Chapter 44
Educating the Educators: Policies
and Initiatives in European Teacher
Education
Jean Murray, Mieke Lunenberg and Kari Smith
44.1 Introduction
Education policy commonly emphasises the potential to make improvements to
schooling by reforming teacher education (Darling-Hammond and Lieberman 2012 ).
Initial Teacher Education (ITE) or pre-service, in particular, is widely seen as a‘lever’
to change and improve school systems. These policy documents often emphasise the
importance of changes to the recruitment criteria and structures of teacher education,
including the curriculum of programmes and its assessment modes, but they rarely
focus on teacher educators and their centrality to all aspects of work in the sector.
Professional voices, in contrast, clearly recognize teacher educators as the‘linchpins
in educational reforms’(Cochran-Smith 2003 : 3) with distinctive expertise and
professional learning requirements (Boyd et al. 2011 ; Goodwin and Kosnik 2013 ).
But, despite this long-term professional consensus, teacher educators’places in the
teacher education system remain largely‘hidden’in policy documents.
Between 2010 and 2013, however, a European Commission initiative began a
series of consultations and peer learning activities to investigate how policy makers
across the European Union 28 member states might implement improvements to
their national teacher education systems, thereby contributing to pan-European
prosperity. This initiative, as it progressed, influenced the content of a number of
key European policy documents andfinally resulted in the publication of a
J. Murray (&)
University of East London, London, UK
e-mail: [email protected]
M. Lunenberg
University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]
K. Smith
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
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_44
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