutch-Flemish Accreditation Commission  120, 127 Dutch Inspectorate  127 Dutch National Curriculum Institution 120 The Dutch National Testing Institution 120 EAL. See English as an Additional Language (EAL) Ecuador 150 Educating Teachers in Schools (ETiS) 124–5 education, improving the quality of  99–100 Education 2020  30 Educational Excellence Everywhere 76 Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) 172 education reforms critical factors of utopian social engineering in  17–36 management of objectives as a master idea of  17–18 problems as solutions  33–6 solving problems, not chasing visions 34–5 time and the reform assembly line 32–3 EEF. See Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Ellis, V.  5, 172, 181, 190 England alternative providers and unexpected outcomes 61–4 consumer of new forms of teacher education 64 Department for Education (DfE)  62 extrinsic motivators for choice  65–6 good teacher and good teaching  171–4 initial teacher education and the role of university 175–9 intrinsic rationale for pathway choice 66–8 ‘locating’ the policy problem  72–3 market forces  58–60 principles of a successful initial teacher education programme  179–81

219

professional preparation in times of change 169–82 reforming 57–73 secondary initial teacher education in 75–97 ‘taken for grantedness’ of reforming 58–64 teaching as a professional activity 174–5 English as an Additional Language (EAL) 84 entrepreneurialism 103 European Bologna Process  14 European Higher Education Area  131 European Qualifications Framework  141 European Union  43, 131, 133 extrinsic motivators for choice  65–6 Fast-Track teaching  175 Finland 79–80 academic status of teacher education in 76 England and  82 secondary initial teacher education in 75–97 teacher autonomy in  76, 77 university-led model in  76 Finnish Teacher Training Schools (FTTS) 80 FINNUT 30 Foucault, M.  57–60, 69, 72, 76 Fraser, J. W.  107 Fraser, N.  42–3 Freidson, Eliot L.  116, 136 Freud, Sigmund  52 FTTS. See Finnish Teacher Training Schools (FTTS) Future Leaders  175 General Teaching Council  174 GERM. See Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) German Science of Education (Erziehungswissenschaft) 132 Gieryn, T. F.  138 Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) 8 globalization  10, 22, 42, 44 ‘good teacher’  171–4 struggle for  15–16

220

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good teaching  171–4 Gove, Michael  61 Handelshøyskolen 26 Hansen, D. T.  137 Hargreaves, A.  122, 175 Haugen, T. O.  132 Haunshek, E. A.  134 Helsinki University, Finland exit survey 85–6 Helsinki University context  81–2 Hernes, Gudmund  20, 23 Hestbeck, J. B.  132 Higher Education Institutions (HIEs) 122–4 higher education struggle of teacher educators in 12–14 Higher Vocational Education  122 Higher Vocational Education Institutions 120. See also Hochschuler; hogescholen; høgskoler Hochschuler 120. See also Higher Vocational Education Institutions Hodgson, P.  174 hogescholen 120. See also Higher Vocational Education Institutions høgskoler 120. See also Higher Vocational Education Institutions holism, political  23–7 homo economicus 24 Hulme, M.  68 Hursh, D.  60 IEA. See International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) The Importance of Teaching 59 initial teacher education (ITE)  57 principles of  179–81 and role of university  175–9 institutionalization of teacher education programmes 156–7 Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Education and Development in South Africa 110 Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa 103

International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)  7 interviews, semi-structured  86–95 intrinsic rationale for pathway choice  66–8 irrationalism, rational  28–9 Junemann, C.  62 kairos persuasion and  18 a rhetorical perspective  18 Kemmis, S.  48, 52, 112 Khronos, timing, rhythm and order of reform 32–3 Kliebard, H. M.  118 knowledge solidary line  22 Latin American Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE) 148 leadership construction of  24–6 problems of  24–6 learning sciences dissolution of national knowledge traditions 142–3 replacing pedagogy  139–42 Licensed Teacher Scheme (LTS)  170 management by objectives (MBO)  8, 10, 17 as a master idea of reform  17–18 managerialism 103 Mancebo, E.  160 marketization 103 Marx, Karl  20, 22 mass schooling  42 ‘master ideas’  4–5, 17–18, 144 McNicholl, J.  5, 190 middle leaders, dilemma of  26–7 Miller, P.  43 Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications 102 monopoly defined 115 of teacher educators  116–19 Moon, B.  43 Moore, A.  16, 173 Morris, Estelle  63

