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Teacher Education inTransition: Re-formingprofessionalismJoan Whitehead , William Taylor & John SmythPublished online: 28 Jun 2010.

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British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 21, No. 4, 2000

REVIEW SYMPOSIUM

Teacher Education in Transition: re-forming professionalismJOHN FURLONG, LEN BARTON, SHEILA MILES, CAROLINE WHITING & GEOFF WHITTY, 2000Buckingham, Open University PressReviewed by Joan Whitehead, William Taylor & John Smyth

The title of this book, Teacher Education in Transition, is well chosen. The authors take astheir focus policy changes in the form, content and provision of initial teacher educationin England and Wales and ask for the reasons behind the changes which have dominatedteacher education since the mid 1980s. Re-forming professionalism is the answer theycome up with.

Furlong et al. turn to Bowe and Ball’s analysis of the policy process and their discussionof the ‘context of in� uence’, ‘the context of text production’ and the ‘context of practice’to help understand the changes they describe. Whilst the authors primarily address thelatter they also identify key in� uences on the production of various government circularswhich have prescribed the format of teacher education and the kind of professionaldesired by the state.

Amongst the voices they highlight have been protagonists for change from neo-Liberals and neo-Conservatives of the New Right. There have also been in� uences fromwithin the profession, and in� uences from those within the state or those appointeddirectly by it. Readers are therefore provided with a lens through which to view thedirection of change but are left to draw their own conclusions as to the relative in� uenceof these groups on the policies that have emerged.

Despite changes in government, Furlong et al. show a measure of continuity in thedirection of reforms. For example, they point to the position held by the neo-Liberalsduring successive Conservative governments. Apparent throughout has been their desirefor greater diversity of provision in order to reduce the monopoly of teacher educationwithin higher education, to enable schools to enter the market and, as with neo-Conser-vatives, for professionals to model themselves on practitioners in schools. Whilst theauthors document particular instances of this through the greater role of schoolsincluding the establishment of School Centred Initial Teacher Training Schemes, Isuggest there are now further examples in the Labour Party’s Green Paper proposals forTraining Schools. In other words teacher education remains in transition and theauthors’ analysis continues to offer important insights beyond the time scale addressed inthis text.

The main focus of the book is, however, a retrospective analysis of the ‘context ofpractice’, with Furlong et al. drawing on data from their Modes of Teacher Education

ISSN 0142–5692 (print)/ISSN 1465-3346 (online)/00/040637–11 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/0142569002001954 2

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(MOTE) Projects which in 1991 and 1996 surveyed the views of teacher educationproviders and their students. The aim of these national surveys was to monitor theimplementation of the various policy changes on course type, structure and content. Itwas also to see whether students were acquiring a new form of professionalism throughdifferent forms of knowledge, skills and values. In so doing the authors explore differentmodels of partnership between higher education institutions and schools as well as thechanged role for higher education institutions following schools’ greater responsibilities inthe training process.

The authors discuss the implementation of the reforms that reduced individualinstitutional autonomy, created greater uniformity and, with the increased involvementof schools, brought � nancial pressures as money was devolved. It was this transfer ofresource and the heightened accountability of institutions which the authors argue posedthe greatest challenge to teacher education and, in their view, outweighed that ofincreased government prescription of the curriculum. It is likely that those of us wholived through the reforms are likely to concur with this analysis. Attempting toreappropriate a model of professionalism is arguably less exacting than coping witheconomic destabilisation. Indeed many course leaders believed it was possible to meet thegovernment’s agenda of competences whilst retaining their own value commitments tomore extended notions of professionality. Less possible to resist was the increase instaff–student ratios, redundancies and casualisation and the authors make only a passingreference to institutions’ varied capacities to cope with these.

