Chapter 27
Helping Teachers and School Leaders
to Become Extra-Critical of Global
Education Reform
Martin Thrupp
Teacher education faces a big problem, or rather a series of interconnected ones. If
teachers want to be of service to current and future generations, they need to
understand our neo-liberal and globalising world and the positioning of educators
within it. When teachers and school leaders are really well informed they will often
challenge local elements of the global education reforms that pose a threat to public
education systems (discussed in Part 4). But initial teacher education students and
experienced teachers alike oftenfind it difficult to tap into rigorous research ideas
andfindings given the abundance of material from neo-liberal advocacy groups and
policymakers available through traditional or social media(Malin and Lubienski
2015 ). As well, since a lot of privatisation reform is quite subtle or‘hidden’(Ball
and Youdell 2007 ), being aware of only the most obvious manifestations of reform
will not be enough. Teachers could oppose reforms quite stridently but still not
realise how they are gradually welcoming global education reform, sometimes
referred to as the GERM (Sahlberg 2011 ), into their schools and classrooms.
There are great challenges for both initial and continuing teacher education to
prepare teachers to be‘extra-critical’, strongly searching rather that just a little bit
so. In initial, teacher education the problems often start withfinding space within
reduced and increasingly managerial teacher education programmes to discuss the
politics of education and probe the politically conservative perspectives that
generations raised under neo-liberal governments increasingly manifest. Unless
teachers are provided with the skills to question the politics of what they are
reading, they may end up being influenced as much by the advocates of
neo-liberalism as by those against the GERM. Once in the teaching workforce there
are ongoing challenges for teachers tofind space to think about the politics of their
work, to interact with colleagues who have a less critical orientation, and to
M. Thrupp (&)
University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
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_27
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