Teacher education between principle, politics, and practice: A statement from the new editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education

A case can be made that in many countries for a significant period of time, teacher education provided one of the few opportunities for people in the lower and middle social classes to achieve intellectual and, potentially, social advancement. As long as universities were elite institutions serving the few rather than the many – a situation that only changed significantly in many countries in the decades following World War Two (see Rüegg, 2004; Trow, 2007) – teacher education provided one of the few opportunities for a broader, more intellectual personal trajectory, rather than one that was solely practical in focus.

While the tension between training for the practicalities of the job, on the one hand, and engagement with educational theory, history, and scholarship more widely, on the other, is probably as old as the institutionalisation of teacher education itself (see, for example, Labaree, 2004), it is not without significance that many of the “normal schools” that were established in the 19^th century in the USA as centres for teacher education eventually developed into fully blown universities (see Labaree, 2008). Of interest is that in the process, “normal schools gradually abandoned their commitment to professional education and allowed themselves to be lured into mimicking the liberal arts college” (Labaree, 2008, p. 294; see also Herbst, 1989).

When we look at the state of teacher education today and at the ways in which it has developed in many countries over the past decades, there is evidence to suggest that the “intellectual heart” has been removed from much teacher education (see, for example, Mayer, 2014; and for an earlier analysis, Bates, 2005). Instead, teacher education has been caught up in the same logic of measurement, competition, and control that has done significant damage to schools in many countries around the world (see, for example, Biesta, 2010; D’Agnese, 2017; Hopmann, 2008; Ravitch, 2011).

In the face of these challenges, some have derived hope from the claim that the teacher is apparently the most important “in-school factor” in the educational process (see, e.g., McKinsey & Co, 2007; OECD, 2005). Yet the very idea of seeing the teacher as a “factor” in the production of measurable learning outcomes rather than as a thoughtful educational professional, actually amounts to an attack on the intellectual integrity of teaching, not an endorsement of it. The suggestion that teaching should become an evidence-based profession where teachers need to act on the basis of evidence about “what works” – and further, should only act on the basis of such evidence – is perhaps the final nail in the coffin of teaching as an act of emancipation rather than an act of domestication. It has also impacted negatively on the idea and the very possibility of the teacher as a public intellectual rather than an obedient servant of the state (see, for example, Cochran-Smith, 2006; and also; Giroux, 2012).

It should not come as a surprise that teacher education research has itself also been caught up in these developments. On the one hand, teacher education research reflects these developments, thus covering a broad spectrum of – at one end – principled, critical, and politically aware scholarship (see, for example, Clarke & Phelan, 2015; Hattam, 2020; Ivinson, 2020; Moodie & Patrick, 2017; Smyth, 1989), and at the other end – strongly practice-focused research, including research that seeks to identify “what works” within teacher education itself. Moreover, teacher education research not only reflects the developments in educational policy and practice but is also a contributing factor to the development of the field that, due to policy pressure and funding ties, is itself not always entirely free of agendas, orientations, and conclusions (Dwyer, Willis, & Call, 2020). This is not to lament the state of teacher education research but does hint at the particular complexity of editing a journal such as the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education.

On the one hand, we do think that academic journals should serve the field(s) of research they are connected to, which means that there is an important role to play in being a lively forum for the broad range of research and scholarship within teacher education. But we also believe that a journal should be more than just a repository for research from the field; it should also play a role in setting the agenda for teacher education research, or at least playing an active role in exploring the possibilities for what teacher education research can be.

Put differently, we believe that the role of an academic journal is not just to follow the research field it serves, but also to challenge the field, to remind the field of its own history, and perhaps even to provoke and irritate the field. We believe that in the long run this may be an important way in which academic journals can serve and extend their fields of research and scholarship. This role is particularly important at a time in which there is a real risk that the intellectual heart of the teaching profession and, along with this, the intellectual heart of teacher education could be undermined and that, within the healthy tension that should exist between principle, politics, and practice, a rather narrow, technicist understanding of teaching and teacher education becomes hegemonic.

