described by one British Prime Minister as teachers’‘secret garden’. And if
politicians have become increasingly interventionist in what should be taught and
learned in schools (the curriculum), they have also become increasingly interven-
tionist in the‘how’of teaching (the pedagogy). As many transnational reports
including several from global consultancies have drawn attention to the proposition
that the most significant determinant of educational outcomes is‘the quality of
teaching’(Barber and Mourshed 2007; OECD 2005), so we have seen much more
centralised control of many aspects of teacher preparation and development. As
becomes clear in several chapters in this book (and not only in Part I) the policies
around teaching quality have been very fraught and often characterised by deep
contradictions and paradoxes.
Given the history of professionalisation of teaching, outlined above, one of the
most glaring paradoxes, at least in some settings, has been the simple view of the
nature of teaching asserted by a number of mainly right-wing politicians. Such
views suggest that all that is required for effective teaching is good subject
knowledge and a passion for the transmission of that subject knowledge to the next
generation. These views therefore downplay the element of professional knowledge
that teachers require in order to carry out their work successfully. On this view, the
most effective form of teacher preparation is a simple modelling of existing
teachers, an apprenticeship approach, implying indeed that teaching is simply a
craft.
The Institutionalisation of Teacher Education
Views such as these have been in deep tension with the development of teaching as
a profession. Widely accepted definitions of‘professionalism’often centre around
the notion of a core of distinctive professional knowledge that is‘owned’ by
members of the profession concerned. In the case of teaching, that specialist pro-
fessional knowledge would include not only knowledge of the subject being taught
(although that is of course crucial), but also knowledge about teaching and learning
generally (often described as general pedagogical knowledge). Furthermore, there is
also what Shulman (1987) has helpfully called‘pedagogical content knowledge’,
which might be simply described as knowing how the content of a subject is best
conveyed to learners. Additionally, there is a range of knowledge about the
structures of the curriculum, the legal responsibilities of teachers and many other
matters that might be called general professional knowledge.
Depending on where one stands in relation to these views of teaching and
teachers, differing views are likely to follow about how those with an interest in
becoming a teacher may best achieve that aim. However, in many countries what
we saw during the twentieth century was a steady‘academisation’of teacher
education. From its origins in‘pupil teachers’ and the largely apprenticeship
approaches of‘normal schools’(Dent 1977) for an account of the history in
England), the study of education as afield or discipline and the growing amount of
Part I: Becoming a Teacher: Teacher Education and Professionalism 19