Session Information
10 SES 09 A, Teacher Education and Reform: Conceptualising Experiences of Educational Change in North America, Australia and England
Symposium
Contribution
Improving school education systems is increasingly positioned as one way of ‘rescuing’ developed countries from perceived or actual states of economic and/or social crises. As part of this education ‘rescue package’, teacher education becomes a powerful lever for bringing about desired changes in schooling. Reflecting this, nearly all teacher education systems have experienced considerable change in the last five years. These changes have inevitably affected the lives of all working and studying on teacher education programmes, whether in universities or schools. The changes and the structural alterations to institutions and programmes which ‘reforms’ inevitably bring have been much analysed. But far less attention has been paid to how the subsequent changes are experienced, by the teacher educators who work ‘inside teacher education’.
This symposium aims to give voice to the perspectives of teacher educators on educational change with the rationale that they remain as under-researched group. In particular, we hope to illuminate the complexity of experience and practice in teacher education, particularly when the field changes around educators, bringing the need for reactions to reforms and possible shifts in professional practices and beliefs. We draw on three methodologically rigorous studies to conceptualise how educators respond to social and educational change through processes which include accommodation, compliance, adaptation and resistance.
The symposium brings together three papers on teacher educators and change from Australia, Canada and England respectively. Each makes a significant contribution to this field of research. Paper 1 presents a study conducted in Australia, exploring change in relation to government calls for reform in relation to links between pre-and in-service work. The work draws on a conceptual framework drawn from the authors’ previous work on community-based teacher education to analyse how changes were experienced and mediated by teacher educators, altering the nature of their work.
The pre-service education system in England is undergoing a radical transformation with the allocation of up to one third of student places directly to schools rather than universities. Paper 2 focuses on the effects of these changes on teacher educators in both schools and universities, drawing on an empirical study of educators’ knowledge and systematic literature reviews of relevant literature and policies. It theorises reactions to the changes in relation to concepts of agency and habitus.
When reforms to schooling and teacher education are proposed, the nature of mother tongue teaching (or literacy education) usually falls under the microscope. This emphasis often places teacher educators working in this subject area as central agents in change. The third paper reports on a funded project focused on 28 literacy/English educators in four Anglophone countries. It identifies individual backgrounds, views on change and research in this area of pre-service and analyses and conceptualizes change around nodes of policy and practice.
The discussant will take a synoptic focus on the three papers, as well as drawing on personal research, to consider the implications of the symposium for managing change in teacher education.
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