programmes can be a place where they develop these (see, for example, Lampert
and Burnett 2014 ). However, we propose that supporting teacher adaptability,
especially in relation to supporting the most highly marginalised students within a
school, requires enabling teachers to become competent consumers of research, to
use this research to apply it to their own contexts and to delve deeper into that
context through sound research skills.
We have shown that the TEMAG report did nod towards the need for teachers to be
able to understand and analyse data in their school contexts. However, as was noted in
the BERA/RSA report,‘many of those who contributed to the Inquiry are deeply
concerned by the emergence of an environment, often narrowly data-driven, that
appears to militate against teachers’engagement in more open forms of research and
enquiry’(2014, p. 11). The same concerns most likely apply in the Australian context
as well. It appears that governments, and by implication TEMAG, want teachers to be
proficient in analysing data that relate to academic outcomes, and principally aca-
demic outcomes on standardised tests, both national and international. The perverse
effects of such a focus, for example, the thinning down of pedagogies, the narrowing
of curriculum options, high suspension rates, etc. have been well documented
(Lingard and Sellar 2013 ). These perverse effects are likely to be amplified when
teachers’research skills are focussed on improving their‘data literacy’in relation to
test scores. Here the teacher is likely to become primarily concerned with using this
limited‘data’in order to construct themselves as a‘good teacher’, and by corollary,
teacher education will become focussed on pre-service teachers’learning how to
construct such an image (Mills and Mitchell 2013 ). Teacher education institutions’
reputations depend on pre-service teachers’ability in this regard.
Other concerns about research in the TEMAG report are also limiting in their
scope and appear to be tied into notions of accountability. Aspects of the GERM are
clearly present in this report. For instance, universities are required to provide
evidence about the quality of their programmes in relation to teacher aptitudes, how
they have selected students for their programmes and the extent to which they have
assessed pre-service teachers’ classroom readiness. Putting teacher education
institutions under such a microscope is also likely to impact upon practice, espe-
cially when‘classroom readiness’is interpreted in narrow ways, such that the
disciplinary depth of educational research may well be reduced in the programme.
We do not have a problem with accountability. However, we are concerned with
issues of accountability to whom and for what. At the moment the‘who’is very
much government and governments whose views on the purposes of education tend
to restricted to human capital understandings. As such the‘what’often relates to
schools, their teachers and teacher education institutions being able to demonstrate
what they have done to support improvements in student academic performance,
especially as it relates to international economic competitors. Ironically, we are of
the view that this is a self-defeating approach. In contrast, and in line with the
BERA/RSA report, we contend that the education system would be improved by
supporting schools to become‘research-rich’environments.
Our focus in this chapter has been on the need for pre-service teachers to become
‘research literate’as part of becoming what TEMAG has referred to as‘classroom
648 M. Mills and M. Goos