Chapter 43
The Place of Research in Teacher
Education? An Analysis of the Australian
Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory
Group Report Action Now: Classroom
Ready Teachers
Martin Mills and Merrilyn Goos
43.1 Introduction
In 2014, the Australian Commonwealth government appointed the Teacher
Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) to investigate and make recom-
mendations regarding initial teacher education in Australia, with the view to better
preparing new teachers for the classroom. In early 2015 the TEMAG report,Action
Now: Classroom Ready Teachers,was released. An overriding concern within this
document was the need for pre-service teachers to be‘classroom ready’ upon
graduation. In this chapter, we provide a critique of the notion of classroom
readiness. Underpinning our critique is the assumption that teaching is an intel-
lectual exercise requiring constant informed and complex decision making. These
decisions require knowing about curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and a
knowledge and understanding of students and their backgrounds (the disciplines of
sociology and psychology, are of course important here). However, none of this
decision making work occurs in a vacuum, the social, political and cultural context
within which teachers operate both enables and constrains what teachers are able to
do. We want to suggest in this chapter that the concern articulated through the
TEMAG document about classroom readiness fails to take context into account and
that the absence of a concern with attributes associated with‘research literacy’will
do little to support pre-service teachers’ability to pro-actively engage with the
students (and their communities) when appointed to theirfirst school.
M. Mills (&)M. Goos
University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
M. Goos
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_43
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