Description
This book provides directions for encouraging practitioners critical thinking, analytical skills, and political activism in teaching and teacher education. ” Teacher education through active engagement “identifies and addresses a contemporary issue: the ways in which teaching and teacher education are articulated by politicians, civil servants, business leaders and educational entrepreneurs intent on profit-making from teaching and teacher education in the current global neo-liberal policy context. This is often characterized by narrow and ill-conceived ideas about teacher characteristics and competences; recruiting and fast-tracking graduates from elsewhere into the profession; the reform of teacher training with less focus on time for theory and academic study; a narrow focus on teachers core skills, behaviour management, and teaching reading; and the promotion of training in model teaching schools . In this book contributors challenge this conceptualization and demonstrate practitioners necessary intellectual work to wrest back professional control. By drawing on practice-focussed research carried out in sites of educational policy and practice, they equip teachers, student teachers and teacher educators with the necessary knowledge to coordinate a professional reply to non-educationalists who dictate the terms of their work, which considers the needs and interests of diverse children and young people in real classrooms, in real schools, in real communities. Illustrated throughout with practice-focussed research and drawing on the historical case of Winifred Mercier and her colleagues at the City of Leeds training college who challenged the establishment to leave a legacy of professional control, this book will appeal to researchers and academics in the fields of teacher education and education studies.