Chapter eight, devoted to a discussion of students’ views of their training, offers adifferent perspective on the implementation of policy and provides evidence of thegovernment’s success. Building on earlier studies carried out by HMI, Furlong et al.conclude that ‘the response of students to what is one of the UK’s largest sectors ofhigher education had been turned from a signi� cantly negative one to an overwhelm-ingly positive one’. The greater practical focus and work in school are identi� ed as keycontributory factors. The authors indicate that this is not, however, at the expense of therole of higher education in students’ learning. They found that the overwhelmingmajority of students still perceived this as of crucial importance particularly for a senseof vision in their teaching.

Data from the students revealed that, in areas in which they felt inadequatelyprepared, it was PGCE students who felt signi� cantly less con� dent than BEd students.There was also some evidence that primary headteachers felt BEd were better preparedthan PGCE students. In the current climate of policy steers by the government towardspostgraduate training, I believe these comparative � ndings about different training routesare worth serious consideration.

Following the consideration of the MOTE research, the two concluding chaptersrevert to a consideration of the contexts of in� uence and text production and provide anupdate on policy development in the late 1990s. Apparent is continuity with previousreforms albeit with even greater controls on teacher education providers throughOFSTED and the TTA thereby increasing the role of ‘the evaluative state’. Furlong etal. also, however, point to a shift in direction. In particular they cite the government’sextension of its in� uence over providers, limiting their scope for professional judgementthrough the requirements of the National Curriculum for initial teacher education andincreasing the prescription of professional knowledge.

In a thought-provoking � nal chapter that addresses globalisation and postmodernity,the authors refer to similar reforms occurring in the USA and Australia though theycaution against ignoring key contextual variations. Developing this theme I found it

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salutary to be reminded that even within the United Kingdom there have beendifferences in the implementation of the reforms. In fact the authors point to lack ofuniformity of response and examples of effective resistance by the profession outsideEngland.

Looking to the future, the authors pose the fundamental question as to who has alegitimate right to be involved in de� ning teacher professionalism. They go on to askwhether it is possible for there to be a model of teacher professionalism premised onmore participatory relationships with communities beyond the state and extending intocivil society. Whilst this offers a new prospect for the future, whether or not it materialisesseems to me to be highly contingent on the greater establishment of trust between societyand the profession. Is that trust yet apparent? Can it become a reality?

All in all I found the book compelling reading providing further insight into thereforms that have dominated my own professional life in the last decade.

Correspondence: Joan Whitehead, Faculty of Education, University of the West of England,Redland Hill, Redland, Bristol BS6 6UZ, UK.

As a beginner in the education and training of teachers in the late 1950s, I used to listenwith some asperity to those who having been in the business since the 1944 Act or evenearlier, maintained there was nothing new under the sun, what we thought to beinnovations had all been tried before, and change seldom meant improvement.

Forty years on, I would have no justi� cation for taking a similar view. As John Furlongand his colleagues point out in this admirably detailed, evidence-based study, the way inwhich we prepare teachers has in recent decades been one of the most active andcontested areas of educational policy. Robbins, James, the 70s reorganisation, the newB.Ed, the four disciplines and CATE are behind us. The TTA, SCITT and OFSTEDare very much with us.

From its earliest beginnings, the formal preparation of teachers for work in primaryand secondary schools comprised four main elements. First, the facts, concepts and skillsthe student required to help pupils learn. Second, how these facts, concepts and skillswere best taught. Third, the theory and practice of education, including past and presentideas about its purposes, how schools are organised and run, the physical and mentaldevelopment of children, the historical and social context of schooling and the roles andresponsibilities of teachers. Fourth, practice teaching in classrooms.

There has always been debate about how these elements are best taught and learned,their relationship to one another, and what proportion of the total programme ofpreparation each should constitute.

Should subject knowledge be acquired before professional studies begin—the consecu-tive model—or concurrently with such studies? Should subject studies be pursuedprimarily for the purposes of students’ intellectual development or geared closely to thecontent of the school curriculum? Should methods of teaching be the responsibility ofsubject or of education staff? How should study of the theory and practice of educationbe organised?

