Now, what is not ever mentioned is that becoming a doctor is a long and arduous
process spread over many years. Second, it is not made clear that trainee-medics
spend most of thefirst two years at their various universities. When they do start
their hospital placements, they are still expected to attend classes and undertake
academic study. In this most practical of training, theory, practice and the capacity
to exercise professional judgements based on evidence-informed reflection are
firmly welded together—as they need to be once the doctor is legally qualified to
start to practice.
Hospitals are large and patient care is one-to-one, so many trainees can be absorbed in the
one institution. In schools, however, children are taught in groups of twenty or more, and
parents are liable to grow restive if their child’s education consists of wall-to-wall trainees.
(Smithers and Robinson 2011 : 32)What the analogy between hospital teaching school and the training schools for
teacher education attempts, is to couple together a long-standing and highly
respected aspect of a high-status professional preparation with an aspect of current
education policy and in this way, to lend virtue and legitimation to what is being
proposed. This is not to say that training schools have nothing to offer; that would
not be the case at all. But it is worth highlighting the contribution made by inno-
vatory PGCE programmes that ask (to paraphrase Yandell 2010 ) not only how it is
that teaching and learning are achieved by but‘how might it be otherwise’—
questions that‘cut across any simple oppositions of university and school-based
elements of the PGCE. However, what I am primarily concerned with here is the
production of a‘general politics of truth’that endeavours to add legitimacy to some
proposals rather than others.
32.6 ‘An Economy of Discourses of Truth’
There is so much more that could be said about the reforming of teachers and
teacher education, related funding issues and the current dilemmas of high teacher
turnover and recruitment problems in some subject areas and in some types of
schools. However, I want to return to where I started, to Foucault and power, truth
and policy:
There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth
which operates through and on the basis of this association. We are subjected to the
production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the
production of truth. This is the case for every society. (Foucault 1980 : 39)This paper has set out to‘think aloud’about the current policy proposals in cir-
culation in England that address pre-service teacher education, how these propo-
sitions are being justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being
managed. In England, what we are seeing is the attempted erasure of the role of the
university-based teacher educationalist as a knowing expert and the valorization of
practical experience, craft and skills. This move has been somewhat easier to bring
32 Reforming Teacher Education in England... 491