Necessary but not Sufficient: reconceptualizing primary teacher education

Abstract

Initial primary teacher education should be designed to cater for the socially, culturally and linguistically diverse populations found in schools. They rarely are. As a result they tend to promote social reproduction rather than social transformation. Using vignettes drawn from our work on the New South Wales Ministerial Advisory Council for the Quality of Teaching we demonstrate the need to re‐explore the fundamental purposes and goals of preparing teachers to meet the needs of all children in our primary schools. We propose a reconceptualization of teacher education around a cultural studies perspective as a productive way forward which would allow integration rather than compartmentalization of knowledge and which encourages a search for truth in which tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty feature such that knowledge is understood as relative and fallible.