The last of these questions was a particular focus for attention during the 1960s. Therewas greater awareness of the part that the organisation and content of schooling couldplay as an instrument of social policy. Research on child development was providing

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more information relevant to classroom practice. The erosion of traditional patterns ofrespect was calling into question the basis of teachers’ authority. The expansion of theuniversities, and particularly of social studies, was making available an increasing numberof graduates in psychology, philosophy, history and sociology as candidates for collegeposts. The increasing size of schools consequent upon rising birth rates, urbanisation andthe lengthening and reorganisation of secondary education were all serving to focusattention on the quality of leadership and administration. The introduction of the B.Edhad made it necessary to stiffen the intellectual content not merely of the subject studiescomponents of the Certi� cate courses that comprised Part I of the degree, but of thestudents’ whole programme.

All these factors played their part in shifting attention to the study of education andto the rise of what came to be known as the four disciplines approach to educationalstudies.

As Furlong et al. make clear, in the years that followed the ‘new study of education’was much criticised. Education departments were taken to task, not so much for theirconception of what the study of education should comprise, as for their allegedlymisguided attempts to burden theory-resistant and practically minded students withdistinct courses in each (or at least some) of the ‘four disciplines’. Teachers, it was alleged,were taking up their responsibilities with inadequate preparation in classroom manage-ment and in the teaching of reading and mathematics.

Furlong et al. rightly underline the importance for subsequent developments of theNew Right critique of the 1980s and early 1990s. Perhaps of greatest signi� cance for theassault by the groups they categorise as neo-Liberals and neo-Conservatives was aconviction that colleges and university departments of education were � lling students’heads with political and social values inappropriate to the development of a market-based economy. It is unlikely this was ever the case. But attacks from the Right werefuelled by sometimes strident left-wing advocacy of the role that teachers might beencouraged to play in social change, consonant with the radical tone of Labour thinkingat that time. The right-wing critique was not simply reactionary. It was also reactive. Iam not sure the authors have given suf� cient attention to this aspect.

One of the major areas of contention and change during the period covered by thisbook has been the relationship of those parts of the preparation of a teacher that takeplace in university and college and those undertaken within schools. The issue is, ofcourse, important in all forms of professional training. How much time during a courseshould be spent in hospital/law court/company of� ce as compared with lecture room/library/laboratory? How should these different kinds of experience be related to oneanother?

The idea of partnership between higher education institutions and schools was not newin the 1980s. Although often featured in the rhetoric of teacher education, it had lessoften been embodied in institutional structures and arrangements conducive to itsdevelopment. For the most part it was the universities and colleges that designedprogrammes, organised courses and evaluated student progress. Heads and teachersco-operated with higher education staff in assisting students during the time that theyspent in classrooms. Some were invited to serve on professional and academic commit-tees. Their involvement varied markedly between institutions and was sometimes verylimited.

This state of affairs occasioned little comment. Teachers had their own work to do.They had no formal part to play in preparing members of their own profession, althoughmost were willing enough to help students allocated to them for periods of teaching

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Review Symposium 641

practice. Some were outstanding in this role, remembered by those whom they helpedwhen ‘college days’ were long forgotten.

Admittedly, complaints could be heard that not enough information was suppliedas to what college staff expected of the schools or about what students knew or didnot know. On some accounts, HEI tutors did not pay enough attention to teachers’assessments of students’ strengths and weaknesses. Generally, however, ‘schoolpractice’ was a well established routine, generating both anxiety and satisfaction forstudents, creating some extra (but often enjoyable) work for teachers, and conferringa bonus of a few extra free periods when students, as was often their wish, could safelybe left to look after a class on their own. It also gave tutors, nearly all who had asuccessful record of classroom teaching, a chance to renew contact with a variety ofschools.

