This book examines teacher education at a critical turning point in the neoliberal dispensation that has steered education policy and practice since the 1980s. It examines Australia's teacher education reforms, the 'TEMAG reforms' launched in 2014, and traces their effects on teacher education practice in 2019 and into the challenges, uncertainties and doubts of 2020's entangled health, economic and environmental crises. Combining data-rich insights into policy and professional workspaces and places, with a temporal sensibility, this book probes the limits of neoliberal logics and shows how school- and university-based educators' professionalism sustains the preparation of beginning teachers through school-university partnerships.
Teacher Education Through Uncertainty and Crisis explores the relationalities, spatialities and temporalities of teacher education, sketching hopeful innovations, pathways and sustainable futures for teacher professionalism. This book will be of interest to policymakers, teacher educators and other professionals who understand the power of education in an uncertain world.
About the Author: Terri Seddon is Professor of Education at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She works in the tradition of comparative historical sociologies of education and has published in the fields of education policy and governance and adult and workplace learning. In this project on teacher education, she is exploring the effects of colliding professional points of view in partnership work. Her aim is to see how these points of view unfold through complex, overlapping and intersectional spatialities and temporalities of education and what they mean for the situated learning and professionalisation of educators.
Alex Kostogriz is Professor in Languages and TESOL Education at the Faculty of Education, Monash University. He has previously held leadership positions at Deakin University and Australian Catholic University. He has published widely on the impact of neoliberal reforms on education and teacher education, in particular. Alex's current research projects focus on the professional practice and ethics of language teachers, teacher education and experiences of beginning teachers.
Joanna Barbousas is Dean of Education, La Trobe University, and former President of the Victorian Council of Deans of Education and former executive of the Australian Council of Deans. She brings a frontline policy perspective to this project on initial teacher education but also interrogates that practice-focused way of seeing professional practice through theories of visuality. Her research orientation historicises teacher education and contextualises its policy, practice with reference to the strategic opportunities that emerge with understandings of the temporal relations between past-present-future.