Public discourse surrounding the quality of teachers and teaching globally frequently draws distinctions between the modern era and memories of the ‘good old day’ when there was trust in teachers and teaching as a profession. Donelson (2000) contests our rosy memory of the past, suggesting that the ‘Golden Teaching Days of Yore’ are more of a remembered dream. In the context of English teachers, he suggests we dream of an era when teachers had the respect of both students and parents, and students wrote formal essays on the classics as the curriculum. But did such an era exist or are these mere fond memories of hope? We suggest our memory of then and now connects to changes in education that Wilkins et al., (2021) identify as systems and processes such as the global neoliberal reforms that have shifted school cultures towards governance led by entrepreneurial leadership with an equity agenda of ‘achievement for all’. These phenomena shift teaching to a paradoxical ‘responsiblised profession’, generating, neoperformative teachers and school leaders, who are given autonomy yet judged in multi-layered systems of surveillance with high-stakes consequences (Wilkins et al. 2021). Embedded in this shift was the message that teachers are both the problem and the solution (Mockler, 2018). Driven in part by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and their league tables of international student testing, the phenomenon of reporting on and claiming a disproportionate connection between student test outcomes and teacher quality (Bradford et al. 2021) resulted in significant policy fascination with this cause-and-effect scenario (Skourdoumbis, 2017). In the context of these global shifts, we are curious about how researchers are drawing on teacher quality so we can be reflexive about whether we are reinforcing the hopes and dreams of the past in our research work. What we want to avoid is the constraints of standardisation on professionalism that Mockler (2022) identified in the context of teacher professional learning and development documents in New South Wales, Australia.

We explore the dominant discourses of quality teaching using a systematic meta-synthesis of empirical research addressing the quality of teachers and teaching in Australia from 2011- 2021 and consider how the public discourses of teacher quality are reflected in the academic discourses of research. Providing an opportunity for reflexivity on our collective memory of this period so as not to recreate the past. The paper contributes to an understanding of why high-quality, contemporary research in teacher education so often does not live up to the expected impact on teacher education policy. The purpose of examining quality in teacher education is to contribute to reconfiguring the public sphere (Thomas, 2004). Our work explores the discursive constructions of “teacher quality” evident in education research about initial teacher education in Australia over the last decade. It presents findings of the systematic meta-synthesis using automated content analysis (ACA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) of empirical research literature about teacher quality, from 2011 – 2021 to identify how the discourses activated by researchers represent quality teaching.

Our findings help to illuminate how certain discourses of quality help position initial teacher education as a convenient policy response by Ministers seeking to identify quality improvements.  As teacher educators we need to ensure that the complexity of teaching is identified and highlight that determining ‘quality’ is highly contentious (Mockler, 2018; Hoyte et al., 2020; Rowe and Skourdoumbis, 2017). As Cochran Smith and colleagues (2014; Ell et al., 2017) put forward, the complexity of the education system means that the relationship between the quality of ITE and the teaching quality of beginning teachers is not entirely linear.  

The purpose of examining quality in teacher education is to contribute to reconfiguring the public sphere (Thomas, 2004). Our approach draws on Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1995; 2003; 2013) and meta-synthesis to analyse the corpus of research data generated. CDA was used to identify the concept of teacher quality as it is articulated at the micro level in research papers. Our substantive research questions are a) What are the discursive constructions of teacher quality evident in teacher education research 2011 – 2021? and b) How do these constructions support or constrain researcher influence on public policy?The research is focused on analysing public documents; hence, ethics approval is not required. As we delved into the four phases of our research project, it was important for us to note that they were not static, linear processes. Instead, they were iterative in nature, constantly building and evolving upon each other. The first phase focused on identifying the social problem of teacher quality in Australia, utilising contemporary empirical research from 2011-2021. This was achieved using meta-synthesis, a systematic review of qualitative research findings with 95 research articles meeting the selection criteria. In the second phase, we drew on Fairclough’s meso level analysis of text, exploring the discursive practices (Fairclough, 1989) to identify the diverse ways researchers used teacher quality in their research and interpreting these discourses in relation to the larger teacher quality agenda. The third phase involved exploring the beneficiaries and obstacles to addressing this social problem and the implications for researcher practice hence, connecting the implications of the micro discourses identified within the context of teacher education. The final phase involved shifting our focus to the ongoing process of researcher reflexivity, acknowledging and examining the impact of our own presence and feelings as teacher educators engaged in this research. Throughout all phases, we maintained a clear audit trail and utilized multiple coding to ensure transparency and encourage conversations about reflexivity. By engaging deeply with these four phases, we were able to gain a deep understanding of the complex issue of teacher quality in Australian research and contribute new knowledge to the field of teacher education research. As a study of published work, this research project did not require ethical approval.

Our research was conceived to explore the impact of high-quality research in initial teacher education shapes and drives national policy and political discourse. Using empirical evidence, we explored the difference between “teacher quality” and “teaching quality” and the way this difference is rarely articulated. We noted that the difference is an important consideration for teacher educators because teaching quality is an ongoing process rather than a destination to be arrived at. The challenge with focusing on “teacher quality” is that contemporary policy is focussed on questions of selecting the right candidates (Mockler, 2018), rather than focusing on what students learn in their ITE program and what they can do in their classroom. Conflating the two concepts of teacher quality and teaching quality has the potential to contribute to a view that ITE is responsible for more than its fair share of the impact on beginning teachers’ practice. Our study identifies researchers draw on six different discourses in their research work with reference to quality teaching. We describe these discourses as either a Hook, Justifying, Championing, Ascribing, Problematising or Disrupting. We found that the Australian story on teacher quality and quality teachers goes back to 2003. Here the Australian Council for Educational Research conference set the scene for the quality agenda to play out. Hattie and Rowe provided the earlier narrative and subsequent federal governments have embraced their notions and run with them. Over time the story moved away from teacher quality to quality within ITE and since this time researchers have chosen to champion or build, ascribe or problematise, challenge or disrupt this national agenda. The messages in teacher education research, what is said, point to a diverse array of themes relating to teacher quality that provide different possibilities for influencing the policy landscape.

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