Well before partnership became a policy imperative, some colleges and universitieshad begun to recognise weaknesses in the traditional pattern of school experience. Inparticular, there were dif� culties in relating the facts, ideas, concepts and skills thatstudents were acquiring in their lectures and private study to those they required andcould employ during their time in classrooms. Although it was not until the 1980s thatthese problems received system-wide attention, there were plenty of earlier attempts toachieve a better relation between what was generally (but sometimes inappropriately)spoken of as ‘theory’ and ‘practice’.

In addition to periods of ‘block practice’ during which students spent several weekscontinuously in schools, arrangements had long been made for shorter periods ofobservation, attachment or ‘study practice’, sometimes in groups rather than individuallyand with a college tutor present throughout. The preparation of materials for use onstudy practice might also be an element of the subject or professional courses thatstudents followed in college.

Whole classes of children came into HEIs, with their teachers, to take part indemonstration lessons, to make use of facilities unavailable in their schools, to work withindividual students or groups of students. Teachers began to be supplied with much moredetailed information about the students with whom they would be working duringperiods of block practice and about the content of the courses these students had beenfollowing.

Carefully planned and executed, such arrangements had a positive effect on thequality of professional training and were well received by students. But they were by nomeans universal. Furthermore, although once quali� ed a teacher could be employedanywhere in the country, differences in the balance of course content meant heads andgovernors had no assurance that a particular candidate had knowledge and experiencerelevant to their requirements. It was factors such as these, and not only ill-informedprejudice on the part of the New Right, that inspired some of the changes institution-alised in the 1980s.

During the 1980s a small number of universities initiated internship schemes that gavea new dimension to partnership. School and college staff co-operated much moresystematically in the design of courses, elements of which were taught in schools duringextended periods of attachment. The architects of such partnerships, of which that atOxford became the best known, did not always welcome support from those who,sometimes for other reasons, advocated a general move towards school-based training.The success of such schemes owed a great deal to lengthy periods of dialogue withlocal authorities and school management, careful preparation of all the staff con-cerned, and signi� cant additional funding. To universalise school-based training by

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ministerial decree, without the necessary resources and adequate preparation, wasunlikely to produce better teachers and might bring the whole partnership approach intodisrepute.

Thus as it developed during the 1980s, the partnership approach drew its strengthfrom two contrasting sources. One was the emerging practice of colleges and universities.The other re� ected the wish of right-wing politicians and opinion formers to break whatthey saw the producer monopoly of the colleges and departments of education, to strikea blow at one of the most vulnerable � anks of the so-called education establishment,whose perceived values and practices they rejected.

On the basis of data provided by the two Modes of Teacher Education (MOTE)projects they undertook in 1991–92 and between 1993 and 1996, Furlong and hiscolleagues show that partnership is not a unitary concept. They identify three ‘idealtypes’—complementary, collaborative, and HEI-led.

The � rst term can be used to categorise arrangements advocated in Department forEducation Circulars in 1992 and 1993. It entails the assignment of distinct, clearly set outand customarily contractual responsibilities to HEIs and to schools. Both may collaboratein initial planning, but beyond that there is little overlap. HEI tutors no longer visitstudents in schools; the supervision of classroom-based study is a responsibility ofteachers. There is little opportunity for continuing dialogue. Mentoring comes fromwithin the school. Any integration of the knowledge acquired in the HEI and in theschool must be undertaken by the student her or himself.

In contrast, collaborative partnerships of the kind developed at Oxford provideopportunities for tutors and teachers to work together throughout a student’s programmeof study. There is a conscious effort to integrate knowledge acquired in different settings.Tutors work in the schools and teachers in the HEIs. Both are fully involved in assessingstudent learning and performance.

The researchers found that in most instances reality did not coincide with either ofthese ideal types. Most partnerships are still HEI led. Heads and small groups of teachersare involved, but not as fully as with the collaborative schemes. Tasks are clearly de� ned.Mentors in schools are trained by the HEIs. Assessment is led and determined by HEIs.What students should learn in schools is de� ned by HEI staff, often in consultation withteachers, but with the initiative for change remaining with the HEI.

