Teacher preparation: what can a teaching-practice reform leave us?

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teacher preparation and professional development in the Chilean context

Proposal

Within the context of teacher preparation and training, this paper diverts attention to education policy that emphasizes the development of teaching skills over concept building. Practicum and early teaching experiences are viewed as central/essential opportunities/possibilities for future teachers to articulate theory and practice, to learn how to teach and to internalize the teaching role on the job. This post-modernist position seems to overlook the idea that learning how to teach also involves learning how to ‘analyse, discriminate and relate [….] what the novice teacher needs to know’ (Shalem & Slonimsky, 2013, p. 80), in other words, the knowledge practice. From this perspective, the related literature (Barrett, 2004; Evans et al, 2017; Rata & Barrett, 2014) states that emphasis on teaching practice ahead of concept building may result in a decline of teachers’ formal and systematic knowledge while in the process of socialization. This belief would conspire against a sustainable type of teacher preparation (Bürgener & Barth, 2018) because it would not favour critical reflection, systemic thinking, participatory learning, thinking for future scenarios, and collaborative learning (Wiley, 2007). Following this concern, the present paper intends to look at the way a teaching-practice education reform is understood, decoded and recontextualized at official and local levels (Bernstein, 1996; Grimaldi, 2012), in particular, the way it vertically focuses on the teaching practice while horizontally makes space to evaluate its effects on the teacher preparation (DiMaggio, 1998). Hence, a tension between emphasizing pedagogical strategies and techniques over disciplinary knowledge remains hidden.
Based on Dale & Robertson’s conceptual explanatory framework for critical policy movements (2012), this paper looks into the dynamics of a policy transformation in terms of its constructed categories, logic and points of convergence. Under scrutiny is promulgated Chilean 20.903 Decree Law on teacher professional development (2016), which requires teacher preparation programs to increase teaching practice, to diagnose and monitor teacher preparation, and to make changes based on a nationwide testing of pre-service teachers (OCDE, 2017; Biblioteca Nacional, 2016). In this line, the present analysis identifies the nature, directions and consequences of such transformation that is to be taking place in the country.
The adopted research design set to collect (i) quantitative data, namely, pre-service teachers’ 2017 results on the national diagnostic evaluation and (ii) qualitative data, that is, the views of pre-service teachers from an English Teaching Program in southern Chile (CPEIP, 2017). Examined data of two case-studies (Yin, 2014) evidenced a new array of actors (Bernstein, 2001), interests, and conflicts that may point at the consequences of emphasizing teaching-practice over concept-building. As policy transfer involves constant revision of the curriculum of teacher education and educators’ practices (Avalos, 2016), debate is currently needed within the Faculty of Education as to new categories that emerged, the logic of intervention used, and the points of convergence among university teacher education programs (Howarth, 2009; Bacchi, 2012). Teacher educators are called to reflect upon the consequences of (a lack of) theorising about pedagogical knowledge in view of a teacher preparation for sustainable education (Dillon, 2003; UNESCO, 2014).

Author

• Maria Margarita Ulloa, Universidad del Bío-Bío