Chapter 37
Relational Expertise: A Cultural-Historical
Approach to Teacher Education
Anne Edwards
37.1 What Is the Problem?
Educational research should, by now, to be able to conceptualise teachers’pro-
fessional learning with some confidence, after all, human learning is where much of
our expertise lies. Yet the ideas underpinning learning to teach and further pro-
fessional development are often either contested or obfuscated. Challenges that
continue to surface include how student teachers are guided as learners in schools;
how partnerships between schools and universities support student teachers’
learning; how newly qualified teachers continue to learn; and how later continuing
professional learning occurs. Each of those concerns has been thoroughly resear-
ched, often through careful studies of specific programmes located within different
regional and natural policy environments. So much so, that the answer to each
question is often“well it depends on whether...”.
The“it depends”response has been taken as a weakness and opened the door to
searches for simple certainties that can be inscribed in policy to save teachers from
themselves. Therefore, as many have observed, teacher education has been con-
figured almost everywhere as a policy problem, to the extent that research questions
are frequently shaped by policy concerns, leading to a focus on policy solutions.
These questions mean that the research is likely to promote teaching in terms of
what Evetts has called“organizational professionalism”, where being a professional
involves following institutional rules, rather than in terms of“occupational pro-
fessionalism”, where one is held account to professional values and knowledge base
of the profession (Evetts 2009 ).
In response to this reading of how teacher education research is being positioned,
a set of theoretical tools will be offered. I shall argue that these tools can be used to
understand and promote teachers’professional learning in different teacher edu-
A. Edwards (&)
University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
©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_37
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