Paper 3: Private actors in Teacher Education

• In Event: The Business of Education – Challenging the economic grip on education

Proposal

Education has long been associated with individual prosperity, hence, the importance of formal educational institutions as key contributors to the economic vitality of the wider societies in which they are situated is nothing new. In the context of globalization and the knowledge-based economy, professional educators are implicated in novel ways within an economics-centered discourse in which policy makers in particular have found the realm of teaching and schooling to be politically useful (Henig, 2013), sharpening focus on the quantification of efficiency and of value added, and positioning teachers as key agents with regard to national economic prosperity (see Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2005). Teacher education has emerged as a new niche for the services and products of actors within an expanding global education industry (Parreira do Amaral et al., 2019; Verger, 2016). Characteristic of these shifts are “frenzied calls for transformation” (Saltman, 2010, p. 100) of teacher education.
Within this climate, although demand for schooling may have remained relatively stable, the demands of schools and of the teachers within them have intensified, and precipitously. Accompanying this shift, some relegation of more traditional teacher roles is apparent–as nurturers of the curiosities of young learners, as facilitators of their cognitive, emotional, and physical development, and as custodians of their general well-being.
Our contribution to the panel will shed light on the new participants in the business of teacher education, like private universities or philanthropies. Evident here becomes that innovation functions as a key rationale to justify their involvement in teacher education, for instance by “reinventing higher education for the 21st century” (Western Governors University, 2023). They emphasize, among others, social emotional learning, digitization or evidence-based school development as desirable and effective practices. In doing so, they foreground certain strategies of schooling and teaching, while they tend to not question societal inequalities and power relations. Regarding their roles, some of these non-state players stand out by seeing themselves as change makers using teacher education as a policy tool to pursue envisioned change (see Kurz & Parreira do Amaral, 2022). Examination of teacher response to emerging demands implicate shifts in the nature of professionalism in the teaching field, revealing tensions between teachers’ self-identification as partners in a process of shaping policy via practice on the one hand, with a contrasting positioning of teachers as implementers for corporate change on the other. Finally, we touch on the public-private dichotomy. Deconstructing this dichotomy offers nuance in analysis of teachers’ shifting roles.
In linking to the conference theme regarding “protest,” we note that amidst the fallout of a global pandemic, chronic underfunding of education, and heightening teacher shortages to suit, these shifts constitute a profound challenge for teachers, contributing to sense of their overburdening, and animating the grievance against which active teachers have recently demonstrated (see Dolif, 2023; Lieberman, 2023)—grievance which is itself also reflected in the teacher burnout that has contributed to the very teacher shortage now at hand.

Authors

• Paul R Fossum, University of Michigan-Dearborn

• Benedict Kurz, Bielefeld University