This hardly coincides with what some critics of teacher education advocated in the1980s and 90s, and what from time to time (and with no recognition that anything haschanged in the past 20 years) they continue to advocate today. Nothing less will satisfythem than the ending of higher education’s role in teacher education. The setting up ofSchool Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) schemes after 1993 seemed to offersuch an opportunity.

There are more than 30 SCITT schemes listed in the Initial Teacher PerformancePro� les published by the TTA in September 2000. Most are small, with between ten and50 students. Many contract with universities and colleges for aspects of their work.Several have done well in recent assessments. Between them, they prepare a growing butstill small proportion of the total number of teachers in training.

There have been many changes in teacher education since 1980, fully and fairlyanalysed by Furlong and his colleagues—the licensed and articled teacher schemes,competency-based training, mandatory partnerships, central accreditation and inspec-tion, the introduction of national standards and curricula. But the preparation of the vastmajority of teachers in England, although undertaken within a very different regulatoryframework from that which existed at the beginning of the 1980s, still depends on the

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work of university schools and departments of education and colleges and institutes ofhigher education.

This should cause neither surprise nor regret.A university or college based education for professionals is not just a matter of status.

It is essential for the acquisition and development of a language to facilitate learning fromexperience, communicating with colleagues and specialists, and bene� ting from theoutcomes of systematic research. As Michael Fullen has emphasised, cognitive under-standing of why a method or procedure or approach works better is essential toimprovement as a practitioner. Courses constructed round topics and themes close tostudents’ own interests and concerns and important to good classroom practice, gaincoherence and depth when related to disciplinary foundations. The ideal of the re� ectivepractitioner to which many educators are committed requires a language with which tore� ect. The contributions of specialists in higher education institutions greatly bene� tevery member of the profession and, ultimately, every pupil.

Teacher Education in Transition is an indispensable record of how and why teachereducation changed in the 1980s and 1990s. John Furlong, Len Barton, Sheila Miles,Caroline Whiting and Geoff Whitty deserve our thanks for a thorough, research-basedanalysis of changing ideas of teacher professionalism in turbulent times.

Correspondence: Sir William Taylor, Research and Graduate School of Education,University of Southampton, High� eld, Southampton S017 1BJ, UK. E-mail:william.taylor@btinternet.com

Politicians worldwide are incredibly good at reading the public mood and inventingattention grabbing sound-bites, and education is a particularly apposite candidate. InAustralia Labour Prime Minister Bob Hawke proclaimed the need to become ‘the clevercountry’ and Kim Beazley the current aspirant is singing the virtues of ‘the knowledgenation’, while in Britain the Blair equivalent was ‘Education, Education, Education’. Butbehind all of these glib one-liners there is a deeply disturbing pathological absence ofpolitical will to honestly present educational issues in their wider complexity, let alone acapacity to imagine ‘solutions’ that might actually have some feasible hope of working.The problematising of education is well and truly closed down prior to the supposedsolutions being reached for.

Nowhere is this trajectory more stunningly evident than in the case of the awakeningpolitical interest in the sleeping giant of teacher education in Britain. As the authors ofTeacher Education in Transition show, teacher education has moved in a remarkably shortspace of time from being ‘something of a backwater’ (p. 1), through a ‘ferment of policychange’ (p. 2), to becoming ‘a major site for ideological struggle between government andothers’ (p. 2). The process by which the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution’ have beensimultaneously located in the subjectivities of teachers, is at one and the same timeunerringly smart and incredibly stupid. Demonising teachers as being the root ‘cause’ ofthe national inability to sustain international economic competitiveness during times inwhich ‘capital has been let off the leash again’ (Davidson, 2000) with the equivalent oftwo trillion (AUD) dollars of speculative capital washing daily through international stockexchanges (only a tiny fraction of which is used to � nance trade or real investment), may

