But perhaps the most ambitious Donaldson proposal is for‘hub schools’that are
“analogous to teaching hospitals”(7), in which schools, universities, local and
national services authorities are jointly engaged. This intensification of partnerships
is imagined to enable reciprocal relationships and collaborations between relevant
institutions. For example, it would enhance support for student-teachers while at the
same time facilitating research with positive effects on student learning. The greater
integration of research and practice and greater capacity for partnership and col-
laboration has been positively received by the Scottish Government which, in
response to Donaldson’s recommendations, established the National Partnership
Group to focus on“the new and strengthened partnership working to support
delivery of effective teacher education and professional development in every
school in Scotland”(Scottish Government 2011 : 2).
This approach to partnerships stands in contrast to the predominantly
practice-oriented positions advocated by policy within Australia and England. In
these countries, improved relations and more time spent in schools are intended to
temper the theoretical knowledge of TE courses with practical knowledge and to
ensure compliance with professional standards. Whereas, Donaldson’s proposals
are more attune to the development of teaching as an intellectual endeavour, which
includes but is not confined to practice.
35.2 Conclusion: Towards a New Logic?
In setting out this prevailing logic of TE we have also sought to show that it is
flawed. It is premised on: (1) decontextualised testing regimes with narrow con-
ceptions of what counts as literacy, numeracy and knowledge more generally, thus
producing questionable representations of students’abilities; (2) a simplistic and
exclusive belief in cause–effect relations between teaching and learning, dismissive
of other sometimes more significant influences on student learning; and (3) a
presumption that if the second is true, any problem with students’test results
(identified in thefirst) must be the fault of poor teaching and, by implication, with
teachers’own education. Having diagnosed the problem in this way, the solution is
self-evident: (4) improved teacher education, which oddly means a return to a
previous conception of teaching (e.g. direction, instruction, phonics, etc.), largely
discredited in the research literature, and which reduces teaching to a collection of
practical skills technically applied according to a predetermined formula.
The rationale for all this‘revisioning’is that Anglophone nations like Australia,
England and, to a lesser extent, Scotland are struggling to retain their global eco-
nomic dominance—in the wake of the industrialisation of China, India and other
developing nations—and have pinned their future hopes on their ascendency in a
global knowledge economy. For this to happen, it is reasoned, teaching and teacher
education need to become more effective. Curriculum is thus narrowed, teaching is
scripted, TE becomes an exercise in training. Pushed to the margins is any real
sense that getting an education is of much value beyond what it contributes to
532 T. Gale and S. Parker