on any specialist expertise on the subject area provided by the teacher. The teacher,
then, becomes‘a facilitator of learning’, an authority on the social and intellectual
processes of inquiry rather than an authority on the subject.
By contrast, most teacher education systems in the world require the equivalent
of three years of full-time study at degree level of the subject/s that the individual
proposes to teach (though sometimes less for primary teachers), even if subsequent
professional training has a strong emphasis on, for example, interactive learning,
group work, inquiry-based learning, etc. Why is this?
For some, the identification of the teacher with particular subject knowledge is a
key to understanding the practice of teaching. MacIntyre and Dunne stand in this
tradition when they write:
a teacher should think of her or himself as a mathematician, a reader of poetry, an historian
or whatever, engaged in communicating craft and knowledge to apprentices. (MacIntyre and
Dunne 2002 :5)Fordham extends the argument, which he says is interesting because:
‘it situates subject expertise at the heart of the activity of teaching. Furthermore, it does not
reduce subject expertise to a simplistic conception of subject knowledge: rather, it requires
us to see teachers as members of an active and developing tradition that continues to
negotiate notions of excellence and the goods that are internal to the practice’. (Fordham
2015 :1)
He goes further in suggesting that: a teacher being engaged in the practice of a
discipline is a necessary condition of pupils learning that discipline (ibid: 11) and
then‘that teaching is a form of disciplinary activity and the implications of this for
how teachers are trained and evaluated are significant’(ibid: 11).
This brief summary of an argument illustrates that teacher education depends on
a conception of what it is to be a teacher, of the nature of the authority that a teacher
can exercise, the source of his or her legitimacy in the classroom and the location of
the teacher in relation to the disciplined and professional practice of the subject that
is taught. There are contributions from social epistemology and other sources to
these questions, but, as the argument in the papers just referred to demonstrates,
they are fundamentally philosophical ones.
36.2.2 What Kind of Theoretical Knowledge
and Understanding (If Any) Do Teachers Need
to Have and to Engage with in Their Own Terms?Most teacher education programmes across the world include elements of educa-
tional theory, though in the UK these have been reduced to an absolute minimum
by successive governments deeply sceptical of its value and of, perhaps, the critical
ideological framing provided by some of the sources to which students have been
introduced.
544 D. Bridges et al.