Transforming Teacher Education

Transformation: What exactly does it mean?

Transformation has, rather like innovation, become a popular way of describing of change, perhaps especially in public services. There are several books with ‘transforming teacher education’ somewhere in the title and many more articles and papers. In public discourse, transformation, as a description of change, often seeks to invoke a sense of powerful and irreversible progress but, I would argue, not always in ways that also justify the radical sense of the transformative process. In my own use of transformation and transformative, I make three critical distinctions.

First, I distinguish between transformation and reform as qualitatively different kinds of change. Reform, as Williams (1973) pointed out, has at least two emphases. The first is the restoration of an ideal state – to ‘re-form’ lost conditions on the basis of cultural and/or political nostalgia. The second is that it is a kind of change imposed from outside or ‘above’ on the basis of a perceived superior rationality or ethos; historically, as Williams points out, these value-rationalities were religious whereas they became more explicitly political throughout the twentieth century. Transformation, however, I understand as change initiated from within individuals and organisations that is inherently unpredictable in outcome and leads to a profound change in both underlying abstract values as well as the concrete details of practices. Changes in these values and practices will have a dialectical relation to culture and politics but there is a profound difference in the locus of agency and the need for change. I therefore distinguish between exogenous (reform) and endogenous (transformative) change with transformative change in practices and institutions necessarily drawing momentum from participant agency.

Second, within current uses of transformation in relation to organisations and society more generally, I distinguish between, on the one hand, transformation as a kind of radical change where new kinds of practices emerge as a result of participants’/citizens’ agentic interrogation of existing values/rationalities and, on the other, transformation as a change in appearance – or even perhaps direction of travel – but informed by existing values and commitments. I understand the latter meaning of transformation – which I am speculating may well be the dominant understanding in our field today – as one both informed by a mathematical logic and requiring mathematical logic to be operationalised and measured. This meaning for transformation is sometime claimed by those working within a ‘learning sciences’ perspective, specifically as defined by the OECD (2002). With reference to educational and social justice, the latter meaning of transformation plays into broadly neo-liberal equality and ‘social mobility’ discourses. The former meaning of transformation – and the one which I deploy in my work – instead takes an equity perspective and accepts the challenge of an assets-based, culturally-sustaining approach in education (and teacher education, in particular) to broader questions of political economy.

Thirdly, my use of the concept of transformation is explicitly informed by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and the importance of the concept of the ‘object’ of activity. For Leont’ev (1978), the object of activity was its ‘object-motive’, which he explained as follows:

The main thing which distinguishes one activity from another, however, is the difference in their objects. It is exactly the object of an activity that gives it a predetermined direction. According to the terminology I have proposed, the object of the activity is its true motive (Leont’ev, 1978, p. 62)

The object of an activity is both what engages/attracts and motivates the participation of individuals in a collective activity (such as helping to prepare teachers). By initially perceiving a new, potentially shared (or shareable) idea and the reasons for pursuing it – and then by collectively working on it – the object is both fashioned and potentially changed through the volitional participation of individuals from within the activity system. Working on the object involves encountering and negotiating contradictions, conflicts, double-binds and multiple antagonisms – personally experienced, affective, but also structural constraints within social systems (including at the level of society) that need to be overcome and broken away from for new forms of the activity to emerge (see my 2015 book with Jane McNicholl for a longer explanation). Analysing these contradictions and negotiating new forms of collective activity might lead to reconfiguration of social practices through a continual re-working of the object of the activity. That is why learning, change and development, from an activity-theoretical perspective, is sometimes described as the transformation of the object of activity; it is a dialectical process that involves new ideas and new ways of organizing the work by those who do the work. Transformation, in CHAT terms, therefore, involves both cultural-historical analysis and future-oriented desires to produce new organisational arrangements and divisions of labour and to create a new social world of, in terms of my interests, teacher education. A critically important part of a transformative process is to understand it as changing the object of activity – not only what is being worked on but why and for whose interests

So, in the same way that innovation isn’t only about capitalising new products in a market and also isn’t only about uses of technology, transformation has another – and I would say – more precise meaning in theorising change and theorising change in education, in particular. First, it describes change processes that take place within social systems or formal organisations and that require the need-for-change and the work-on-change to be driven by the momentum of participants’ agency rather than only by – or primarily by – external political energy. Second, transformation involves a shift in underlying values and rationalities as well as concrete labour practices on the understanding that these are in a dialectical relation. Transformation is not driven by a mathematical logic of measurement within existing conditions but seeks to change the conditions themselves. And thirdly, transformative change is motivated by a desire not only to do things differently but to have a different object for the activity, to consider not only the how question but the why and for whose interest questions also.

