Thinking about what has been ‘missing’ in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE) and perhaps the field more generally

As part of our 50 years “celebration” of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (APJTE), we thought it may be timely to think about what is, or has been, missing from the journal and, possibly, the “field” of teacher education over the past 50 years. To that end, you will see in this issue a paper, which is an edited “conversation” between scholars who have had an interest in the journal and the field of teacher education on the topic of what is, or has been, missing in APJTE and/or the “field.” We want to focus on the “missing” in this issue, not to highlight any deficiencies in past or present practices, but instead, to stimulate some discussion about what might eventuate in the next 50 years – to think about what might be “missing” 50 years hence. Below, we briefly discuss our initial orientation to the “missing” and the invited conversation piece, and then we introduce the other papers in the issue.

When planning this issue as part of the 50-year celebration of APJTE, the question of what is missing arose in our discussion; we were interested in how we might frame this problem. It seems that the problem of the “missing,” on reflection, is at once both practical and philosophical. For example, from a practical point of view one can imagine that all of the authors whose papers have been submitted, but rejected, may read the responses to the question of the “missing” with some interest (paradoxically, one of the editors [Heimans] had the experience of having a submission rejected in APJTE!). More philosophically, one may wonder about the following: 1. what is “present”; 2. what is “missing,” or, seen another way, an “absent presence”; and 3. what is an “absent absence”- to draw lightly on work by John Law (2004). Roughly these three categories focus our attention on 1. what is “in” the journal/field; 2. what is “out,” but may have been in given different conditions (e.g., different editors, different year of submission – thinking about the 50-year span and the faddishness of education practice and education research); and 3. what is not even thinkable as a possibility of being “in.”

If we use Law’s typology, we can begin with the seemingly straightforward question about “What is ‘in’?.” A logical place to start with this is to look at the aims and scope of the journal – what is “in” must surely fall within these descriptors. However, such descriptors of desirable content are still subject to the processes of double-blind review and decision-making by editors. It is hard (perhaps impossible) to describe with any degree of accuracy the actual parameters of the aims and scope of a journal, and what does and does not fit within these – there is, perhaps, some desirable flexibility here. This leads us to the invited “conversation” piece in this issue. The aim of the invited “conversation” is not to try to reflect on the parameters and effects of the journal’s aims and scope, nor to clarify why some papers have made their way “in” and some not. Instead, we (the editors) wanted to invite a conversation about some of the ways in which teacher education is constituted as a “field” and some of the contradictions that play into judgements about what is “in” and what is “not,” that is, what is “missing.”

To pursue the idea of “missing” a little further (connected to question “2” above), we might identify a category of authors who decided to not even submit something to APJTE. What can we say about that work, we wonder? We imagine that there are people who have read the journal and seen what it publishes and seen that it is not a good “fit” for their thinking and writing. What can we say about this work – perhaps very little, though we would note the responsibility on editors to “show” the aims and scope of the journal through the evidence of the work that makes it into print. Here, we can say that there are scholars who self-deselect (self-edit?) the journal as a place for their work.

While some might self-deselect the journal, others are left out by the default selection of English as the language of publication. We acknowledge that the vast majority of teacher education research and knowledge are generated in different languages than English, and that those that are written in English do not adequately represent the richness of knowledge and understanding about teacher education available through different linguistic means. APJTE receives a large number of manuscripts by non-English using researchers, and yet they only represent a tiny portion of the global knowledge base. This recognition helps us stay modest about the kind of claims we make about teacher education and research.

One other point in relation to the argument above (and that spans perhaps point “2” and “3” from the typology above) is consideration that “speculative” thinking and writing are largely absent from submissions to the journal although we acknowledge some notable exceptions (see, for example, Hattam, 2020). The point here is that very few submissions to the journal take a “philosophical” approach, opening up, for example, broader questions about the purposes of teacher education (research) and drawing insights into the deep quandaries about the contemporary assumptions that undergird our “field.” Just as few submissions engage directly with questions about the history or sociology of teacher education. Why is that? One answer may be, that in the last 40 years or so, in the Anglosphere predominately, the overt reductivist, (de)politicisation of teacher education has diminished initial teacher education to a relentless focus on “what works.” The struggle to control the field of judgement (Ball, 2012) about what counts as teacher education has been lost well and truly by scholars and educators with an interest in history, philosophy, sociology, and perhaps even more precisely and devastatingly, “education” as a discipline in and of itself (see Biesta, 2014) (something that has been “there” but been largely invisibilised and/or sidelined, in the Anglosphere at least, in recent times).

There is perhaps a final category of “missing” which leads us to consider the work that does not even make it into a textual form that is submissible – work that is “unimaginable.” This is a very wide category, but we could focus here, as a provocation, on the category of teacher educators whose work is largely invisible to the field – teachers who work as teacher educators in schools on “continuing” education through “in-service” professional development. This work is largely undertaken because of the reduction in what counts as teacher education that we noted above, so that the responsibility for educating teachers shifts to ongoing work “on the job” in schools.

2The other papers in this issue also connect in one way or another to the “missing.” In the first paper in this issue (which is based on a keynote presentation at the 2018 ATEA conference), Critical race self-study: An abolitionist methodology, Souto-Manning challenges the status quo of whiteness in teacher education, via a reframing of self-study methodology through critical race theory. In the second paper, Double indemnity: Dualities, tensions and loss in the moral economies of feedback, Clarke and Elbra-Ramsay explore the contradictions that student teachers face in giving and receiving feedback highlighting the predicaments they face through the incursions of neo-liberal regulatory regimes into initial teacher education. The paper discusses “notions of irresolvable dualities and contradictions and on notions of loss – in order to read the emerging practices and understandings of student teachers in relation to assessment in terms of the moral economies of feedback” (Clarke & Elbra-Ramsay, 2022, p. 3). Mankki and Kyrö-Ämmälä, in the third paper, look at the “demotives” of admission for potential teacher education students in Finland; they suggest that “pre-admission demotives … refer to the reasons student teachers had for turning down primary teacher education and, thus, the profession during the application period” (p. 4). They note also that “(B)y focusing on student teachers’ demotives and also addressing the characteristics of teacher training, perspectives that are mainly missing from professionally fixed studies concerning career choice, retention and turnover, our study fills the gap in existing research” (p. 6). In the fourth paper, Working towards LGBTIQ-inclusive education: Perceptions of pre-service teachers’ comfort and emotional experience, Cutler, Adams and Jenkins report on research conducted with Master of Teaching pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’), exploring their feelings of comfort and emotional experience as they prepare to work in classrooms with LGBTIQ students. They draw on Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach in order to investigate the PSTs’ emotional experience (perezhivanie). In the fifth paper, Teacher professional learning and development: Linear discourses and complexities of teacher learning, Phantharakphong and Liyanage write about seeking to understand teacher learning and the managerial policy discourses of commodification in which institutions utilise linear models of professional learning and development (PLD), which is contradictory to conceptualisations of teacher learning as complex, unpredictable, and individually unique.

We hope that you find some stimulation in this issue to raise questions about what is “missing” and what we might aim to do in relation to these questions. Perhaps, we could ask what it is that we desire as “teacher educators,” and, more perspicaciously, how can we bring those desires into question (Biesta, 2014) to consider what is “present,” a “present/absence” and perhaps even unthinkable?