Government and the national polity have also attempted to infuse the ideal of
quality teaching throughout their engagement with mass media and popular cultural
texts. This effort is reflected in diverse tactical efforts, for example: the direct
association of the Prime Minister, not the Minister of Education, with a prestigious
national annual awards ceremony for teaching excellence; and more broadly, the
intentional deployment of“quality teaching” as a catch-all proxy or umbrella
concept by ministers and officials whenever early childhood and compulsory
schooling“problems”and their“solutions”are discussed.
In this sense, quality teaching may be regarded as a socially constructed dis-
course, worthy of critical analysis in its own right. This paper takes the now
ubiquitous Quality Teaching Discourse (QTD) as a basis for asserting that teacher
educators need to be reflexive about their responsibility as questioning mediators of
official policy discourses. In New Zealand, tertiary education institutions enjoy a
statutory responsibility to act as a“critic and conscience”of society. This obligation
is vested in the staff who work in them. Accordingly, teacher educators in this
instance are ethically obligated to understand how and why key ideals about the
role of teachers in society become part of common understandings and practices,
and the ways in which, in turn, this shapes the possibilities of their work with
teaching candidates and of theirs with students in classrooms.
This stance would certainly constitute a form of teacher education scholarship
but is it teacher education research in the sense expected of contributions to this
volume? Lawrence Stenhouse is credited with the aphorism that research is simply
systematic inquiry made public. In that sense, the tradition of education policy
scholarship is systematic in its attempts to trace the historical, political and social
trajectories of educational ideas (such as the QTD) and their practical effects in a
particular time and place. The advent of the World Wide Web has produced, among
other things, a viral spread of New Public Management (NPM) education policies
across jurisdictions, the rise of social media as a highly influential public sphere,
and the emergence of new policy governance networks comprisingfluid, dynamic
alliances of public, private and philanthropic actors. In response, policy governance
scholarship has required immersion in the virtualfield and attempting to keep track,
and make sense of, these policy making moments as they unfold more or less in real
time across traditional and new media.
Drawing on these forms of scholarship, this chapter, then, offers a personal
analysis of the underlying meanings and purposes of what might otherwise be a
taken-for-granted trope in contemporary teacher education discourse, namely that
overcoming structural and often intergenerational structural inequalities is simply a
case of“fixing-up”teachers. Thefirst part of the paper identifies the key origins and
features of the QTD in the local New Zealand context. The remainder of the chapter
identifies other elements of the day to day work and working conditions of teachers
which also need to be taken fully into account by both teaching candidates and
teacher educators (i.e. partiality, performativity, materiality). In developing the
analysis in this way, I claim to be modelling a reflexive approach to the work of
teacher educators that is essential if: (i) teacher candidates are to be able to develop
a critical understanding of education policy texts and the ways in which normative
496 J. O’Neill