Teacher Education Through Uncertainty and Crisis

Towards Sustainable Futures

Terri Seddon, Alexander Kostogriz, Joanna Barbousas, Terri Seddon, Alexander Kostogriz, Joanna Barbousas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000522662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

This book examines teacher education at a critical turning point in the neoliberal dispensation that has steered education policy and practice since the 1980s. It examines Australia's teacher education reforms, the 'TEMAG reforms' launched in 2014, and traces their effects on teacher education practice in 2019 and into the challenges, uncertainties and doubts of 2020's entangled health, economic and environmental crises. Combining data-rich insights into policy and professional workspaces and places, with a temporal sensibility, this book probes the limits of neoliberal logics and shows how school- and university-based educators' professionalism sustains the preparation of beginning teachers through school-university partnerships.

Teacher Education Through Uncertainty and Crisis explores the relationalities, spatialities and temporalities of teacher education, sketching hopeful innovations, pathways and sustainable futures for teacher professionalism. This book will be of interest to policymakers, teacher educators and other professionals who understand the power of education in an uncertain world.

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CRISES AND CHALLENGES

Teacher education from the vantage point of 2020

Terri Seddon and Alexander Kostogriz

DOI: 10.4324/9781003170716-1

This book uses the vantage point of 2020 to examine strengths and limitations in teacher education policy and practice. With chapters drafted during that year of crisis, a unique moment in time when multi-layered networks and overlapping events entangled education and societies, we re-read business-as-usual education through our experiences of uncertainty and doubt, and suggest how teacher education might contribute to more sustainable futures.

The Australian Research Council-funded research that underpins these chapters examines a 2014 Australian teacher education reform commissioned by the Australian Government. Similar to other teacher education reforms around the world, this policy agenda was designed to improve teaching quality through a standards-based accountability regime that steered and monitored the preparation of ‘classroom-ready teachers’ through ‘integrated partnerships’, which required schools, universities and state-based school systems to work together. Having collected policy documents, partnership case reports and interviews with school and university professionals through 2018 and 2019, we used the events of 2020 to ask questions about that pre-pandemic approach to teacher education policy and practice.

The chapters that follow are our attempts to capture and analyse our insights into teacher education practices that were made strange by the events of 2020. We combine data-rich evidence showing the work of professionals who occupy policy processes and integrated partnerships, using concepts that helped us sharpen our historical sensibility and analyse the times and temporalities of teacher education. We offer this work as a contribution to knowledge that reveals limits in education’s neoliberal logics when global networks become a primary practice of organising. We also show how an educator’s capacity to act professionally within school–university–system partnerships contributes to future making by sustaining concerns that help school societies.

Times and teacher education

On 1 January 2020, Australia’s eastern seaboard was shrouded in smoke. It choked Sydney and turned the daytime sky black along the eastern states. Scientists called these bushfires that joined up a ‘megafire’. People described hearing koalas scream. Scientists later estimated that over 3 billion animals had died and expressed concern given Australia’s status as a global extinction hotspot. These events were widely seen to be Australian manifestations of global climate change.

These megafires were only the beginning of a year in which global dislocations became visible, making our times seem apocalyptic. The extended bushfire season was soon followed by news of a new virus: COVID-19, which was highly contagious but slow to show itself. As individual outbreaks became a global pandemic, governments sometimes dithered. Some introduced regulations that locked people down and crunched economies. Others flip-flopped, unable to move beyond the laissez-faire dream of growing economies through herd immunity. But as people died, socially patterned effects came into view; structural inequalities became visible and people felt the cold hand of fear in their hearts.

Through 2020, we drafted the chapters that make up this study of teacher education policy and practice. But our experiences of these entangled environmental, health and subsequent economic, social and political crises helped us see Australian teacher education as just one part of the larger global system where the virus was disrupting regulation and production. The teacher education reform agenda that was endorsed by global policy-research agencies and coordinated in nationally negotiated ways through teacher education policy and practice was being dislocated like everything else. The most spectacular effects became visible in Victoria, where school closures created a crisis of teacher supply.

