Teachers and Teacher Education: What Counts Most in Challenging Times?

The session focuses on the link between teachers and teacher education and it places in the centre the issue of the quality of teachers over a career and the quality of teacher education in challenging times. The session aims at being a forum to present, discuss and disseminate latest research findings which contribute to knowledge and the formation of theory in the field of teaching as a profession and teacher education in Europe.

The contributors to the session critically examine an issue of responsibility for the education and aim to answer the following questions:

• What are the key elements of being a teacher in challenging times?
• How is teacher quality and teacher education quality understood in various contexts?
• What counts most in teacher quality and teacher education quality in challenging times?

Hannele Niemi in her presentation “For Better Quality: Teacher education and teachers’ work in the educational ecosystems”focuses on the influences of macro level factors of the educational ecosystem, institutional structures and social practices of mid-level parts of ecosystems on teacher education and teachers’ work. She also reflects on how these macro- and middle level ecosystem relationships have consequences on learning opportunities of individual learners.

Brian Hudson in the paper entitled: „On the need for teachers with powerful professional knowledge of high epistemic quality in the 21st century classroom” takes as a starting point in the argument by Biesta (2017) that teaching needs to be understood and reconnected with the emancipatory ambitions of education. He draws on the arguments by Young (2014) on his “Three Futures” approach to thinking about the curriculum. His presentation draws on work by the Research Group on Subject-Specific Education (ROSE) at Karlstad University on powerful knowledge and transformation processes across school subjects (Gericke et al., 2018), on epistemic quality and powerful knowledge (Hudson, 2018) and also, with collaborating partners drawing on Furlong and Whitty (2017), on powerful professional knowledge in teacher education (Brooks and Tani, 2018).

Maria Assunção Flores focuses on the theme: „Unpacking Teacher Quality: Issues of Professionalism and Leadership”. She aims: i) to identify and contrast the ways in which teacher quality has been defined internationally; ii) to analyse (and deconstruct) the term quality drawing upon empirical evidence from diverse stakeholders. She argues that in many contexts teacher quality has been associated with a rather narrow view which has been related to standards, performativity and managerialism. However, it is also possible to identify more comprehensive understandings of teacher quality which take into account contextual, professional and political, and personal dimensions.

The next three papers presented by Bjorn Astrand „Changing notions of teaching and teacher education“, Marco Snoek „The teaching profession as a continuum and it implications for teachers, schools and teacher education“, and Joanna Madalińska-Michalak „What counts most in teacher quality and teacher education quality in challenging times?“ deals with i) improvement of schooling through systemic models for development of teaching during teachers careers, ii) notions on the relationship between teaching as a profession, research and teaching excellence, iii) the notion of the teaching profession as a continuum of professional development, spanning both initial teacher education, induction and a phase of lifelong professional development, and iv) notion of responsiblity for high quality education.

The session encourages collaboration amongst educational researchers from various European countries, who represent their own institutions and serve as leaders of such organisations as ISATT, WERA and TEPE. The session raising the issue of teacher quality and quality of teacher education, can be significant at least for the following Networks: Network 1., Network 9., Network 10., and Network 27.