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seem like a good way of de� ecting attention away from the real issue of ‘coping with theglut of capital’ (Shutt, 1998) caught up in the daily � ight and futile search for ways ofmaintaining and maximizing high rates of return. But, proclaiming teachers as thesaviours to problems brought about by the greed of the international stock markets isstaggering in its audacity and/or its naivety—and it this which lies behind the educa-tional policy manoeuvres discussed by the authors of Teacher Education in Transition. Whatthe authors of Teacher Education in Transition skilfully reveal is the incredibly complex webof intrigue, falsi� cation and half truths successive British governments (and their counter-parts elsewhere in the world) are prepared to go to sustain the myth that all will be wellwith western capitalism if only we subjugate welfare capitalism and get education,teaching and teacher education under control. While certainly vastly more complicatedthan space permits in a brief review, this does provide something of the big picturebackdrop against which to talk about what is being attempted in this courageous book.

The authors advance several cogent reasons, in Britain at least, as to why teachereducation is an especially good candidate for fundamental reform, not the least of whichis its historical vulnerability through the ‘tenuous hold’ of teacher education withinhigher education. But more substantively, what has been undertaken in Britain (andelsewhere) has been a taking out of the very heart of teaching and a re-de� ning of itthrough the notion of professionalism. Capitalising on the constructed and growingworldwide mood of professionals (teachers among them) as no longer being trustworthybecause of the alleged self-interested pursuit of their own interests over those of theirclients, it has not been hard in the British case to construct policies that go to the heartof ‘knowledge’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘responsibility’ which constitute the essence of teachers’capacity to make professional judgements. The rather simplistic logic behind thisprofessional purging and cleansing, is that if initial teacher education is changed radicallyenough, then in time, this will work through into the kind of cultural metamorphosisnecessary for the creation of a new and more compliant generation of teachers imbuedwith different knowledge, skills and values.

The major ideological policy weapon used in the early stages in the 1980s, as theauthors show, was the widely held perception that teacher education in higher educationlacked relevance to the real world of schools—a disaffection willingly fed by teachers aswell as students in training. Arguing for a more practically focussed form of teacherpreparation and ‘opening up training to the “realities” of schooling’ (p. 22) and as aconsequence improving the quality of training, therefore did not appear to be anespecially radical (but nevertheless powerfully persuasive rhetorical) way of beginning torefocus professionalism away from what some perceived as the ideological confusion inhigher education. Requiring lecturers to return to schools for periods of reinduction andexposing students in training to longer periods in schools, were two of the strategies forreculturing teacher education from within, but they had only limited effect as long aspower continued to reside with higher education. The ultimate potency of measures likethese lay in their being the harbinger of stronger measures to follow that were designedto rework the teacher education enterprise through ‘partnerships’ and ‘collaboration’with schools.

As the policy and practice of the reform process became even sharper and moredeeply etched in the 1990s with the incursion of the mandated National Curriculum forTeacher Education and the tighter central control exercised through agencies like theTTA and OFSTED Inspections (with their competencies, standards, performanceindicators, performance-related pay and quantitative indicators), the struggle shiftedsomewhat in emphasis to one of the conception of teacher professionalism as comprising

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the ‘autonomous (and re� ective) practitioner’—knowledgeable about current educationalpractices and their theoretical underpinnings, capable of making independent judge-ments—versus the ‘competent practitioner’—knowledgeable about the centrally de� nedcontent of teacher education and increasingly capable of meeting the marketiseddemands of the globalised economy.

