Teacher Education and Its Discontents

Courageous in the face of coercive curriculum control, wilfully optimistic in the intellectual wasteland of standardised ITE content that requires new teachers to know what to teach and how to teach it but keeps them ignorant about why, and who decides this, this volume demonstrates the value and the importance of dissensus, and the need to take an agonistic stance towards the preparation of new teachers in neoliberal conditions around the world. For me, this book has clearly exposed the Catch 22 of teacher education practice. In so doing it takes a stand against the global education reform movement that serves the interests of rapidly changing late neo-capitalism, a stand that is simultaneously ethical, intellectual and political, as the authors show how this paradoxically fails to educate for change. It is a must read for all those who care about teachers and teacher education – particularly those who recognise that if teacher education succeeds in producing teachers fit for the purposes of GERM, then it fails to prepare them to educate. For a field caught up in the intellectual pessimism inherent in institutions that must increasingly provide ITE programs compliant with details of mandated core curriculum content, the authors clearly articulate the challenge. Without a preparation that equips new teachers with knowledge about what education is, and has been, and what schooling has done in different times and places, how can they think about what they are doing here and now? How can they question the decisions other people have made about what works for all teachers, when they need it to work for their own students? How will they know what to try when it doesn't? This book channels the real moral and ethical concerns that many teacher educators share about where our field is heading, in a collection of compelling thought-pieces that can resource us richly with something approaching a new philosophy of teacher education. It’s an invitation to teacher education to think theoretically about what it’s doing, and it helps us do so. Jo-Anne Reid, Emeritus Professor, Charles Sturt University, Australia This excellent and inspiring collection of essays shows that teacher education is far from limited by normative national frameworks. Instead, those frameworks tend to be the very reason for our discontent, driving the need to clarify the fundamental educational questions at the heart of teaching; how to take responsibility for the freedom of the other? This book is an important, challenging and thoughtful contribution to the conversation. Professor, Dr. Carl Anders Säfström Director, Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy Maynooth University, Ireland