Chapter 33
Teacher Educators’Responsibility
to Prepare Candidates for Classroom
Realities
John O’Neill
33.1 Introduction
School teaching in most countries is legislated as a form of professional practice
and governed by specific system level preparation, registration and continuing
certification requirements. Teacher education programmes offered in universities
are required culturally to induct candidates into contributing discipline knowledge,
and contractually to ensure functional preparedness andfitness to enter the pro-
fession. In this sense the candidates are consciously positioned both inside and
outside the academy, having to negotiate the various and subtly different normative
expectations of their in-university and in-school educators. In turn, university tea-
cher educators must reconcile their own occupational tensions between dutiful
promotion of and critical engagement with official government policy on curricu-
lum, pedagogy and assessment matters.
In New Zealand over the last decade, the term“quality teaching”has emerged as
a powerful touchstone around which to nurture a common set of premises about
desirable teacher education practices and to encourage the adoption of officially
preferred values, behaviours, competencies and dispositions among pre-service,
novice and experienced teachers. Over that same period, the control agencies of
teaching (the Ministry of Education [MoE], the Education Council [EC], the
Education Review Office [ERO]) have proselytised this common language
throughout the commission, execution and evaluation of teacher education policy
initiatives in an effort to ensure greater predictability of teacher education workforce
quality and supply. Teacher professional associations or unions meanwhile have
tried to accommodate policy demands by linking “quality teaching” to the
advancement of professional and industrial concerns about the materiality and
performativity strands of state teachers’working conditions and lives.
J. O’Neill (&)
Massey University, Palmerston North, 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_33
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