expectations of teacher’s work may be quite at odds with classroom realities; and
(ii) teacher educators are to be able to maintain a“safe”tertiary education space in
which to interrogate increasing prescriptions/proscriptions of the state for the
preparation of beginning teachers.
33.2 The Quality Teaching Discourse
Today, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Quality Teaching Discourse (QTD) is
hegemonic in official schooling policy texts. As such it is rarely questioned. QTD
emerged from the former post-WWII“progressive sentiment”in education policy
discourse according to which the ideal teacher was an“educated person”whose job
it was to create classroom environments and programmes conducive to students’
engagement and learning. This ideal was gradually displaced following the publi-
cation of the Education and Science Select Committee’s 1986 report,The Quality of
Teaching,by an ideal of the teacher who is held accountable (by self and others) for
the measurable outcomes achieved by students.
New Zealand’s growing participation in international studies of comparative
student performance from the mid-1990s gave added impetus to the QTD policy
agenda as information and communication technologies made it easier to produce
periodic statistics to identify precisely which students were succeeding, or not, at
national, institutional and classroom levels, and to disaggregate these data by class
location, ethnicity and gender. Simple correlational analyses made it possible to
identify examples of teachers or schools that had apparently“beaten the odds”of
their socio-economic circumstances and thereby justified a new“state sponsored
possibilism”(Nash 2003 ): the ideology that all students can succeed provided only
that sufficient attention and commitment are given to improving the quality of
teaching.
In recent years, the work of selected academic researchers has been variously
co-opted, distilled and redeployed tactically by officials to justify numerous QTD
teaching policy initiatives (e.g. Alton-Lee 2003 ; Bishop et al. 2007 ; Timperley et al.
2007 ; Hattie 2009 ). Within the QTD, policy and academic discursive strands have
become mutually sustaining and practically indistinguishable over time: officials
come to depend on their preferred academics, and vice versa. Together, groups of
officials and academics acting on behalf of the State have developed QTD as, in
effect, an intellectual project. Its purpose is to secure greater control over the ways
in which teachers as an occupational group come to view their obligations to
learners and to distract attention from the deteriorating material conditions of
teachers’ work. In a very real sense, these “intellectuals” are“functionaries”
(Gramsci 1971 , p. 12) of dominant groups within the state. In Gramsci’s terms, they
are“exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political govern-
ment” in order to maintain the trajectory of QTD via the “spontaneous” or
unthinking consent of teachers in schools (p. 12).
33 Teacher Educators’Responsibility to Prepare Candidates... 497