Index NAFOL. See The Norwegian National Research School in Teacher Education (NAFOL) National Graduate School in Educational Research (NATED)  31 A Nation at Risk (Gardner)  7 neo-liberalism 44 Netherlands compulsory content and knowledge tests in teacher education  126–7 educating teachers in partnerships 124–6 monopoly and autonomy of teacher educators 116–19 struggle between primary teacher education and Higher Education Institutions (HIEs)  122–4 struggle between teacher education institutes and schools  124–6 struggles about the profession of teacher educators (1990–2010)  122–7 teacher education in  119–22 teacher educators’ struggles over monopoly and autonomy  115–29 New Public Management  8 NHO. See Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO) Nicolini, D.  49 Normal Lyceum of Helsinki  81 Normal Schools  119 Norway  3–4, 10–11, 19–32, 131–9 analysing conceptual changes  138 changing reality by documents  140–1 engaging with reality  141–2 national knowledge traditions  142–3 pedagogical authority and teacher education 135–8 and pedagogikk 131–3 productivity and teacher education 133–5 Productivity Commission  134 Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (Nokut)  133 The Norwegian National Research School in Teacher Education (NAFOL)  30–1 Oakeshott, M.  137 OECD. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

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Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted)  60, 75, 77, 82, 169, 171, 174, 182 n.1 On Organization and Governance of the Educational Sector 18 The Open Society and its Enemies (Popper)  10, 19 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)  7, 14, 20, 43 participant democracy  35 pedagogical authority  136–7 and teacher education  135–8 pedagogikk 131–3 pedagogy changing reality by documents  140–1 lost in translation  143–5 replacing 139–42 in teacher education  143–5 Perú 150–4 PGCE. See Post Graduate Certification in Education (PGCE) Phelan, A.  40, 42 phronesis 52 Piazza, P.  109, 112 piecemeal social engineering  10, 33, 34 advantages of  35–6 experience and  35 historical criticism of  35 PISA 2011 test  148 Pitzer, H.  70 policy reform in teacher education  100–1 political holism  23–27 construction of leadership and its problems 24–6 dilemma of middle leaders  26–7 public and its problems  24 political-scientific governing regimes 27–9 dictator’s successor, problem with  27 rational irrationalism  28–9 reinforced dogmatism  28–9 Robinson Crusoe syndrome  28 scapegoating 28–9 wholeness, critique and change of circumstance 27–8 politics of accountability  109–10 Popkewitz, T. S.  41, 42 Popper, Karl  10, 19–36

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Post Graduate Certification in Education (PGCE) 65 postmodernism 23 Power, C.  109 practical wisdom  52 practice-as-institution, notion of  50 PRAKUT. See Praxis in Education (PRAKUT) Praxis in Education (PRAKUT)  30 primary teacher education, and HIEs 122–4 Primary Teacher Education Institute  123 productivity and teacher education  133–5 Productivity Commission, Norway  134 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)  2, 8, 29, 133 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)  8 Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)  170 rational irrationalism  28–9 reform as a state of exception  185–91 reinforced dogmatism  28–9 representationalism 49 Researchers in Schools  61 Richardson, P. W  45 Robinson Crusoe syndrome  28 Rolf, Bertil  35 Rose, Nikolas  41, 43 Sahlberg, P.  68 scapegoating 28–9 Schatzki, T. R.  48 School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT)  76–7, 170 School Direct  11, 63, 65–7, 70–1, 76–8, 177–80 schools English 12 Finnish Teacher Training Schools (FTTS) 80 positioning within an ITE marketplace 63 teacher education institutes and  124–6 teacher training  12, 76–7 serving economically and socially disadvantaged communities  45