Our research had examined the effects of a teacher education policy reform that was proposed and accepted by the Australian Government in late 2014. The report prepared by the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) (TEMAG, 2014) advised the Australian Government how teacher education courses could better prepare ‘beginning teachers’ with the right mix of academic and practical skills needed for the classroom. That report, Action Now: Classroom-Ready Teachers, recommended stronger quality assurance based on a more stringent standards-based accountability regime. Quality teaching, the report claimed, required a more effective teaching workforce development strategy that was ‘practical and achievable’.

This strategy for reform required the reorganisation of initial teacher education through ‘integrated partnerships’, where schools, universities and state-based school systems would work together. The redesign of teacher education would provide pre-service teachers with opportunities for extended professional experience placements. The Advisory Group identified these placements as ‘crucial to the development of new teachers’ and an important means of integrating theory and practice. The partnerships and placements would ‘prepare graduates with in-depth content knowledge and a solid understanding of teaching practices that are proven to make a difference to student learning’ (TEMAG, 2014, p. 18).

But most of the 38 TEMAG recommendations addressed new accountability measures or ‘strengthened’ old ones to ‘show’ that universities were producing ‘quality’ teachers. This regulatory regime would mean more rigorous selection for entry to teacher education courses, structured practical experience for students, standardised assessment of graduates to ensure ‘classroom readiness’ and improved workforce planning. The federal government allocated $16.9 million for implementation, with the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) setting standards and leading these changes. In response, University of Sydney’s Professor Nicole Mockler (2015) noted:

There’s an old farming saying that goes ‘you don’t make a pig fatter by weighing it’. What we find in the TEMAG report are many recommendations for weighing the pig and very few for fattening it up.

Our writing workshop in early July followed the first COVID-19 lockdown in Melbourne; it finished the evening before the second lockdown that lasted until early November. That five-month lockdown imposed cross-border quarantine, social isolation and an 8 pm curfew and tied almost 5 million people in Melbourne to 5 km from home. At the workshop, we had agreed that working from home was fabulous, but that experience went hand in hand with anxieties, sadness, grief and sometimes personal tragedy. In that safe space, surrounded by chill mists, winter sunshine and the rustle of towering eucalyptus trees, we began to acknowledge how uncertainties had become facts in our lives, while the unanticipated fluidities of 2020 generated matters of concern that affected what and how we saw the world.

A free writing exercise on the last day of our workshop, 8 July 2020, helped us voice these experiences and explore their implications for our research. Claire Manton surfaced the idea of ‘concern’ and how it bred a sense of care:

We recognise care in the experience of anxiety. In anxiety, one feels an indeterminate threat from an indeterminate source. These threats are illness and infection, worries about elderly and infirm family members, lockdown and disconnected children and youths, job loss. And for our situatedness in education – job instability in higher education, loss of funding, less value placed on theory (theory = bad). I feel despondent about my future as an educational researcher, a potential academic, a lecturer in a field that may cease to exist. We may go back to a time that I didn’t even know, where there was no university for teachers. There was little recognition for the complexities of education. But we care about the project of education in the face of this anxiety.

Michelle Ludecke explored the flipside of this sentiment. Observing that governments in many countries were using health advice to steer national policy, she asked, what if the Minister for Education defined the facts that anchored policy truths:

Good morning, I’m Michelle, Chief Education Officer for the Australian Government. These are unprecedented times and we have experienced a radical shift in understanding the way we currently educate the leaders of tomorrow.

I come to you today with hard truths and will detail the immediate 6-week ‘education shake up’ period starting midnight tomorrow.

This pandemic has demonstrated that we teach our learners in schools and universities based on an insular community-model, which creates hotspots of privilege or disadvantage. We have, in the past, celebrated and denigrated these hotspots by publicly displaying quantitative data derived from arbitrary tests designed to spread white middle class privileged perspectives throughout our community like this virus.

Our education system is reflected back at us as we prepare, induct and support beginning teachers making their transition to the profession and teaching our children.

We will focus will be on those immediately responsible – school-university partnerships.

I ask these partnerships to set an example in this radical and long-term shake up of our education system from early childhood to tertiary systems.

WE WILL FIRST REMOVE ARBITRARY BARRIERS BETWEEN OR CREATED BY SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES.

