Challenges to Teacher Education in Difficult Economic Times

International perspectives

Joan Stephenson, Lorraine Ling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135101442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teacher education in a financial crisis – what are the consequences and how can probity be maintained?

Education, like most other parts of everyday life, is experiencing the challenges brought about by global financial constrictions. This book presents the experiences and views of practising teacher educators from multiple countries and continents on how the melt-down in world economics has affected and will continue to affect teacher education and concomitant experiences in schooling. The ramifications are seen to extend into every aspect of teacher preparation, continuing staff development and teacher support, and there are significant implications for the quality of teaching and learning, and the ethos and standing of the process of education as a whole.

Drawing on educational theory and social, political, and economic discourses, the book addresses issues such as policy, philosophy, organisation, funding, resources, modes of teaching and learning, curricular change, recruitment and retention, amongst others, and provides a snap-shot across diverse contexts. It aims to provide an evaluative, analytical but reflective picture of teacher education in the light of the world economic crisis, whilst exploring good practice and suggesting future strategies to develop the quality of teacher education and professional support, teaching and learning.

The volume provides an insight into the need for a new paradigm for teacher education: one that involves teacher educators in devising a discourse of positive and radical change. It will be a valuable resource for teacher educators, educational leaders, policy makers, educational commentators and teachers seeking to engage with the scholarship of teaching as a means to engage in continuous professional development.

1 Introduction

Joan Stephenson and Lorraine Ling

This book focuses upon the impact of times of economic constraint on teacher education.

Public spending in all social contexts has been affected by the recent series of financial crises, and in most developed countries spending on education is one of the major expenses. Teacher education, along with schools, has been particularly severely affected. As part of the higher education system the extent to which this has and will impact on the provision of both initial training and further professional development for serving teachers shows, as these contributions will demonstrate, some variations and many similarities. These are dependant to an extent upon contextual circumstances. First, the institution in which the faculty is situated and its standing within it may be impacted unfavourably consequent on the budget it is allocated given an overall cut in resources. Concomitant with this is the major source of funding for the institution concerned and the degree to which money for teacher education is quarantined or ‘ring-fenced’ for training purposes. A further influence on education stems from the degree of control exercised by the government body responsible for education within that country. Overarching all is the political complexion of the party in power, and the rigour with which this has been translated into policies and legislation. This has increasingly been market-dominated, spreading to all functions of social life, including education. Driven into a maze of economic and welfare tracks, teacher education and those trying to provide it find themselves trying to operate according to contradictory discourses.

The New Right political agenda, which has pervaded the policy and practice of teacher education for several decades, has inevitably entrenched and reinforced specific discourses across higher education in general and teacher education specifically, as is addressed here.

Apple (2006) talks of ‘conservative modernization’ identified in the United States of America (USA) as four major power blocks, all of which are discernible in the examples of practice discussed in this volume. Broadly they are that part of the market with a strong belief in the entrenched tenet that ‘private’ equals ‘good’, public equals ‘bad’ (thereby reducing democracy to consumerism), choice in the market, competition and testing as the drivers for improvement. This is a neo-liberal belief often held with a religious fervour. Neoconservatives may be seen to wish to return to the past, to a golden age, with an agreed and imposed body of ‘official knowledge’, not expecting people to pause to question the source of this knowledge or its possible prejudices and holding them accountable for its further embedding through curriculum. This mindset is born out of a feeling of having the ‘one true answer’ and is shared with the third group, the ‘religious conservatives’, who perceive themselves as the chosen ones. Finally there is what Apple refers to as the new middle class, professionally and managerially committed to the ‘new ideology’ and reliant upon it for their own perpetuation and continued career chances. It is the contradictions in the discourse emanating from these blocks, found across all the participants affecting education, that makes them potentially both part of the problem and the solution as follows below.

The concept of discourse immediately focuses our attention upon the political creation of meanings which imply, both explicitly and implicitly, particular permissions and prohibitions about what can and cannot be said, written or done. Policy discourse in its various forms is constructed inevitably in the political arena, and drives systems and organizations acting as a form of control mechanism which legislates behaviours. In the chapters that follow examples are provided of discourses impacting on teacher education at a number of levels. The predominant discourses pertain to:

• economic policy, market forces and funding;
• curriculum and ‘official knowledge’;
• audit, regulation and compliance;
• efficiency, productivity and accountability;
• quality and standards;
• globalization, internationalization, networks and partnerships;
• access, equality and diversity;
• change prompted by crisis, disrupting old thinking; and
• teacher professionalism and status.

These ideas will be described further in conjunction with the explanation of the interpretive framework to be utilized to analyse the key messages and issues that arise in the chapters from the various contributors.

