Why shouldn't teacher education produce ‘ready-to-teach’ graduates? Mapping a pathway to alternative teacher education and teacher becomings

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teacher education reforms worldwide have reinforced a narrative that ‘high-quality’ teaching and teachers are the most significant contributors to raising education achievement, reducing societal inequities, and boosting economic development. Consequently, countries have put substantial efforts into regulating initial teacher education (ITE) to ensure graduates are ‘ready’ to deliver ‘high-quality’ practice tackling education and societal issues. This paper problematises the widespread narrative of ITE by critiquing the construction of ‘ready to teach’ graduates in a leading New Zealand ITE regulatory policy. I argue that teaching and assessing ‘readiness’ via ITE has reinforced ‘linearity’ and ‘technical rationalism’ in defining what it is to be a teacher. It has also reflected humanist-colonial discourses that placed solely human agency, capacity, and achievement at the centre of global progress. I propose making a qualitative shift in conceptualising ITE and moving away from defining ‘quality’ and ‘achievement’ through a set of ‘special properties essential to the human knowing subject’. Recognising that the knowing subject is never the teacher alone, but is a living constellation of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human elements with distributed agency is vital for inviting alternative teacher becomings that societies need to change the status quo.