About the project
The Rationale and Background
Nations are competing to establish or maintain their respective education systems as ‘world class’, through processes of regulation, standardisation and accountability along with measuring outcomes, impact and quality. This has flow-on effects for those who work in the field of both initial teacher education (ITE) and in-service teacher education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2013; Livingston, 2017; Stacey et al., 2020). Faculties and staff need to adapt to rapid changes in digital communications and technologies and implications for new modes of learning and teaching (Allen et al., 2020). Similarly, those in teacher education work with multiple stakeholders, while also meeting the accountability measures of neo-liberal university contexts (Ellis et al., 2014). In tandem with these demands, the field of teacher education continues to be subject to intense scrutiny, both nationally and internationally (Alexander et al., 2020; Mayer & Mills, 2021).
A recent ministerial inquiry in Australia, Next steps: Report of the quality initial teacher education review (Paul et al., 2022) highlights the continual policy influence over the field. In this landscape, the voices and experiences of those working in teacher education are often marginalised and silenced by discourses of policy, reform, standards and accountability (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; McLaren & Baltodano, 2000). Pinar (2012) argues, “teacher education today threatens to become culture-in-the-unmaking as it is deprofessionalized by anti-intellectual interventions by government and presumably professional organizations” (p. 35).
The dominant meta-narratives about teacher education frequently come from those who are either outside, or occupy a certain part of the field, who speak for and about, rather than with, teacher educators.