ABSTRACT
Teacher education has been constructed as a problem for almost as long as it has formally existed (Cochran-Smith and Fries 2005; Labaree 2004). The American Educational Research Association (AERA) Panel on Research and Teacher Education noted that, as a mode of professional formation and as a set of institutional practices, teacher education has been shaped in response to fundamental societal questions such as the nature of childhood and adolescence, the challenges of globalization, the rise of a professional class and the role of the state, as well as specifically educational concerns such as school effectiveness and teachers’ impact on educational attainment (Cochran-Smith and Zeichner 2005; see also, for example, Furlong et al. 2000; Zeichner 2009). The ‘peculiar problem of preparing teachers’ (Labaree 2004: 39) has played out rather differently around the world, but it is possible to discern a constellation of concerns that have achieved greater relative importance at different times and places. One of these might be posed as the question of the ‘contribution’ of higher education to the initial (pre-service) education of teachers. This concern speaks to the status of both teachers and teacher educators as professionals or academics as well as the kind of learning that is privileged. A related concern has been the nature of the association between the universities and the schools in teachers’ learning processes. From this concern arise questions of ‘partnership’ and ‘internship’ or ‘learning on the job’. Another has been an interest in teachers’ uniquely ‘professional’ knowledge and, following on from this, questions about what, where and how teachers learn – and how their expertise and the development of their expertise might be conceptualized. Often, it seems, the capacity of individual teachers for reflection has been preeminent in answers to these questions. Until relatively recently, much of the thinking about teacher education and development has been informed by dualistic understandings of the relationship between thought and action which seeks proof of the transfer of learning through the evident application of knowledge. From this perspective, teachers’ minds become storage devices; university curricula and
mentor (supervisory) teacher feedback are inputs; classroom teaching and learning is the output. Highly valued outputs can then become codified into competence statements or professional ‘Standards’ either imposed by the state or developed from inside the profession by researchers. ‘Standards’ can then be employed to measure both teachers’ effectiveness and the quality of the teacher-education programmes they have followed. We are less confident about the coherence and integrity of this way of thinking about teacher education than many policy-makers, and want to suggest a shift in perspective. The argument of this book is that a culturalhistorical perspective on teacher education and development offers a powerful theoretical and methodological lens through which both to analyse the problem of teacher education and to design new curricula and programmes. The chapters come from a range of international authors who have been using cultural-historical theories to understand teacher learning and professional development, analyse relationships between universities and schools, interrogate the nature of teacher knowledge and expertise and seek to understand the potential of formative interventions into teacher education in developing a theory of practice. They do so across a range of different national contexts in Europe, the United States and China. Our book doesn’t claim to offer representative coverage of education systems worldwide; rather, the chapters raise interesting questions about teacher education and teacher learning, show how these questions play out in local settings and why a cultural-historical perspective helped each contributor to analyse the issues and act on them. We next define what we mean by a cultural-historical perspective, outline how this perspective differs from vaguely ‘social’ theories of learning and suggest what some of the possible distinctions within the perspective might be.
