In England at present, an intense debate is raging about teacher education, triggered by a set of reform proposals from the UK government. I have been involved in university-based biology teacher education for nearly 20 years, and I find it noteworthy that stakeholders’ responses to the proposals are almost unanimously critical; those stakeholders include subject associations, unions and teacher education providers, including universities and school-based providers. Questions have even been asked in Parliament, and there have been over 70 articles in the national and education-specialist media. A number of universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, will withdraw from teacher education if the proposals are implemented. More broadly, the proposals have been labelled a threat to the continuation of university-based teacher education as a whole.
It is important that biology teachers make their voices heard in such debates, but the role of this journal should perhaps be more one of affirming what we value in biology teacher education, and the role Universities play in delivering those values. The Universities' Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET 2020) argues that teacher education should produce teachers who are:
competent, thoughtful and confident professionals, ‘who act as independent thinkers, recognising that knowledge, policy and practice are contestable, provisional and contingent’.
able to engage in enquiry-rich practice, ‘and have a predisposition to be continually intellectually curious about their work, with the capacity to be innovative, creative and receptive to new ideas emerging from their individual or collaborative practitioner enquiries’.
Responses to the UK Government’s proposals say much the same thing. They reiterate that teaching should be an intellectual, postgraduate profession, within which teachers build professional criticality that equips them to make informed professional decisions every day. As professionals, teachers should learn from, and ideally contribute to, research, there being strong evidence that ‘research-rich’ schools and colleges underpin the world’s best education systems.
Research and scholarship require specialist knowledge. Biology teachers need knowledge of their subject, knowledge of their discipline (the ways of thinking and procedural knowledge which characterises the subject) and knowledge of how to build and assess students’ developing understanding in biology in particular. Universities are important in building such knowledge, and indeed in generating research which contributes to that knowledge (think of the important roles played by academics like Ros Driver, Michael Reiss and Chris Harrison). On top of that, universities also induct new teachers into the appropriate tools and traditions which enable them to undertake research into their own practice, reflect critically on that practice and build professional autonomy as teachers of biology, making their own contributions to codified professional and academic knowledge.
Without universities, teaching and teacher education are diminished. Without research, teaching and teacher education are impoverished. And without professional autonomy, teaching and teacher education are reduced to ‘one-size-fits all’ approaches which ossify the profession, and through it, the educational experience of future generations.
It is of course unfortunate that one size never fits all, but we do incalculable damage if, for the sake of political expediency, we ignore that inconvenient truth.
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