Teacher Educators as "Disruptive Innovators" in England: The Rhetorics of Reform in Times of Evidence-Free Policy

• In Event: Teacher Educators as Reformers? The Complicated U.S. Case

Abstract

Problem and Educational Significance
Pre-service teacher education is subject to market-based reforms in several parts of the world. The opening-up and deregulation of teacher education provision as a higher education market has been a defining feature of English education policy since 2010. Whereas much education policy analysis has long characterized neoliberal policy intent as the ‘hollowing out of the state’ (Holliday 2000) - culturally and economically – an alternative perspective might instead propose that the introduction of private providers of teacher education in England is a continuation of attempts by the state to assert control of the education system – and teaching profession in particular – by using private capital to disrupt the perceived ‘vested interests’ of the profession and university sector. The 2017 Higher Education and Research Act is allowing the establishment of private higher education institutions that, for the first time, do not need a Royal Charter. Some of the first such organisations getting ready to open are private teacher education providers modelled on the US independent graduate schools of education such as Relay.

Objectives, perspectives and mode of inquiry
In this paper, we address the question: how do a new cadre of reform-minded teacher educators in England construct the problem of the country’s supposedly ‘failing’ teacher education provision, what solutions to this problem do they propose - and on what grounds? We look in particular at two private graduate schools of education currently in development that have grown out of chains of academy schools (charter management organisations). We take a rhetorical approach to the analysis of a corpus of written and spoken texts produced by these organisations and their high profile, social media-savvy teacher educators. Taking a ‘new rhetorical’ perspective (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1991), we seek to understand the reciprocal relation between the shaping of these teacher educators’ social actions by established patterns of argumentation and frames of reference and the rhetorical agency of these teacher educators, in turn, to potentially re-shape these patterns and frames. In particular, we trace the appropriation of borrowed topoi from US discourses of teacher education reform that centre on questions of equity and social justice.

Analysis, results and contributions
Our analysis shows how the arguments of this new and distinctive group of British teacher educators adopt US frames of reference about the fragmentation of university-based teacher education programmes and the dominance of the universities (in terms of time allocation and assessment power) over teachers’ professional judgement in ways that have never been relevant to England. We also show how the historical failure of mainstream teacher education programmes to address issues of differential attainment among dominant and non-dominant populations of students in schools, couched in the language of a great ‘civil rights cause’, becomes the ground for the ’problem formulation privilege (Friedman 2002) asserted by these reform-minded teacher educators as they self-consciously announce their ‘disruptive innovation’ (Christensen 1997). Finally, the rhetorical skill and fluency of these teacher education ‘disruptive innovators’ is seen as their defining characteristic against a background of an absent or contradictory evidence-base.

Authors

• Viv Ellis, King's College London

• Sarah Steadman, King's College London