This post is based on a contribution to a paper I’m writing with Mariana Souto-Manning and Jamy Stillman. We’ll be presenting it at AERA this week.

References

Leont’ev, A.N. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality. Hillsdale, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

OECD (2002). Understanding the Brain – Towards a New Learning Science. Paris: OECD.

Williams, R. (1976). Keywords. A vocabulary of culture and society. London: Croom Helm.

SCOTENS Conference: 13-14 October, Dundalk, Ireland

I’ll be talking at the 2017 SCOTENS conference in Dundalk in a few weeks, on the conference theme of Educational innovation – the challenge of evidence-informed change.

SCOTENS – the Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South – is a network of 37 college and university education departments, teaching councils, curriculum councils, trade unions and other organisations in Ireland established in 2003 and administered by the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh. It’s a unique educational network of committed organisations across a contested border, in my experience, and I’ve really enjoyed attending their conference in previous years (the last time being in Limerick in 2015).

Here’s the conference theme description:

As teacher educators we are conscious of the contested discourse around evidence-informed change, whether in school classrooms or in terms of teacher education itself, and we feel that there is an important debate to be had around the role of evidence in driving innovation: what sort of evidence is needed? Who is producing it? Is it adequate? Are policy makers listening? What are the consequences of not listening? Are there tensions around values and evidence, and if so, how do we reconcile them? How do we address the tendency to have ‘one size fits all’ innovation? How do we obtain the best balance among decision makers: policy makers, researchers, professional educators?

The 2017 Annual SCoTENS conference theme aims to encourage speakers, panel members and delegates to consider these kinds of questions in a way that prompts reflection, discussion and debate.

I’ll be talking about my recent study of historical cases of innovation in initial teacher education in England and the particular contribution of joint curriculum work with schools. And, arising out of this research, proposing a different meaning for ‘innovation’ to one focused on technical ‘efficiency’ and cost-cutting. I’m looking forward to it.

The challenge of transformation in teacher education: New article in Acta Didactica Norge

‘Reforming’ teacher education is the go-to policy area in many countries around the world. You can have a bash at teachers (they’re not good enough) and university lecturers (they’re why teachers are not good enough) and also that ‘out-dated’ model of the welfare state where general taxation provides basic services for the general population in a relationship of democratic accountability and for the public good (‘how old-fashioned!’). You need some private providers who will do some ‘disruptive innovation’ (for which read ‘high risk codswallop that will, in the final analysis, be financially underwritten by the state when it inevitably goes south’). And while what I’ve just written may be mildly sarcastic in tone, it is undeniably the basis on which English governments have operated for at least 17 years.

But ‘reform’ means many different things. Norway is one of those countries also deeply interested in reform, especially with that highly successful Finnish neighbour. Norway has a dose of PISA envy like many countries but how they are choosing to reform teacher education (and under what, for them, is a right-wing government) stands in stark contrast to the unholy clusterfuck that is the recent White Paper in England. Far from trying to dismantle a system of public or community schools, abolish teaching qualifications, reduce university involvement, generally foul things up and fall over into a ditch, the Norwegian reforms – first mooted in 2010 and announced in 2014 to be implemented in 2017 (now that’s a difference too) – entrench and enhance the university contribution, challenge the universities to do better, reorganise and restructure parts of the higher education system and put practitioner research at the heart of professional preparation.

