Practice Theory and Policy: Redesigning ‘Quality’ Teacher Education in Australia

Abstract

This chapter draws upon recent reforms in teacher education policy in Australia to exemplify the richness of Stephen Kemmis’ work on practice theory. Specifically, I elaborate how Kemmis’ notion of practice as constituting particular actions (‘doing’), discourses (‘Sayings’), and relationships (‘relatings’), and as influenced by and influencing the particular conditions—‘practice architectures’—for practice, provides a particularly useful conceptual apparatus for making sense of how initial teacher education policy is currently understood and promoted by the Australian federal government. The chapter draws upon part of the ‘Students First’ policy ensemble in Australia—the principal policy for schooling in Australia. The chapter argues that even as the action of promoting particular discourses around ‘quality’ teacher education practices within this initiative seems instinctively sensible, closer scrutiny of this policy ensemble reveals evidence of more reductive conceptions of what constitutes productive teacher learning. Focusing in particular upon the Australian Government commissioned Action Now: Classroom Ready Teacher policy artefact, and the federal government’s response, the chapter reveals that rather than cultivating a more site-based, praxis-oriented conception of teachers’ initial education, this policy, and its associated policy artefacts, and the broader policy and political milieu in which the policy was generated, privilege more generic, standardized conceptions of initial teachers’ learning. Through the example of this particular policy initiative, the chapter seeks to honour Kemmis’ work by revealing the power of his concepts for not only critiquing but also suggesting how schooling might be done differently. The chapter also seeks to position Kemmis’ recent work within the broader programme of research that has characterized his own lived experience.