Chapter 35
The Prevailing Logic of Teacher
Education: Privileging the Practical
in Australia, England and Scotland
Trevor Gale and Stephen Parker
35.1 Introduction
Teacher Education (TE) in OECD nations is undergoing its most significant challenge
since its relocation from colleges to universities. The focus of this change is the
contribution that teacher education makes to the development of teachers for a new
political and economic future. Today’s teachers now need to produce students who
perform highly on international rankings in PISA (and TIMSS, PIRLS, etc.) in a
context of increased neo-liberal governance led by‘big data’and policy as numbers
(Grek 2009 ). When students perform at levels below national aspirations, it is their
teachers who are deemed to be at fault and it is their teacher education that needs to
change.
This logic is particularly evident in nations such as Australia and the UK, with
increasing emphasis on professional standards, measures of competency and tea-
cher effectiveness. These have emerged in response to the perceived poor quality of
teaching and teacher education^1 that have presumed to be responsible for declining
achievement among Australian and UK school students relative to other‘reference
societies’ (Sellar and Lingard 2013 ). Along with the public perception that
schooling does not do enough to teach the‘basics’of literacy and numeracy,
T. Gale (&)S. Parker
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Parker
e-mail: [email protected]
(^1) The terminology for teacher education varies between nations. In Australia it is known as teacher
education (TE), while in the UK the terms initial teacher education (ITE) or initial teacher training
(ITT) are more common. Our preference is for‘education’rather than‘training’although for the
purposes of this chapter we understand the terms synonymously in how they are used within
quotations and the like.
©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_35
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