Chapter 9
You Teach Who You Are Until
the Government Comes to Class: A Study
of 28 Literacy Teacher Educators in Four
Countries
Clare Kosnik, Lydia Menna, Pooja Dharamshi and Clive Beck
Something dramatic has happened to teacher education policy in the last 30 years. Up until
the 1980s, in virtually every country around the world, teacher education was a relative
backwater in terms of educational policy...Today as one international report after another
makes clear (Barber and Mourshed 2007; Mourshed et al. 2010; Organisation for Economic
Co-Operation and Development [OECD] 2005), teachers are now seen asthekey resource
in ensuring global competitiveness...In a world of intense competition among nations,
education increasingly plays a key role. National prosperity, social justice, and social
cohesion are all seen to rest on the shoulders of education (Lauder et al. 2007)...(Furlong
2013 , p. 29)As reform efforts in education continue at a rapid and seemingly unrelenting rate,
teachers and teacher educators must navigate the choppy waters of education by
reconciling a plethora of initiatives. For example, in Australia“[t]here have been
101 government inquiries of one sort or another into Australian teacher education
since 1979”(Louden 2008 , p. 357). Beside the sheer number of reports and ini-
tiatives, the rhetoric around education is polarizing especially for those working in
literacy education: on the one hand there is former British Secretary of State for
Education, Michael Gove, advocating that literacy instruction is “about the
preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage” (Furlong 2013 , p. 40), while
UNESCO is promoting literacy for all with awareness and sensitivity to cultural
needs ( 2006 ). Wading through this vitriolic and contradictory minefield is difficult
C. Kosnik (&)C. Beck
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]
C. Beck
e-mail: [email protected]
L. Menna
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]
P. Dharamshi
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_9
135