Mobilising Policy to Reframe Teacher Education in Europe: Pushing Crisis Response Toward Sustainable Transformation

• In Event: Comparative Studies in Teacher Education

Abstract

1. Objectives

This paper analyzes how the construction of the European Education Area (EEA) energises policymaking influencing teacher education across the Union toward increased accountability measures, which have been introduced as a powerful tool to drive forward improvement. Much of the Commission’s current policy positioning regarding teachers and teacher education accountability, however is explicit in terms of classroom-based standards but have little to say concerning broader social purposes.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

A major gap in understanding European Commission (EC) policy narrative and its policy work more generally is that of lack of insight into the underpinning actions of the EC policymakers and policy researchers who have carefully nurtured and curated the European Education Area (EEA) initiative from its inception circa 2002 to the place of policy primacy it now occupies. The emergence of its ‘competence strategy’ should be counted among the most significant developments to date, concerning the consolidation of a European educational discourse.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

The paper first considers the policy landscape that has propagated policy work and its technical characteristics. Our discussion is structured as interwoven strands bringing forward insights from the authoring team concerning policy advocacy and writing at the national and EU level, supporting policy science for the European Commission, and critically researching education and public policy. We address the roles of EC institutional and individualistic policy elites; shifting priorities and methodologies in teacher education policy work; and the technical and political purposes that infuse these.

4. Data sources

Policy documents.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view

We find that a largely unremarked but significant change in how policy work on teachers and teaching lives is led and orchestrated globally and regionally began to emerge globally over the past decade or so – primarily in regards to the digitalization and technologization of teachers’ work – and that this has been embraced enthusiastically by the European Commission as it moves for the first time into a policy space hitherto seen as unquestionably one of national competence. We propose also that this move has been accelerated by the experience of the pandemic and its related crisisification (Rhinard, 2019). This paper details and critiques this move and consider its implications – both positive and less-so – for teacher education, and specifically what it will likely mean for teacher education policy work in Europe in the near future.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

The analysis we present in this paper represents a step in addressing how to better understand the politics underpinning moves to reframe European Teacher Education in ways that push crisis response towards sustainable transformation, and more specifically the relevance of this emerging policy determination for the governance and control of teacher education work in the European future.

Author

• Conor Galvin, University College Dublin