Politics, Policy, and Practice of Teacher Education Reform in India

Educational reform measures adopted in India since early liberalization led to systemic changes in the provisioning and practice of school and teacher education. Despite judicial intervention, the state withdrew from the responsibility of developing institutional capacity to prepare teachers, leading to a de facto public policy that undermines the potential role of teachers and their education in achieving equitable, quality education. The policy narrative constructed around quality and knowledge created the logic of marginalizing the teacher, undermining the teacher’s agency and the need for epistemic engagement. Commitment to the Constitution-led policy frame was gradually subverted by a polity committed to privatizing education and a bureaucracy committed to incrementalism and suboptimal solutions to the several challenges of universalizing quality education. A discourse constructed around teachers, their education, and practice led to narrowing curriculum to a disconnected set of learning outcomes and putting the onus of learning on the child. In the absence of robust institutional monitoring of the Right to Education effort and poor fiscal and teacher provisioning, this act too became a target of neoliberal reform, leading to dilution. The wedge between the constitutional aims of education and market-based reforms has become sharper as the practice of education prioritizes narrow economic self-interest over crucial public and social concerns. This has gradually hollowed out the Constitution-centered national policy perspective on education as critical to the needs of India’s disadvantaged and plural society. A major fallout of this has been the decoupling of concerns for social justice from those for quality education.

School-university Partnerships in Teacher Education

Myanmar, a country of developing status, is facing many challenges in reforming its education system. This article investigates the current practices of school-university partnerships from the perspective of student teachers and mentor teachers in Myanmar, where there is an ongoing process of teacher education reform. The aim of this article is to investigate the practices of school-university partnerships and the tension between partners in the training of pre-service teachers within the context of teacher education. A qualitative research method is applied in this study where six candidates were interviewed individually. Participants include three student teachers from educational universities and three mentor teachers from basic education high schools in Myanmar. The results showed that, except for student teachers’ practice teaching, there is no intensive collaboration between schools and universities. Trust is a major problem between student teachers and mentor teachers. Different opinions and perspectives towards teaching and learning are also causing tension between partners. Although there is tension between mentor teachers and student teachers, they handle this through alternative collaboration activities and negotiation between partners.

Socially Constructed Teacher Professionalism: An Historical Analysis of Teacher Education Reform Policies of Canadian Case

Employing comparative historical method, this study provides an account of reforms and policies in teacher education from 1970s to the present in Alberta, Canada. In particular, this article tracks how teacher professionalism has been conceptualized and enacts over different historical periods in Alberta, and reveals that teacher professionalism, as a socially constructed concept, has taken on different interpretations from “de-professionalism” to “re-professionalism” in Canada historical contexts. Alberta’s teacher education policy has been usually used as a dynamic instrument to shape the paradigms of the concept of teacher professionalism. This analysis has also supported the claim that government-led teacher education reform has been accorded the key political significance in Canada. As a whole, the teacher education reform in Alberta area provides a useful concrete understanding and offers international lessons outside of Canada in how historical context influences the reform of teacher professional development.

Accountability and Initial Teacher Education Reform: A Perspective from Abroad

This article focuses on accountability as a tool for teacher education reform. The article is based on my experience as a teacher education scholar and practitioner over the last 40 years and especially on analyses of teacher preparation accountability in the United States, recently conducted by Project TEER (Teacher Education and Education Reform), a group of teacher education practitioners, researchers, and scholars at Boston College. The members of the group were united by a growing concern about the direction education reform was taking and the impact it was having on teacher education in the US and by a commitment to equity for all the students served in the nation's schools. For five years, we tracked US teacher education reform, concentrating on the major accountability initiatives that were shaping the field. This work culminated in the book, Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018). Drawing on this work and on my experience in the national and international teacher education communities, this article has three purposes: to present a framework for unpacking accountability policies related to initial teacher education; to use that framework to describe briefly the dominant accountability paradigm in the US as well as an alternative to the dominant paradigm –democratic accountability in teacher education; and finally, to use ideas from the framework and from our US analyses to comment on the current reform of initial teacher education in Wales.

Teacher Mentoring in Service of Preservice Teachers’ Learning to Teach: Conceptual Bases, Characteristics, and Challenges for Teacher Education Reform

Preservice teacher education programs worldwide are increasingly becoming field based with student teaching as the capstone experience for preservice teacher learning in the program. Consequently, mentor teachers at field-placement program schools are bestowed with new and unique functions to support preservice teachers’ learning to teach, which calls for new conceptualizations of teacher mentoring approaches. This article critically examines the theoretical underpinnings of four existing approaches to teacher mentoring during student teaching, analyzes the focuses and practices associated with each approach, and identifies the major challenges that each approach faces in guiding preservice teachers to learn to teach as expected by the field based teacher education reforms. Finally, it proposes an integrated approach to teacher mentoring for field-based teacher education that transcends the four existing teacher mentoring approaches.