European Teacher Education in the Grip of ‘Academic Tribes and Territories’

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reconsider European developments in teacher education and to discuss some aspects of its future. Teacher education has been largely ‘universitised’; both its present and future should be discussed within the context of the broad changes in European Higher Education deeply marked by the Bologna Process and the emerging European Higher Education Area. We rely on J. Goodlad’s and B. Clark’s discussion of teacher education from a higher education perspective (1999) and try to comment on it in the context of European higher education reforms of the past decade. The central controversy of these reforms has concerned the length of traditional undergraduate courses at universities in most continental countries (4–5 years), particularly with regard to the relationship between ‘academic’ and ‘professional’ higher education. Until today, most teacher education institutions have adapted to the new system of two ‘Bologna’ cycles (Bachelor and Master). However, the reforms have led to different interpretations and their implementation has varied in different countries, thus opening new dilemmas about the future of European Teacher Education. This paper argues that the central part of these dilemmas relates the position and identity of teacher education “in the grip of ‘academic tribes and territories’”, a concept borrowed from Becher and Trowler (2001).