Yet, after over five years of working in the Norwegian system, I think they and us (here in England) suffer from the same problem: we haven’t worked out the relationship between the teaching profession and a bunch of academics in universities (teacher educators) who have an important relationship to that profession but are not it. In large part, I think it is a knowledge problem in that the knowledge that tends to get people from schools work in the university is not, in the end, valued by the higher education system (as useful as it is in the preparation of teachers) and the knowledge that is valued within the university rewards system is often assumed to be capable of being simply transferred or, at best, translated into schools. And when that doesn’t work, it is usually schools and teachers (who, remember, haven’t been prepared well by the universities in the first place, so the argument goes) that get the blame. The university researchers go all hoity-toity and remind us that the effect size was significant and it was just those pesky teachers’ lack of fidelity to the design that was the problem.

A special issue of the Norwegian journal Acta Didactica Norge has just been published on teacher education and teacher education reform with a range of fantastic articles by leading Norwegian researchers. There are analyses of pilots of the 2017 reforms and the development of the new five year Master’s degree for all primary school teachers. There is a great historical analysis of Norwegian teacher education curricula from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century that shows how control of the curriculum was lost by the profession to a point in 1965 when it was just one university (Oslo) that determined what teachers were taught (and not much about teaching, it seems). There are some very interesting papers on digital tools creating new dialogic spaces for teacher development. And also reports from projects led by ProTed, the Norwegian national centre of excellence in teacher development led by Andreas Lund. I was asked to write an epilogue for the special issue that responded to the articles and drew, briefly, on the international comparison.

In making the argument I do in the article (which you can download for free from the Acta Didactica Norge website and also from the Articles section of this site), I draw on the work of Paul Carlile who works in organisational theory and his ideas about the complex processes that are required when different actors have to work together across complex boundaries. So far, I argue, we have managed to get new teachers to do some pretty difficult translation work quite successfully and the risk of the Norwegian reforms is that this situation will continue, with the struggle to translate now encoded in a Masters’ thesis. But the potential for genuine transformation is a challenge for both Norway and England and requires us to work through that question about the relationship between one of the largest and most important professions in society and a group of academics in the increasingly specialised and competitive environment of universities.

The Empire Strikes Back: Reforming Teacher Education in Australia

Hot on the heels of the Carter Review in England, comes Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers, Australia’s very own review conducted by a ministerial advisory group. It is the season to review teacher education, it seems. In fact, it is always the season to poke around and point a finger at the supposedly feckless employees of university faculties of Education who, when they are not turning impressionable twenty-somethings into Marxists are generally incompetent and disinterested in helping anyone to learn how to teach in a school. This kind of finger-pointing has gone on for so long, it is now traditional. And I’ve clearly internalised the criticisms!

Reform of initial teacher education is one of those globally travelling educational ideas that researchers such as Jenny Ozga and Terri Seddon have been investigating for years. Every aspiring knowledge economy has to be interested in reform of teacher education, regardless of how successful their own school systems really are. Built on a kernel of truth – that the quality of teaching is the in-school factor that makes the biggest difference to student achievement (overall, poverty is the factor that makes the biggest difference) – it now seems compulsory for any self-respecting economy to be ‘committed to reform’ of teacher education (amongst other things) on market-based principles and promoting a mix of provision (universities but also organisations such as Teach First, Teach for Australia and its parent body, Teach for All).

One of the strangest examples of this form of compulsory participation in the rhetoric of teacher education reform is Norway, where the city of Oslo hosts a Teach First Norway affiliate of Teach for All. The city of Oslo has one of the most successful school systems in the country and, in order to find the grit and challenge they believe is necessary to create good teachers and leaders, they send their Teach First Norway trainees to England to some supposedly ‘challenging’ London schools. For ‘challenging’, we might read diverse and multicultural. One might argue that this is a perverse form of tourism for a country and a school system with its own rather different problems to solve.

Action Now, from Australia’s Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG), is a fine example of this rhetoric of reform. First, on the positive side, it is a good deal more systematic and weighty than its English cousin, the Carter Review. TEMAG has a modest but relevant list of references; it provides copious information about the historical context in Australia; the perceived challenges are set out carefully and they are argued, at least, rather than simply asserted. In comparison, the Carter Review looks slightly amateurish.

