Chapter 32
Reforming Teacher Education
in England—‘An Economy
of Discourses of Truth’
Meg Maguire
32.1 Introduction
Education policy works by producing sets of ideas that become part of the‘taken
for grantedness’of the way things should be. This frequently involves the pro-
duction of hard policy texts that represent and document and illustrate what has to
be done or what is desirable to do.‘These textual artefacts are cultural productions
that carry within them sets of beliefs and meanings that speak to social processes
and policy enactments—ways of being and becoming—that is, forms of govern-
mentality’(Ball et al. 2011 : 122). But policy texts are constructions—constructions
and productions of versions of‘truths’. As Foucault explains:
Contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the
reward of free spirit nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves.
Truth is a thing of this world: It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.
And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its own regime of truth, its
“general politics”of truth; that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function
as true. (Foucault 1980 : 131)I start with a brief review of the main propositions for reforming English teacher
education. Much of what is being enacted is an amalgam of long-standing policies
and strategies that have been revisited and reworked tofit with discourses of
markets, efficiency, competition and globalising‘necessities’. These policies are an
attempt to displace and erase any alternative and‘counter memories’of becoming a
teacher. However, despite all the rhetoric and activity around the‘new’reforms for
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in theJournal of Education Policy, Vol. 29, Issue 6,
2014, pp. 774– 784
M. Maguire (&)
King’s College, London, England, UK
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_32
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