Beyond the Blueprint Toward a Practice-Based Approach of Teacher Educators' Professionalism

• In Event: 31.022 - Teacher Educators' Professional Development: Paradigms and Approaches

Abstract

In recent years the issue of the specific professionalism of the educators of future teachers has received increasing attention from policy makers and researchers. However, attempts to identify as well as assess that professionalism have most often taken the form of a “blueprint”: an exhaustive list of standards or competencies (knowledge, attitudes, skills) that teacher educators need to have in order to rightfully consider themselves to be ‘professional’. Parallel to the definition of the content of that professionalism, the blueprint- approach to the issue also calls for assessment procedures and as such installs procedures (jury’s) who become the judges of who is professional and who is not. In this paper we criticize this blueprint-approach from a conceptual framework on professional development as well as from critical policy analysis. We exemplify the analysis with evidence from Belgium (Flanders) and the Netherlands (and to a lesser extent other West-European countries and the US). As a result of that critical analysis of the arguments and assumptions underneath the actual practices on defining teacher educator professionalism, we argue that this approach is paradoxical and counterproductive in that it a) represents a de-professionalising approach, based on distrust and establishing new power structures and b) essentializes professionalism as a set of personal characteristics (implying that the individual is to be held responsible for proving the enactment of the required competencies in his/her practices). This way the fundamental relational, contextualized and enacted character of teacher educator professionalism is ignored. Instead of the blueprint approach the paper builds an argument for a radically different approach that starts from the assumption that professionalism needs to be looked at as enacted in practice (instead of in terms of decontextualized, normative descriptions in a blueprint). This “practice-based” approach gives central stage to actual teacher education practices as the starting point for a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the practice, acknowledging this way that those practices need to be understood as being situated in the particular conditions of the time/space-context in which the educators are acting. In the paper we conclude by arguing that one way of contributing to teacher educator professionalism can be the development of “good examples of practice” (as different from the static and prescriptive “examples of good practice”) (Kelchtermans, in press). Good examples of practice a) describe in detail how actual teacher educator practices evolve in particular contexts and what their impact is on both teacher educators and their students; while b) at the same time providing an analytical understanding of the reasons for the actual form of the practice (explanation). The ‘publication’ of the ‘good examples of practice’ contributes to a growing, explicit, publicly accessible knowledge base on teacher education practices, their value as well as their conditions.

Author

• Geert Kelchtermans, University of Leuven