Externally driven higher education reform: Whither academic formation and professional responsibility?
Author(s):
Ciaran Sugrue (presenting / submitting) Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke (presenting)
Conference:
ECER 2015
Network:
22. Research in Higher Education
Format:
Paper

Session Information

22 SES 07 D, Higher Education Reforms

Paper Session

Time:
2015-09-09
17:15-18:45
Room:
340. [Main]
Chair:
Jaakko Kauko

Contribution

It has been argued that EU Higher Education policies are increasingly challenging higher education institutions to develop study programmes that ‘produce’ ‘ready to go’ graduates prepared for the needs of the economy  (Council of the European Union 2011:2) ). This is evident in professional programmes where there is an expectation that educators integrate more real work experiences. In teacher education for example, there is an increasing global political interest in expanding practice and arrangements such as ‘school placement’, frequently without the allocation of additional resources(Zeichner, 2012). In this paper we critically analyse the policy shift from informal relationships  of ‘goodwill’ to a formal partnership between schools and universities regarding placement and its positioning within Initial Teacher Education (ITE). We use the case of ITE in Ireland to indicate how an externally prescribed policy on ‘school placement’ without the allocation of additional resources impacts on teacher educators’ whose responsibility it is to  re-conceputalise and implement these externally decreed policy reforms.  These concerns are considered  a ‘wake up’ call that challenges Higher Education in general. Research questions are:

  • What are the policy intentions embedded in key policy documents in articulating a shift from ‘teaching practice’ to ‘school placement’ as an approach to initial teacher education reform?
  • How have key teacher educators in seven institutions engaged with these new expectations prescribed by the Teaching Council?
  •  What lessons may be extrapolated from these experiences with more general import for HE?

 

Conceptually, we identify a tension between the logics of professional ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’ as a consequence of what has become established new public management (NPM) policy orthodoxies (Solbrekke &Englund 2011). We argue that while accountability is the ‘mantra’ of  NPM embedded in current HE governance, ‘responsibility’ resonates more with the traditional governance  of higher education programmes (Solbrekke & Sugrue 2014). While dictionary definitions of responsibility’ include:  trustworthiness, capacity, dependability, reliability, judgment and choice, ‘accountability’ is associated with terms such as  answerability, blame, liability and obligation . Such externally determined regimes of control introduce a new logic and oblige professionals, including  teacher educators, to adhere to, and be accountable against prescriptive policy standards of quality and to make their work as explicit and transparent as possible. In the context of higher education in Europe this is typically done through soft laws (Karseth & Solbrekke 2010). The deployment of “soft power” thus “getting the outcomes one wants by attracting others rather than manipulating their material incentives” (Nye, 2008, p. 29). Use of soft power is “the ability to shape the preferences of others to want what you want” (Nye, 2008, p. 29); a perspective closely resonant with the notion of ‘Performativity’ in order to account for results…..whereby “the new performative worker is a promiscuous self, an enterprising self, with a passion for excellence”  thus “for some, … an opportunity to make a success of themselves” while “for others it portends inner conflicts, inauthenticity and resistance” (Ball, 2003, p. 215).

 By comparison, exercising ‘responsibility,’ relies on professionals’ ability to deploy discretionary specialization (Freidson, 2001) or wise action (phronesis) (Green, 2011) imbued with consideration of what it means to serve the public (Sullivan 2005). It includes the cultivation of values and dispositions such as integrity, an ethic of care, courage and commitment. The distinction between the two concepts is deployed in order to understand the tensions teacher educators struggle with while coping with recently prescribed ‘placement’ requirements in ITE, as part of a wider ongoing reform agenda and external  accreditation of ITE. In such tension filled circumstances, are teacher educators professionally compromised, and what are the possible implications for higher education in general?

Method

We applied an abductive mode of inquiry inspired by what Alvesson and Sköldberg (2001) describe as “reflexive interpretation” (pp. 247-257); a multilayered analysis, moving between theory, analytical concepts and the narratives emerging from documents and interviews. In order to grasp the ideas underpinning the new policy reforms, we have undertaken a critical analysis of key policy documents that have been produced by the Teaching Council since its establishment in 2006. The Teaching Council consists of 37 members with legislative power to control the accreditation of initial teacher education –thus also play a most influential role when it comes to formation of new practices in higher education institutions. A core document in the context of Irish ITE is the culminating document on ‘school placement’ that completes a series of reforms and prescriptions for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programme providers (Council., 2013). In addition to the systematic document analysis interviews with seven ITE educators in as many institutions who had responsibility for programme accreditation with the Teaching Council were completed between November – December 2011 and 2012. Each recorded interview was 60 to 90 minutes, and all were subsequently transcribed verbatim. When the placement guidelines were finalised and published by the Teaching Council in 2013, we subsequently made contact with all of our original interviewees by email and requested that they address in an open-ended manner, 5 questions we posted to each regarding their ‘interpretations’ of the placement document. This was considered necessary to generate additional data to those already available in the interviews. While placement was a major consideration in the re-accredition of existing ITE programmes, this latest policy shift was more prescriptive than previously, thus a new threshold was crossed in terms of relationships between the Teaching Council and Higher Education Providers. All of the interviews were collaboratively conducted by both researchers. This approach facilitated an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspective when both completing the interviews as well as when undertaking data coding and analysis. The responses to our questions, received electronically, were also shared, coded individually, while subsequently arriving at agreed codes and interpretation of evidence from an insider-outsider perspective.