Underpinning each of the discourses reflected in this book as they apply to teacher education is Apple’s (1990) notion of ‘official knowledge’ which is a basis for the creation of discourses in society. In revisiting the concept of official knowledge as put forward in his book, Ideology and Curriculum (1990), Apple (1993) states that

the decision to define some groups’ knowledge as the most legitimate, as official knowledge, while other groups’ knowledge hardly sees the light of day, says something extremely important about who has the power in society … There is then a politics of official knowledge, a politics that embodies conflict over what some regard as simply neutral descriptions of the world and others regard as elite conceptions that empower some groups while disempowering others.

(1993: 222)

The official knowledge of the policies and practices which impel teacher education in universities becomes entrenched and reinforced through the discourses which are privileged within those policies and practices. Each discourse we refer to in this book embodies elements of both a neo-liberal and a neoconservative agenda and as these movements sit side by side in the New Right Movement, they are both pervasive. However, they are also potentially or even deliberately in tension with each other, as can be seen by the list of issues which are outlined as impacting upon teacher education. For example, at the same time as a market forces economy of teacher education is mandated with its attendant privatization and deregulation, there is a strong emphasis on regulation, accreditation, compliance and standards.

Neo-liberalism has a vision of the weak state. A society that lets the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market guide all aspects of its forms of social interaction and is seen as both efficient and democratic. On the other hand, neo-conservatism is guided by a vision of the strong state in certain areas, especially over the politics of the body and gender and race relations; over standards, values and conduct; and over what knowledge should be passed on to future generations.

(Apple 1993: 228)

The narratives in the chapters here reflect the constant tensions and apparent disjunctions between the discourses of neoliberalism and neo conservatism. However as Apple (1993) notes, in addressing this apparent tension Dale (1989) has also seen that it is not unintentional or coincidental that such apparent tensions have been created. He refers to the way the New Right has constructed this tension as a policy of ‘conservative modernization’ which has the effect of

simultaneously ‘freeing’ individuals for economic purposes while controlling them for social purposes; indeed in so far as economic ‘freedom’ increases inequalities, it is likely to increase the need for social control.

(Apple 1993: 228)

Thus with apparent choice and freedom being given to schools and educational systems including teacher education, the burden of the consequences of that choice rests not with governments but with individuals or institutions. With fewer resources being provided by government the heavier is the reliance on private sector provision, resulting in more costs inevitably flowing to individuals and institutions. However, the government still maintains strong control through processes of regulation, accountability, standards, rankings, assessment and measures of quality.

The inevitable and non-coincidental parallel discourses of neo-liberalism and neoconservatism which comprise the New Right ideology provide the key to understanding the current era with its policy tensions, disjunctions and confusion. To characterize all of the New Right policies as neo-liberal is to omit an important part of the total ideological picture and means that the potential to be empowered to challenge and disrupt the dominant New Right discourse is significantly hampered and restricted.

Having the ability to disrupt and challenge prevailing ideologies and discourses is linked strongly with notions of human beings as agents of change. Giddens’ (1984) notions of human beings as having agency which allows them to make choices to act, or not to act to make a difference to events, is central to interpreting the way people and systems are responding to the current era of economic constraint coupled with regimes of compliance and regulation. In the chapters which follow we see examples of agents acting in empowered ways to make a difference to events and to use crisis as a means to bring about change and renewal. We also see examples of people who as human beings underestimate their potential as agents and thus become submerged or consumed by an apparent hopelessness and lack of control. Giddens (1984) underpins the notion of empowered action with a concept of ‘knowledgeability’ which develops through critical reflection on past and current events and leads to a situation where agents are able to use the understandings which flow from critical reflection to reflexively monitor their actions. The combination of understanding underpinning empowered action which makes a difference to events is termed ‘knowledgeability’. In order to steer a course through the discourses of teacher education which characterize the current era, concepts of agency and knowledgeability are central, and the various ways such concepts and actions are demonstrated (or not) in teacher education is exemplified in the chapters which follow.

Giroux (2013 cited in Tristram 2013) effectively links the concepts of empowered agency, official knowledge, and critical reflection in his notion of ‘critical pedagogy’.

Pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency. As a political project, critical pedagogy illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority and power. It draws attention to the questions concerning who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge, values and skills and it illuminates how knowledge, identity and authority are constructed within particular sets of social relations.

(Giroux 2013 cited in Tristram 2013: no page number)

Giroux asserts that critical pedagogy is ‘both a way of understanding education as well as a way of highlighting the performative nature of agency as a way of participating in shaping the world in which we live’ (Giroux 2013 cited in Tristram 2013). Critical pedagogy as a basis to motivate empowered action could be likened to Giddens’ notion of reflexively monitoring our actions based upon ‘knowledgeability’ gained through critical reflection on events. The extent to which teacher educators are ready and able to engage in this kind of potentially powerful action to make a difference to events and contexts in the face of economic constraint and New Right policy agendas is part of what we aim to explore in this volume.

