Conference Agenda

Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in Wales has undergone substantial reform in recent years, reflecting a similar trend internationally (Menter, 2019). These reforms have been driven by concerns around the ranking of individual countries in international tests such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the argument that any improvement is dependent on enhancing teacher quality. This in turn depends on improving the effectiveness of teacher education programmes and schools’ capacity to provide the learning environments new teachers need (Milton et al. 2020). The result has often been reform focussed on different interpretations of neoliberal policies and practices (Tatto, 2015), but in Wales there has been an attempt to address this somewhat differently (Mutton & Burn, 2020).

Whilst this might seem a relatively parochial piece of policy implementation it has much wider significance beyond Wales. First, because the reforms in Wales are part of a much wider international context in which teacher education reform is seen as being essential in delivering better quality teaching and, by implication, better quality outcomes for pupils in schools. Governments across the world often cite poor performance in international tests as providing the imperative for proposed teacher education reform and look to the solutions offered by intergovernmental organisations (Rautalin et al., 2019). What has happened in Wales needs to be contextualised within these wider global trends. Second, the reform in Wales is worthy of international attention because of the complexity of the ambition for research and enquiry informed teacher education alongside a backdrop of the attempt to implement extensive educational reform across all levels of the system.

The influential report Teaching Tomorrow’s Teachers (Furlong, 2015), focused extensively on the new Welsh model for ITE informed by this vision. It embodies not only consideration of the way in which beginning teachers are given the opportunity to draw on and interrogate different forms of professional knowledge, but also the aspiration for them to develop ‘research literacy’ that can inform and improve classroom practice (BERA-RSA, 2014).

The paper draws on a theoretical framework of how teachers learn informed particularly by the model of research-informed clinical practice in teacher education (Burn & Mutton, 2015) the development of teachers as adaptive expertise (Berliner, 2004). The Cardiff Partnership for ITE is used as a case study and explores the opportunities, experiences, complexities and challenges inherent in enacting this model, with a particular focus on the development of professional expertise and judgement. This is essential because so many key decisions in teaching are impossible to predict or make routine. We will examine the extent to which the model of research-informed clinical-practice adopted by the Partnership shapes the way in which the beginning teachers within the programme develop as professionals, and develop the habits of mind by which they become more ‘expert’ in terms of the clinical judgements that they are required to make (Kriewaldt & Turnidge, 2013). Drawing on empirical data, we will build a picture of the factors that are perceived to influence the development of this expertise. It will also explore the complex challenges of equipping beginning teachers to manage both the day-to-day routines of the classroom and simultaneously to think deeply and critically about their practice.

In recent years, social change processes have exerted significant pressure on schools and education systems worldwide. Factors such as increasing digitalization, demands for inclusive education, and global challenges like inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, migration, and global conflicts have created new challenges for educational institutions. These transformations are often accompanied by legal amendments at various levels, ranging from international law (e. g. UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), constitutional regulations (e. g. constitutional right to education in the individual states), to internal administrative policies (e.g. reform of curricula). Teachers and schools must navigate this complex legal landscape, adapting to changes and ensuring compliance with evolving standards. The increasing relevance of legal considerations in education is acknowledged, emphasizing the need for professionalization in this domain (Avenarius, 2019a, 2019b).

With regard to teacher professionalization (Clandinin & Husu, 2017a, 2017b), legal education assumes a critical role: Teachers must not only be well-versed in pedagogical strategies but also possess a profound understanding of the legal frameworks governing education. The term “legal professionalization” encapsulates this imperative need for educators to continuously enhance their legal knowledge and skills. It involves the cultivation of a professional identity that recognizes the role of law in shaping educational practices and policies.

However, despite the growing importance of legal aspects in the teaching profession, law still represents a “blind spot” (Füssel, 2020) in university teacher training. There is also hardly any theoretical or empirical work on the legal professionalization of teachers. While there are some practical guides for school implementation (e.g., Stedrak & Mezzina, 2022), there is a lack of substantial empirical foundational research on teachers' legal literacy and its antecedent, legal professionalization.

Against this background, this paper aims to understand the extent to which legal topics are integrated into the curriculum of the university phase of teacher training and asks with focus on Germany: Which legal topics are covered by the intended and implemented curriculum of the university phase of teacher training in Germany?

By undertaking a comparative analysis, we seek to systematize the legal education provided and unravel how curriculum development responds to the prevailing social challenges mentioned earlier.

Public discourse surrounding the quality of teachers and teaching globally frequently draws distinctions between the modern era and memories of the ‘good old day’ when there was trust in teachers and teaching as a profession. Donelson (2000) contests our rosy memory of the past, suggesting that the ‘Golden Teaching Days of Yore’ are more of a remembered dream. In the context of English teachers, he suggests we dream of an era when teachers had the respect of both students and parents, and students wrote formal essays on the classics as the curriculum. But did such an era exist or are these mere fond memories of hope? We suggest our memory of then and now connects to changes in education that Wilkins et al., (2021) identify as systems and processes such as the global neoliberal reforms that have shifted school cultures towards governance led by entrepreneurial leadership with an equity agenda of ‘achievement for all’. These phenomena shift teaching to a paradoxical ‘responsiblised profession’, generating, neoperformative teachers and school leaders, who are given autonomy yet judged in multi-layered systems of surveillance with high-stakes consequences (Wilkins et al. 2021). Embedded in this shift was the message that teachers are both the problem and the solution (Mockler, 2018). Driven in part by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and their league tables of international student testing, the phenomenon of reporting on and claiming a disproportionate connection between student test outcomes and teacher quality (Bradford et al. 2021) resulted in significant policy fascination with this cause-and-effect scenario (Skourdoumbis, 2017). In the context of these global shifts, we are curious about how researchers are drawing on teacher quality so we can be reflexive about whether we are reinforcing the hopes and dreams of the past in our research work. What we want to avoid is the constraints of standardisation on professionalism that Mockler (2022) identified in the context of teacher professional learning and development documents in New South Wales, Australia.

We explore the dominant discourses of quality teaching using a systematic meta-synthesis of empirical research addressing the quality of teachers and teaching in Australia from 2011- 2021 and consider how the public discourses of teacher quality are reflected in the academic discourses of research. Providing an opportunity for reflexivity on our collective memory of this period so as not to recreate the past. The paper contributes to an understanding of why high-quality, contemporary research in teacher education so often does not live up to the expected impact on teacher education policy. The purpose of examining quality in teacher education is to contribute to reconfiguring the public sphere (Thomas, 2004). Our work explores the discursive constructions of “teacher quality” evident in education research about initial teacher education in Australia over the last decade. It presents findings of the systematic meta-synthesis using automated content analysis (ACA) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) of empirical research literature about teacher quality, from 2011 – 2021 to identify how the discourses activated by researchers represent quality teaching.

Our findings help to illuminate how certain discourses of quality help position initial teacher education as a convenient policy response by Ministers seeking to identify quality improvements. As teacher educators we need to ensure that the complexity of teaching is identified and highlight that determining ‘quality’ is highly contentious (Mockler, 2018; Hoyte et al., 2020; Rowe and Skourdoumbis, 2017). As Cochran Smith and colleagues (2014; Ell et al., 2017) put forward, the complexity of the education system means that the relationship between the quality of ITE and the teaching quality of beginning teachers is not entirely linear.