ABSTRACT
Where are we with teacher education? Cochran-Smith has described what she terms the ‘new teacher education’ in the United States as a ‘public policy problem’ (Cochran-Smith 2008: 271). Echoing Furlong’s (2005) observation that teacher professionalism and the education associated with it has become increasingly managed by national governments to meet national policy aims, she argues that teacher educators should challenge the narrowest aspects of current versions of ‘new teacher education’ and should build on the opportunities they offer. In order to build on preoccupations with the ‘ends’ of education, she proposes questioning the purposes of education with the aim of including among them socioemotional development, participation in democratic processes and combating inequalities. Government-funded education has long been a ‘public policy problem’ in the UK, whether the point was to educate the newly enfranchised or to prepare a civil service for an expanding Empire. But policy imperatives change, therefore the relationship between societal goals, the activity of schooling and the practices of teaching needs to be regularly scrutinised to identify disjunctions, outmoded legacies and unintended outcomes. The question driving the scrutiny has to be forward-looking, for example, ‘What kinds of teachers for what kinds of learners?’ However, the answer to this question won’t ever be clear. As Vygotsky once put it: ‘ Questions of education will have been resolved when questions of life will have been solved’ (1997a: 350). Uncertainty is perhaps one of the few certainties facing education systems (Edwards et al. 2002). ‘New teacher education’ appears geared towards high stakes testing, which is seen to be linked to economic competitiveness (Cochran-Smith 2008). Yet, as I write, the US Congress is debating a bail-out of the Detroit car industry: survival in the changing conditions of the global economy may call for more than good test scores. In that context, teacher education systems that reduce the capacity of
practitioners to respond to learners, to work with other professionals who support children’s well-being or to adapt to changing socioeconomic conditions deserve to be revisited. The challenge, as the English Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) and National College for School Leadership (NCSL) now recognise, is to re-professionalise, as informed decision-makers, a profession trained for almost two decades in England in efficient curriculum delivery in ways that limited their responsiveness to learners (Edwards 1997, 1998; Edwards and Protheroe 2003, 2004). In this chapter I discuss what Vygotsky’s ideas, and their development into cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), can offer an understanding of teachers’ professional learning and development which is aimed at creating a professionalised workforce. I shall outline briefly how learning is conceptualised within CHAT; discuss how CHAT allows a questioning of legacy practices and an understanding of the production of new practices for new purposes; reflect on the insertion of values and motives into pedagogic settings; offer the idea of ‘teaching as resourceful practice’ based on CHAT principles; and consider the implications for teacher education. The message throughout these discussions will be that teaching as a responsive practice should be seen as part of a responsible professional activity which should be supported at a policy level. These sentiments find strong support in Mulgan’s recent analysis of ‘the art of public strategy’:
many of the best strategies are simple – they provide a framework within which smart, responsive and responsible people and units can work things out for themselves, supported by rapid feedback and easy communication. Over elaborate strategies that attempt to prepare for every eventuality are much more likely to fail.