Overview of this volume

The twelve contributed chapters in this volume present a variety of discourses on the financial and other challenges of the policy, practice and provision of teacher education. While presenting pictures of consequences at a particular simultaneous point in the world economic cycle they do not share identical contexts All but four of the contributions come from the European Union (Clarke and Killeavy, Moran, Livingston and Hulme, Piñar, Jaén and Pérez, Avis, Canning, Fisher and Simmons, Stephenson, Žogla). They share a community but have sovereign political systems. The remaining four chapters (OTurk and Aslan, Fitzgerald, Ling and O’Neill) give perspectives from more distant and different political stances. The common thread joining all chapters centres on the challenges raised by the impact of economic conditions on education, and more specifically on teacher education and the teaching profession broadly.

The authors discuss a number of points which recur throughout the chapters with varying degrees of emphasis. These can be classified as economic considerations, particularly aspects of a market economy, the status quo in the country with regard to what is seen as the correct form and content for teacher education, matters of efficiency, accountability, and productivity intertwined with quality and standards, a movement towards globalization, networking and cooperation, with some attention being paid to access and equality or its reverse. All are influenced by politics, including the ideological make-up of current and recent governments and the influence of these on attitudes about what education should be, the length and strength of the mandate it holds and the degree to which ‘public opinion’ does or does not affect policy-making and change. These influences can be seen as having a bearing on the nature of change and severity of measures taken in the implementation of change motivated by fiscal events, and also of the explanations and justifications given by the ruling power for requiring and/or imposing a particular policy. There is some evidence in the chapters here to suggest that paths followed reflect the views of a particular stratum of society, often in the face of evidence that there are more propitious directions available. These seem to reflect the need for a ‘short time’ fix rather than a long-term solution. A variety of ‘common values, mores and beliefs’ assumed within a particular nation have a bearing on the shape and content of policies across countries and sometimes areas or continents. Exactly who is the owner, producer and arbiter of this ‘common knowledge’ is seldom overt and sometimes a wraith of ‘smoke and mirrors’.

A second important shared feature is in the area of the increasing emphasis placed on measurement, segueing education towards embodying and producing activities and outcomes that can be ‘accurately’ measured and leading in many views to the commodification of education, as if it were a common part of production and transaction formerly traditionally viewed as part of manufacturing and the commercial world. In discussing the results of the economic downturn the twelve contributors reflect the differing and similar philosophical, organizational and presentational reactions to the changes made over the contexts observed.

In the first area presented, Australia and New Zealand, Fitzgerald interrogates a policy discussion paper for the state of Victoria, New Directions for School Leadership and the Teaching Profession (2012) and its follow-up Towards Victoria as a Learning Community, and looks at the policy responses to the current economic challenge. Both of the publications propose new directions for teacher education and the teaching profession, using a ‘common-sense’ approach. Their aim is to re-align Victoria’s and hence Australia’s ranking upwards into the global top tier of educational rankings – a promotion also desired by other countries in the volume. The policy uses language that is ‘deeply seductive’ but serves in essence to use a discourse to encourage teachers to ‘play the game and act in their own economic self-interest’.

Ling in contrast views the ongoing economic constraint in education as resulting in a system reflecting ‘threat rigidity’ (Straw et al. 1981) where external forces cause individuals and organizations to react inflexibly to threats. Teacher education in Australia is characterized by concerns about government underfunding, scarce resources, high staff to student ratios, falling entry standards and a debate about the type and duration of teacher education courses. The theory of ‘threat rigidity’ is employed to analyse the current context of teacher education in Australia. As an alternative to threat rigidity, the theory of ‘autogenic crisis’ is employed as a means of pre-empting threatening events and acting radically to take control of them and change old ways and thinking.

O’Neill, the final contributor from this area, discussing movements in New Zealand, explores the many changes made since the election of a new centre-right coalition government. These measures were justified on the rationality of two counts, the financial crisis and equality, with the efficient use of limited funding to the most disadvantaged. Amendments included the removal of qualification requirements for early-learning teachers and the introduction of the private sector into professional development. Theorizing the events as a political strategy to introduce neo-liberal principles, the author illustrates how discourse is used to change the pillars of teacher education to fit the government’s political ideology.

Continental Europe

Moving to continental Europe, there are two contributions from widely different historical backgrounds but sharing the fairly recent experience of domination by extremes of political thinking. In the case of the Baltic States, Estonia, Lativa and Lithuania, that of the former Soviet Republic, where democratic directions of governance and a return to sovereignty began in the 1990s, change has occurred simultan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Australia and New Zealand
• Part II: Continental Europe
• Part III: Ireland and the United Kingdom
• Index