Abstract
In recent years policymakers and politicians in many countries have become increasingly interested in teacher education. In most cases, however, the interest in teacher education is not informed by a desire to enhance the professionalism of teachers but rather is part of ongoing attempts to control the educational 'enterprise.' In this chapter I analyse these developments, particularly with regard to a focus on the alleged need for 'evidence' to form the basis for teaching or the idea that teaching can be adequalty captured in terms of competences. Against these tendencies I argue for the important role teacher judgement plays in education, make clear why such judgement is needed, and what this would require for teacher education.
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Notes
- 1.
http://www.education.gov.uk/b0068570/the-importance-of-teaching/. Retrieved 27 Feb 2011.
- 2.
http://www.reviewofteachereducationinscotland.org.uk/teachingscotlandsfuture/index.asp. Retrieved 27 Feb 2011.
- 3.
http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/ec/00100-r1.en0.htm. Retrieved 27 Feb 2011.
- 4.
www.oecd/edu/teacherpolicy. Retrieved 27 Feb 2011.
- 5.
http://ec.europa.eu/education/com392_en.pdf. Retrieved 27 Feb 2011.
- 6.
http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/2010/doc/principles_en.pdf. Retrieved 27 Feb 2011.
- 7.
From http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/2010/doc/principles_en.pdf. Retrieved 27 Feb 2011.
- 8.
In my view the priority of Steiner education lies with the person and with the freedom of the person. That does not mean that the other two dimensions—subjectification and socialisation—do not matter in Steiner education, but they do not simply matter in themselves but always as ways in which the person can ‘encounter’ the world and through this can also ‘encounter’ himself or herself. This suggests the importance of using the Venn diagram in a dynamic way, so that a particular school conception is not simply represented as a position in the diagram, but has to be identified through where its starting point is located and how, from this starting point, it relates to the different dimensions of education.
- 9.
An interesting question here is whether we should only focus on those who exemplify educational virtuosity, or whether we can also learn from studying those who do not exemplify this virtuosity. The more general question here is whether we can learn most from good examples or from bad examples. With regard to educational virtuosity I am inclined to argue that it is only when we have developed a sense of what virtuosity looks like, that we can begin to learn from those cases where such virtuosity is absent.
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Acknowledgements
This text is based on my keynote presentation at the “2020 The Future of Teacher Education” conference, Vienna, 3–4 March 2011. I would like to thank the organisers of the conference for the invitation to share my ideas, and the audience for questions and insightful feedback that has helped me to develop my ideas further. A version of the presentation was published in 2012 in the open access journal Research on Steiner Education 3(1), 8–21.
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Biesta, G. (2017). The Future of Teacher Education: Evidence, Competence or Wisdom?. In: Peters, M., Cowie, B., Menter, I. (eds) A Companion to Research in Teacher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_29
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