At the start of our three-year tenure as editors of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education we therefore seek to serve the field by, on the one hand, being a forum for the breadth of contemporary teacher education research and, on the other hand, challenging the field to take up new questions, explore new directions, and develop new resources for teacher education research and scholarship, in order to establish a better balance between principle, politics and practice than where we believe the field currently is. In order to do so, we have identified eight challenges for teacher education research, and we invite everyone in the field to consider and engage with these – productively and critically – as we proceed through our editorship. Our ambition is to promote research and scholarship around these eight challenges – and elsewhere in this issue, there is a call for contributions on these themes. We also intend to bring the discussion about a new agenda for teacher education research to coming annual conferences of the Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA). All this is not to set an exclusive agenda for the coming years, but to highlight important aspects of what we believe the field of teacher education should comprise at this juncture in time.

These are our eight challenges to the field.

1. Reclaim a practically meaningful, intellectually rigorous and politically astute conception of teaching. As a result of global trends and developments and deliberate policy interventions, teaching has become increasingly redefined as a technical operation aimed at the effective production of measurable learning outcomes. Such a notion of teaching is not just problematic in terms of the very practice of teaching, but has also undermined teacher agency, teacher identity, and teacher professionalism, individually and collectively. In our view the journal might, going forward, make an effort in reclaiming a sufficiently complex understanding of teaching that speaks to practice and practitioners and also speaks back to policy and politics.

2. Deepen, add to, or critique the current “empirical” focus of teacher education research. We would especially welcome submissions that deal well with the complexity of education, teaching, and teacher education and rigorously theorise this complexity.

3. Employ or develop theoretical and methodological resources that are relevant to teacher education that draw from the experiences of education practice and research informed by and in engagement with the politics of Global South/North designation. To be specific, we would hope that an increasing number of submissions will engage explicitly with both the transnational and intranational politics of knowledge production and demonstrate strong reflexivity about what one’s research does in relation to such broader politics of knowledge. This should encourage us to rethink what questions we ask, what theories we draw upon, and whose knowledge our research privileges and marginalises.

4. Take seriously the ecological precarity of the planet and how teacher education is implicated therein. To be clear, this is not just a call to reconsider teacher education in relation to the currently popular UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). What is called for is a rigorous rethinking of the mode of “being human” as implicitly promoted through teacher education programmes and education systems as a whole.

5. Engage strongly with the politics of language and culture in teaching and teacher education across diverse educational contexts; for example, policies mandating English as a lingua franca and medium of instruction, and questions of ongoing cultural/linguistic colonisation for Indigenous and local communities. Critiques of existing practices may highlight linguistic/cultural injustice and are important; work that elucidates conditions of possibility within existing systems will also be crucial.

6. Identify the powerful roles of transnational organisations such as OECD, UNESCO, World Bank and Asia Development Bank as well as other major international donors (Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea) and the regionally based strategic moves that Pacific island nations have taken in their relationship with international development “partners” (Nabobo-Baba, 2012). All this suggests that transnational policy actors intersect with teacher education reform; it is important, however, to investigate how their policies are resisted and recontextualized, and where the regionally based networks of educators and schools experimenting with bottom-up teacher education reform are emerging. We seek manuscripts that document, interrogate, and theorise these top-down and bottom-up teacher education initiatives.

7. Identify resources that will help to strengthen the field conceptually and thereby expanding its cognitive jurisdiction, while also perhaps mapping the territory more thoroughly. An element of this systemic focus is to encourage submissions that draw from underserved sectors of education, for example, in Vocational Education and Training.

8. Re-Engage with the politics of education as teacher educators, both within our research and writing and more broadly, so that collectively we can make the case for an educational conception of education, that is not lost behind questions about efficacy, efficiency and meeting imposed standards.