science, as a method and the need for a public character  33–4 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education  45, 63 SCITT. See School Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) secondary initial teacher education comparing England and Finland  82 in England  75–97 England context  77–8 in Finland  75–97 Finland context  79–80 Helsinki University, Finland exit survey 85–6 Helsinki University context  81–2 material and method  82–4 models of  82 semi-structured interviews  86–95 Sheffield Hallam University, England exit survey  84–5 Sheffield Hallam University context 78–9 Second World War  117 semi-structured interviews  86–95 Helsinki University, Finland  86–95 Sheffield Hallam University, England  86–91, 93–4 Shalem, Y.  109 Sheffield Hallam University, England exit survey 84–5 Sheffield Hallam University context 78–9 Shulman, L. S.  172 Singh, M.  107, 110 social justice in South Africa  107–9 teacher educators working for  99–113 Sørhaug, Tian  2 South Africa conceptual considerations  107–12 policy reform in teacher education 100–1 politics of accountability  109–10 professional and academic expectations 104–5 social justice  107–9 socioinstitutional factors  105–7 strategic interventions  110–12

Index teacher education qualifications framework 101–3 teacher educators working for social justice 99–113 towards improving the quality of education 99–100 South America critical situations recognized as problem areas in the selected countries 155–63 improving the curriculum via standards setting and competitive funding 161–62 institutionalization of teacher education programmes 156–7 intake quality of teacher candidates 157–8 national educational contexts and school achievement  148–52 overview 147–8 quality assurance  162–3 teacher education curricula and its quality 158–60 teachers and their preparation  152–5 TERCE study  152–5 Spours, K.  174 Spranger, E.  15 The State of Exception (Agamben)  185 strategic interventions, South Africa, 110–12 The struggle for the American curriculum (Kliebard) 118 The Teacher, the Role, and the Education 30 teacher candidates, intake quality of 157–8 teacher education compulsory content and knowledge tests in  126–7 consumer of new forms of  64 institutionalization of  156–7 pedagogical authority and  135–8 pedagogy in  143–5 policy reform in  100–1 as a problem  8–9 productivity and  133–5 purpose of  145 reconfiguring authority in  131–45 research-based teacher role  30–1

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science expansion and disciplinary specialization in  29–32 science race in  31–2 struggle for  40–2 struggle for the ‘good teacher’  15–16 waves of struggle within  5–6 teacher education curricula quality of  158–60 weaknesses in  147 teacher education institutes in Argentina  156 private 158 and schools  124–6 teacher education qualifications framework 101–3 teacher education reforms Australian perspective  42–7 first and second wave of  6–8 global 42–7 primacy of practice  47–53 ready to teach, or managing the soul 53–5 struggle with a primacy of policy 9–11 struggle with practice policies  11–12 third wave  8–9 teacher educators autonomy of  116–19 monopoly of  116–19 struggle of, in higher education  12–14 struggles about the profession of 122–7 struggle with learning outcomes  14–15 The Teacher Promotion: Teaming up for the Knowledge School 31 The teacher role seen from the position of the teachers 26 teachers educating, in partnerships  124–6 good 171–4 professionalism 174 and their preparation  152–5 Teachers Colleges  119 Teachers College to Pedagogical Academy 122 Teach First  11, 61–2, 76–7, 79, 175 ‘Teach for All’ movement  47

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Teach for America  62 teaching good 171–4 as a professional activity  174–5 Teaching School Alliances  177 ‘10voordeleraar (10fortheteacher)’  127 Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Studies (TERCE)  150, 152–5 totalitarian economical systems  2 Transforming Teacher Education (Ellis and McNicholl) 190 Trends in International and Mathematical Science Study (TIMSS)  2, 8 Tröhler, D.  7 Troops to Teachers  61 UNESCO Latin American Regional Office of 150 Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE)  15 Universidad de La Republica 157 Universities of Applied Sciences  123 university(ies), initial teacher education and role of  175–9

Uruguay  150, 160, 163, 166 government vigilance in  165 National System of Teacher Education 156 teacher education curricula in  164 Utopian social engineering  10 utopian social engineering  19 critical factors in education reforms 17–36 U – topos arrested state  20–1 construction of crisis  22–3 making of a visionary position  18–23 visions as erasers  21–2 Viikki Teacher Training School  81 Volckmar, Nina  20 Watt, H. M. G.  45 Weber, Max  20 Wilkins, C.  58, 63 With Knowledge and Will  20, 23 Wood, D.  58 World Bank  7, 8, 43 Zeichner, Ken  11, 41

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