Expected Outcomes

5.4. Analysis will show that several tensions emerge when teacher educators are expected to implement the new school placement reform. There are important consequences for behaving in a professionally responsible manner when increasing external prescriptive accountability measures are imposed on professionals, particularly in the absence of adequate resource allocation. These tensions have longer terms implications for Higher Education institutions. For example, when soft power becomes hard, as accountability measures take their toll, they are likely to give way to ‘survival’-- “an extreme form of adaptation in beleaguered situations” (Ibid., p. 64). , Thus, where initially key actors cope creatively with competing and conflicting demands, as a means of dealing with the “new architecture of regulation based on interlocking relationships between disparate sites in and beyond the state”, the reality is that all of our informant’s programmes have been accredited suggesting that they have all rendered themselves ‘auditable’ (Power, 1999). We will argue that, over time, the deftness necessary to re-produce the appropriate response for the right audience has potential to become an end in itself—whereby deftness becomes depthlessness such that “today man believes there is nothing in him, so he accepts anything, even if he knows it to be bad, in order to find himself at one with others” (Milosz, 1953/1980, p. 81) (Italics in original). If the ‘preconditions’ for placement partnerships do not exist (including appropriate resource allocation), our thesis is that being compromised, the lot of teacher educators today, is already a challenge to the entire HE sector. As Collini (2012, p. 95) suggests, in such circumstances , “ quite soon only the activities which seem to deliver in those terms will be judged worthy of support” (Collini, 2012, p. 95).

References

Ball, S. (2012). Global Education Inc. New Policy Networks and The Neo-Liberal Imaginary. Abingdon: Routledge. Collini, S. (2012). What Are Universities For? London: Penguin. Couldry, N. (2010/2012). Why Voice Matters Culture and Politics afer NeoLiberalism. Thousand Oaks Sage. Furlong, J. (2013). Education- An Anatomy Of The Discipline Rescuing the university project? . Abingdon: Routledge. Green, J. (2011). Education, Professionalism and the Quest for Accountability Hitting the Target but MIssing the Point London & New York Routledge. Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the Knowledge Society. Buckingham: Open University Press. Hood, C. (1991). A Public Managment for All Seasons. Public Administration 69(Spring), 3-19. Lawn, M., & Grek, S. (2012). Europeanizing Education governing a new policy space Oxford Symposium Books. Maykut, P., & Morehouse, R. (1994). Beginning Qualitative Research A Philosophical and Practical Guide. London & Washington: The Falmer Press. Milosz, C. (1953/1980). The Captive Mind (Translated from the Polish by Jane Zielonko). London Penguin Books. Nye, J. S. (2008). The Power To Lead. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. OECD (2010). PISA 2009 Results: What Students Know and Can Do – Student Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science Paris: OECD. Solbrekke, T. D., & Sugrue, C. (2011). Professional Responsibility- Back to the Future. In T. Dyrdal Solbrekke & C. Sugrue (Eds.), Professional Responsibility: New Horizons of Praxis (pp. 10-28). London & New York: Routledge. Solbrekke, T. D., & Sugrue, C. (2014). Professional accreditation of initial teacher education programmes: Teacher Educators' strategies-- between 'accountability' and 'professional responsibility'? Teachers and Teacher Education 37, 11-20. Teaching Council. (2011a). Initial Teacher Education: Criteria and Guidelines for Programme Providers. Maynooth: Teaching Council. Teaching Council. (2011b). Initial Teacher Education: Criteria and Guidelines for Programme Providers (in accordance with Section 38 of the Teaching Council Act, 2001) Maynooth Teaching Council Teaching Council. (2011c). Initial Teacher Education: Pro Forma for the submission of existing programmes for review and professional accreditation by the Teaching Council Maynooth: Teaching Council Teaching Council. (2011d). Initial Teacher Education: Strategies for The Review and Professional Accreditation of Existing Programmes Maynooth: Teaching Council. Teaching Council. (2011e). Initial Teacher Education: Strategy for the Review and Professional Accreditation of Existing Programmes Maynooth Teaching Council Teaching Council. (2011f). Policy on the Continuum of Teacher Education Maynooth Teaching Council . Teaching Council. (2013). Guidelines on School Placement. Maynooth Teaching Council Zeichner, K. (2012). The Turn Once Again Toward Practice-Based Teacher Education. JournaL OF Teacher Education, 63(5), 376-382.

Author Information

Ciaran Sugrue (presenting / submitting)
University College Dublin
Education
Dublin
Tone Dyrdal Solbrekke (presenting)
University of Oslo, Norway

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