While the driving force behind these muscular reforms to teacher education may wellbe as the authors note, the creation of an ‘imagined future’ in which Britain ‘has amodern world-class education system capable of competing in the globalised world’ (p.159), what remains highly questionable is whether such ‘low trust’ (p. 175) and ‘exchangevalue’ relationships between society and its teachers built solely around the notion of‘commercialised professionalism’ (p. 170), have the ef� cacy with which to sustain anddeliver such a grand aspiration. There also needs to be a sober realisation of the‘limitations of what has in fact been achieved in the United Kingdom’ (p. 171). Whileevidence is not easy to come by, experience in Australia and the USA has been thatdespite the posturing rhetoric and discursive shifts ‘there has been relatively little statemandated revision of the form and content of teacher education programs’ (Sachs &Groundwater Smith, 1999, p. 215). But, as the authors of Teacher Education in Transitionnote, while governments elsewhere might appear to be moving closer to the narrowerEnglish de� nition of professionality and increased central control of teacher education,places with ‘genuinely federal governments’ (p. 172) may be more sanguine that changesto school-based training cannot be imposed through policy, but have to be ‘managedthrough carefully orchestrated initiatives aimed at in� uencing opinion as well as volun-tary codes …’ (p. 172) sensitive to more extended notions of professionality.

Clearly, whether in Britain or elsewhere the economic imperative and its accompany-ing ideology lies at the heart of teacher education reforms and one has to search invain among the detritus of ill-conceived economic reforms to � nd even a feint trace ofan educator’s sensibility—a matter that should be cause for considerable alarm. Asif we need more evidence of the folly of these same policies, even as I write, theconsequences of the failed 15 year New Zealand economic fundamentalist experimentare becoming even more embarrassingly evident. The value of their dollar is down to 40US cents, in less than 50 years New Zealand has moved from one of the world’swealthiest economies to having the highest level of foreign debt of any OECD country,its physical and human capital is in tatters, the chasm between rich and poor isexploding, and the architects of this failed experiment have become conspicuouslysilent—as one commentator put it, ‘we hardly ever hear from these guys any more’(Millmow, 2000, p. 3).

But the bleak situation described by the authors in Teacher Education in Transition, neednot be so. Research by myself and colleagues in the Teachers’ Learning Project (Smyth et al.,1999a,b; Hattam et al., 1999; McInerney et al., 1999) around a grassroots reform cultureof teachers’ work, suggests that far from all (or even a majority of) teachers having beenco-opted into the external reform process, the reality may be quite different. The processof reculturing underway in many of the Australian schools we have been researching fornearly a decade, suggests that when schools � nd the spaces around which to create acourageous vision where they can keep alive a culture of debate about teaching andlearning, then the vision and the practices of socially just schooling are still very muchalive and a possibility—even within regimes that have of� cially expunged the policy textsand that presents themselves managerially. The point to be taken from this is that evenin such uniformily depressing accounts as those offered in Teacher Education in Transition,at the level of schools, classrooms and the practices of groups of teachers, there are still

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‘enunciative spaces’ (see Smyth, 1998) within which teachers are able to push back andshape notions of extended professionality.

