teaching but given relatively little attention in professional formation programmes.
Philosophical inquiry has a distinctive and valuable role to play in addressing this
deficit, as Heilbronn’s earlier work on professional judgement has also illustrated
(see Heilbronn in Heilbronn and Foreman-Peck 2015 ).
Further, as part of an interdisciplinary initiative, philosophers of education have
collaborated with other teacher educators to develop deliberative and dialogical
approaches to reflecting on everyday decisions in classroom situations (see the
chapter by Shortt et al. in Heilbronn and Foreman-Peck 2015 ). These could be
general moral and ethical dimensions of teaching practice; for example, why teach
these students, this content, in this context, and in this way? What course of action
should I take in this situation? Or other, more specific concerns that might exercise
teachers; are my students free to choose what they want? What’s a fair way to
divide the limited time I have to help my students?
We are not suggesting that only philosophers who are teacher educators research
these areas well, or even that they have the best ideas. On the contrary, one
distinctive feature of philosophy of education as a discipline is that it provides a
means by which the researcher can‘conceive otherwise’in systematic and struc-
tured ways within thefield. In a time of considerableflux in teacher education, one
contribution that those philosophers who are not too intimately bound up in its
practice might usefully make would be to initiate critical reflection on the nature
and purpose of teacher education, leading to recommendations as to how it might
change in the medium to long term future.
Nevertheless, where they are motivated to do so, and adequately equipped, it
should be possible for those teachers and teacher educators to think philosophically
about their own practice, as well as about the policy and theory which frame it. The
problem is, however, few teacher education programmes allow either the intellec-
tual space or an environment conducive to philosophical deliberation. Instead, we
are faced at the macro level by a crowded teacher education system driven by
instrumental, competence-based learning outcomes, focussed on‘doing’rather than
‘thinking’; and at the micro level by set tasks and assignments which are not
amenable to philosophical interpretation.
36.4 Philosophy in Teacher Education Research: The Role
of Philosophers in Multidisciplinary Research Teams
Teacher education research is part of a wider landscape of shifting funding,
structural and governance arrangements for education research more widely, and for
publicly funded research and development more generally. This landscape is
characterised by increasingly selective and concentrated funding, particularly in
conditions offinancial restraint. The allocation of funding has been supported by
detailed assessments of research performance at organisational (for example in the
UK Research Excellence Framework or Hong Kong’s Research Assessment
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