This means any previous formal (Memorandum of Understanding) or informal (‘we only take graduates from Go8 universities’) partnerships will be disbanded.

From midnight tomorrow schools, universities and all their staff will be locked down into an educational sharing program, with triads working together throughout a 6-month period to deliver a professional learning, exchange and mentoring program (PLEMP).

Each triad will consist of a teacher, preservice teacher and academic with a focus on enhancing student learning. They will be supported by a leadership triad, comprising a senior academic, graduate teacher and mentor teacher, who will focus on the model of teaching and learning that is embodied, not linear. These triads will be enabled by an administrative triad of dean, principal and professional staff who are seconded or ex-teachers. They will address the sustainability of the triads, including the health and wellbeing of those involved.

Make no mistake, this move will be policed by cyber patrols through random bugging of web-based communications and emails… . Fines will apply, if schools or universities are found to be upholding old practices beyond Wednesday 15th July.

These playful reflections set the tone for our chapter writing. We recognised that TEMAG reforms had produced things: a TEMAG report, standards-based reforms, integrated partnerships and classroom-ready teachers. But none of these things were simple objects. Reform processes between 2014 and 2019 had institutionalised integrated partnerships and the accountability regime that defined a ‘classroom-ready teacher’. These arrangements had become normalised, business-as-usual teacher education that was largely taken for granted. Yet, in 2020, all those things, those seemingly coherent objects of 2014–2019 teacher education, started to fall apart. It began with school closures, requiring students to learn online from home. The crunch came with the near extinction of professional experience placements for preservice teachers which, in turn, disrupted the professional pipeline of new teaching graduates and became a crisis of teacher supply.

The placement crisis made uncertainty and doubt a reality for all the partners. Preservice teachers were unable to graduate if they could not meet the government’s requirements by completing their school placement and showing they were classroom ready. Anxious preservice teachers appealed to university-based teacher educators, and their complaints, tears and anger, grief and mental health consequences rippled through university leadership and administration. The universities appealed to schools to find ways of helping preservice teachers complete their training. Many declined, citing their own overload as they translated all their face-to-face teaching into online provision. Some offered universities and preservice teachers opportunities to complete their practicum through online classroom teaching, but the provision was patchy and troubled the meaning of readiness for a ‘classroom’. Finally, the state government and teacher registration board, the Victorian Institute of Teaching (VIT), recognised that this key failure in business-as-usual teacher education threatened Victoria’s capacity to staff its state, Catholic and independent school systems in 2021.

Between facts, fairies and fair analysis

These events of 2014, 2019 and 2020 raised questions within the research team about how to handle the project, our already collected data and reporting the findings from our research. Indeed, what were ‘findings’ when our data collections presumed a familiar standards-based landscape of teacher education, but that landscape, our analyses and interpretations were coloured by the eerie light of 2020 and its global pandemic, fears of economic depression, #BlackLivesMatter and #Brexit as well as the effects and eccentricities of ‘false-truth’ presidencies?

As we puzzled over these aspects of building knowledge about teacher education reform, we found ourselves discussing the historicity of teacher education and how it unfolds through the relation between matters of fact and matters of concern. As Bruno Latour suggests, a thing becomes an object ‘out there’, a matter of fact that is seemingly independent from the person who looks. In another sense, that thing is also an issue ‘in there’, a matter of concern that is experienced, and felt in ways that emerge through some kind of gathering as a collective experience. But how do you analyse teacher education reform when the ‘same word thing designates matters of fact and matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004, p. 233)?

Through 2020, Latour’s insight that a thing is realised both as an object and through a gathering became clearer as events overtook the usually smooth workings of government and other institutions. Actions on the ground challenged and confronted the usual horizons of expectations that defined and secured business as usual. This happened with the placement crisis and with university funding. Gatherings became obvious in the exploding #BlackLivesMatter movements that went global, and the storming of the US Congress. The Australian federal government initially inaugurated a collaborative ‘National Council’ with the state governments. It was a significant move in a country organised as a federation of states and territories with deep historic divisions in state–federal relations. The federal government also opened negotiations with the Australian Council of Trade Unions to address matters of concern that accompanied surging unemployment and business closures, until the weaponising of facts drove out possibilities of negotiated agreements.

Latour ...