At the same time, some of the new approaches are gaining global traction, not
only through the work of global companies like Pearson, but also philanthropic
endeavours like the Gates Foundation and Teach for All, which brings together
national initiatives like Teach for America, Teach First and Teach for Australia.
Meanwhile, the OECD has stimulated a developing discourse about‘clinical
practice’models of teacher preparation amid concerns about how best to prepare
teachers for contemporary schools in terms of the relationship between theory and
practice. This is potentially much more constructive than the parochial debates in
England and America about the institutional location and leadership of teacher
education, although it has sometimes been used as ammunition in those debates.
OECD ( 2010 ) argued that
the best-performing countries are working to move their initial teacher-education pro-
grammes towards a model based less on preparing academics and more on preparing
professionals in clinical settings, in which they get into schools earlier, spend more time
there and get more and better support in the process. (p. 238)In England, Michael Gove suggested that such approaches involved giving aspiring
teachers‘the opportunity to work in a great school from day one, just like student
medics in hospitals—learning from more experienced colleagues and immediately
putting their new skills into practice’. Not only did this somewhat misrepresent the
nature of medical training, it also ignored the extent to which the best such
programmes entail not just ‘clinical practice’, but‘research informed clinical
practice’. Indeed, in the same document cited above, OECD ( 2010 ) itself pointed
out that‘some countries, notably Shanghai-China and Finland, provide teachers
with the research skills needed to enable them to improve their practice in a highly
disciplined way’(p. 239).
Clinical practice of this sort is one of the ways in which research literacy might
be better incorporated into teacher education wherever it is located, as argued in a
recent report from the British Educational Research Association and the Royal
Society of Arts. Significantly, that report concluded by calling for an end to the
false dichotomy between university and school-based approaches to initial teacher
education (BERA 2014 ). And, in this spirit, a recent report on successful clinical
practice models in the USA embraces both university- and non-university-based
programmes (UTRU 2015 ).
25.7 New Opportunities?
Although marketization and globalisation are often seen as a threat to
university-based teacher education, they may also open up some new opportunities.
For years teacher educators have complained about increasing standardization
constraining innovation and creativity, with unintelligent accountability systems
replacing trust in professional judgement. Even the government in England says
that the intention of its reforms is to enhance professionalism, so why not see
25 The Marketization of Teacher Education: Threat or Opportunity? 381