Mobilising Policy to Reframe Teaching and Teacher Education in Europe

Abstract

Recent initiatives by the European Commission (EC) have returned the issue of teacher quality to the forefront of policy work across Europe. These have also taken the Commission’s policy activity in a direction and to a scale previously unseen. We believe that a sense of urgency driving the establishment of the European Education Area (EEA) is facilitating a new, increasingly assertive and practice-centred policy method on the part of the Commission, and that this involves mobilising policy in ways that are already starting to significantly reframe teaching and teacher education in Europe. A defining characteristic of this new method is an increased willingness and rising confidence on the part of the EC to lead on interventionist policy-work that engages the spectrum of policy activity from the European to the national and even includes policy experimentation at the level of individual schools and school systems. We propose that policy action in this modality represents a largely unmarked but significant change in how EC policy work is led and undertaken. This development offers both possibilities and potential problems. Consequently, the central focus of our chapter rests on unpacking the changing policy practices of the Commission in pursuit of its teacher quality agenda over recent years. We detail and critique the move to new policy method and consider its implications for teachers and teacher education, and specifically what it will likely mean for teacher education policy work in Europe of the near future. To close, we consider how positive and proactive engagement with the new policy work realities by the teacher education research community in Europe can help strengthen and deepen the pluralism and diversity of teachers and their education in ways that both the Commission and teacher education professionals can readily value and share. This however is not something that can be taken for granted – meaningful access to spaces of influence and the relevant policy fora to do so will need to be argued for and occupied.