A way of drawing this symposium review to some conclusion I want to allude to somepointers suggested by Knight et al. (1993) and colleagues in Australia, as a possible wayof rethinking how the British experience might be different. The elements are at the levelof ‘working notes’ towards a more ‘enabling’ view of teacher education. At centre, thereneeds to be a material policy that goes beyond symbolic gestures and that is grounded ineconomic, social, political and cultural realities, but that does not collapse down to‘narrowly instrumental human capital approaches to teacher education and the manage-rialist and economic rationalist assumptions currently associated with them’ (p. 140).Such a reforming approach has to be a critically dialogic policy in the way it moves beyondbeing merely responsive, but genuinely attend to the multiplicity of voices that have tobe heard if the reform is to work. What is required is a view of professionalism that goesconsiderably beyond a crippling view of competencies that are separated from values andtheoretical frameworks, and that work against the training of technicians to produce an ‘expertknowledge base’, ‘specialised skills’, ‘intellectual strength’, ‘collegiality’ and ‘a deepcommitment to the public good’ (p. 141). Such a reform approach to teacher educationis part of a conscious socially just policy struggling to embody practices of teacher educationthat teach for democracy, equity and social justice. There is a move here to go beyondFordist lines to embrace diversity and � exibility in content and structure, but withoutstandardisation or centralisation. And, there is a more sophisticated view of thepracticum than occurs in the reproductive, training by osmosis, or imitative models of theimpractical practicum—to one where immersion in a variety of different sites is a way ofunpicking complexity, of seeing how particular contexts work, and for whom. Theemphasis is away from unhelpful binaries (like pre-service/in-service and theory/practice)towards a renewing professional education where theories about teaching and learning takeaccount of the wider condition in which both exist, like ‘trust, commitment, co-operationand common purpose’ (Bowe et al., 1992, p. 5). In contrast to a utilitarian or extractiveview of knowledge there is an appropriating [of] ‘really useful knowledge’ through criticalre� ection that ‘begins with personal experience and the circumstances in which it wasshaped’ (p. 148). And, � nally, the emphasis is one of moving beyond minimum standards ofcompetence and national benchmarks � xated with ‘detailed taxonomic speci� cations’ (p. 15)and symptomatic of a de� cit approach, to allowing teachers the space to de� ne what itmeans to be a teacher and the associated knowledge, skills, qualities, and attributes.

The authors of Teacher Education in Transition, have given a fascinating and detailedaccount of a particular instance of teacher education reform, but what they chronicle isan agenda desperately lacking a commitment to the features of educative reform forteacher education. For that reason, the book deserves to be widely read and discussedso that the overwhelming direction of the reforms can be resoundingly refuted.

REFERENCES

BOWE, R. & BALL, S., WITH GOLD, A. (1992) Reforming Education and Changing Schools: Case Studies in Policy Sociology(London, Routledge).

DAVIDSON, K. (2000) Capital has been let off the leash again, The Age, 13 September, p. 17.HATTAM, R., MCINERNEY, P., SMYTH, J., & LAWSON, M. (1999) Promoting Student Voices. Investigation Series,

Teachers’ Learning Project (Adelaide, Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching).KNIGHT, J., MCWILLIAM & BARTLETT, L. (1993) The road ahead: refashioning Australian teacher education for

the twenty-� rst century, in: J., KNIGHT, L., BARTLETT, & E. MCWILLIAM (Eds) (1993) Un�nished Business:

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Reshaping the Teacher Education Industry for the 19990s pp. 139–153 (Rockhampton: University of CentralQueensland Press).

MCINERNEY, P., HATTAM, R., SMYTH, J., & LAWSON, M. (1999) Making Socially Just Curriculum. InvestigationSeries, Teachers’ Learning Project (Adelaide, Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching).

MILLMOW, A. (2000) Sorry New Zealand, but you buck must stop there, The Age (Business), p. 3.SACHS, J., & GROUNDWATER SMITH, S. (1999) The changing landscape of teacher education in Australia,

Teaching and Teacher Education, 15, pp. 215–227.SHUTT, H. (1998) The Trouble with Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure (London, ZED

Books).SMYTH, J. (1998) Finding the ‘enunciative space’ for teacher leadership and teacher learning in schools, Asia

Paci�c Journal of Teacher Education, 26(2), pp. 91–202.SMYTH, J., MCINERNEY, P., LAWSON, M. & HATTAM, R. (1999a) Making Socially Just Curriculum. Investigation

Series, Teachers’ Learning Project (Adelaide, Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching).SMYTH, J., MCINERNEY, P., HATTAM, R. & LAWSON, M. (1999b) Critical Re�ection on Teaching and Learning.

Investigation Series, Teachers Learning Project (Adelaide, Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching).

Correspondence: John Smyth, Director, Flinders Institute for the Study of Teaching,Flinders University of South Australia, P. O. Box 2100, Adelaide, Australia 5001.

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