On the other hand, Action Now is a very strange document indeed, one that sometimes gives the appearance of being bought ‘off the shelf’ from the steady stream of former policy-makers/consultants from England that ply their trade internationally when they or their bosses lose power. I know that it was authored by TEMAG but when one reads about national program accreditation and national standards and national quality assurance mechanisms (all of which makes a horrible kind of sense in England), you do wonder how these directions fit within the shifting political settlement of federalism in Australia where education technically remains the responsibility of individual states, although universities are funded federally. Also, TEMAG seems to focus its attention on younger people with poor academic qualifications whereas the majority of new entrants in Australia are older and many are career-changers (rather unlike England). Part of the proposed solution to anxiety over academic quality is to insist on national skills tests in literacy and numeracy – a solution implemented for years in England and one that has never resolved concerns about teachers’ intellectual authority (but that has made a tidy sum for the purveyors of these tests under contract to the state). As one reads the report, it is easy to recognize familiar acronyms and bits of jargon that look likely to have been imported from Blighty. One example is the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership with its echoes of the (soon to be abolished, it seems likely) English National College for Teaching and Leadership. One might suggest it is still a case of ‘the empire strikes back’ when it comes to TEMAG and Australia’s teacher education reform agenda.

TEMAG’s most obvious borrowings are the literacy and numeracy tests for student teachers. As I said, England has operated a national system of online testing in literacy, numeracy and the use of ICT for over fifteen years. A small industry of test preparation activity has grown up alongside the tests and that has been good news for educational publishers, of course. But the mere existence of these tests has done nothing to change the panic over teachers’ academic capabilities that has been whipped up by governments around the world. Even though they pass these tests, teachers continue to be criticized for their academic capabilities. Globally, politicians continue to argue that if only we could get more of the highest qualified graduates into teaching, the attainment of their school systems would rise to the top of the PISA league table. So the introduction of these relatively trivial literacy and numeracy tests in Australia (trivial in the sense that they can never offer more than a one-off measurement of a narrow set of decontextualized skills of people who are already graduates) is little more than a token response to this widespread anxiety.

And in most cases, it is pure anxiety. The policy tourists often refer to the case of Finland where getting into teaching is a highly competitive business. As former Finnish school official and Harvard professor Pasi Sahlberg has recently demonstrated, the basis on which teaching has become such a competitive profession in Finland is not on the basis of academic qualifications alone. The selection that takes place in Finland is of a much wider range of knowledge, skills and dispositions – dispositions such as being able to relate to and work with children and young people, for example.

Similarly, prior academic qualifications are not always a reliable predictor of effectiveness as a teacher. The American Educational Research Association’s panel on teacher education surveyed the research literature and concluded that the only school subject where there was some evidence that teachers’ high levels of specialism in a subject made a difference to their students’ outcomes was in secondary Mathematics. That said, the teachers of the students who made the most progress in Mathematics had joint degrees in Mathematics and Education rather than Mathematics alone. And primary school children whose teachers had PhDs in Mathematics did less well than children whose teachers were not as highly qualified in the subject. So the lesson as far as teachers’ academic capabilities are concerned is a complex one. That’s not to argue that teachers shouldn’t be literate and numerate, of course. But while introducing such tests in Australia may have some temporary symbolic impact, they are unlikely to solve the problem – which is one of improving teacher preparation as an aspect of the improvement of the whole school system.

In Transforming Teacher Education: Reconfiguring the Academic Work, Jane McNicholl and I analyse the reform/defend dichotomy that bedevils attempts to improve the education of teachers all around the world and relies on some globally travelling reform ideas (both neoliberal and neoconservative) that often make little sense in local contexts. Instead, we argue, countries that are genuinely interested in improving school systems and the preparation of teachers might focus their attention on reconfiguring the kind of work academics in Education faculties do in relation to the profession of teaching. Of course partnerships with schools are important, as is quality mentoring in practice. And of course it’s a good idea to model workforce requirements to predict the number of teachers you need and to anticipate shortages and over-supply. TEMAG recommends all these good ideas. But neither the Carter Review nor TEMAG confront the central challenge of how university Education academics should work with the profession of teaching, how the division of labour between universities and schools in the preparation of teachers might be better conceptualized, and how we can support the early and mid-career development of teachers so as to retain them in the profession and help them to develop to their highest potential. It would be a shame if Australia borrowed some ideas that have had little genuine impact elsewhere.

‘The force is with you, Skywalker, but you haven’t transformed teacher education yet.”