CARACTERÍSTICAS GENERALES Referencia normativa Las indicadas

Teacher educators are a crucial group of people in higher education and in schools who “are formally involved in pre-service and in-service teacher education” (Swennen and van der Klink, 2008: 6) in order to support teacher development with the aim of raising the teaching quality and, in turn, to impact student achievement. The professional development of teacher educators is no different to that of school teachers in the teaching profession, in that it, “is subject to central control and direction, is answerable to multiple agencies and has to respond to the expectations and needs of a rapidly changing society” (Day et al.,

Professional Development of

Teacher Educators

Identity, Role and Responsibility

Organisational Culture

52

2007: 3). For these reasons, if we are to understand teacher educators’ work and professional development, it is important to understand the policies, the policy changes and the institutional contexts that influence them.

In Chapter 2, I described the policy context of teacher education in China, and the two policy makers’ perspectives on policy making and implementation. Their description suggests that a centralised political and social system has meant that there have been fundamental changes in the demands made on education in China. In turn, teacher educators also have to keep up to date with the developments in their discipline and keep abreast of a range of new curricular and policy changes in the country. This has placed enormous pressure on teacher educators, who prepare new teachers for schools and train the in-service school teachers, as the new environment is very different from the environment that they themselves experienced.

In teacher education, the emphasis on change has manifested itself in different ways in different countries all over the world according to their histories and transitions (Hammersley-Fletcher and Qualter, 2009). Changes have been made in many countries that aim to improve teacher education and raise educational standards and, at the same time, they have had a significant impact on teacher educators’ professional development. For example, in England, teacher education is now intimately related to the changing national policy priorities in which one of the most distinctive features is that the government has promoted the development of partnerships across the whole of State service provision, including teacher education (Furlong et al., 2008: 49). This happened during the leadership of the Labour Party. The Conservative and Liberal-Democratic coalition government published the first real signals of this policy intent in the government White Paper, The

Importance of Teaching (Department for Education, 2010) which signalled a significant

shift to more school-led, school-based teacher education (Childs, 2013). This created a new policy direction that would cause large changes in understanding teachers’ and teacher educators’ identity, roles and responsibilities.

In Scotland, the Donaldson report, Teaching Scotland’s Future (Donaldson, 2011) explicitly set out a positive view of teacher education throughout the course of the teaching career, making Scotland a more positive place in which to be working and researching teacher education (Menter, 2011).

53

In the USA, the changes appear more ambitious. During the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, a ‘new teacher education’ was established, due to a public policy problem based on research evidence and driven by outcomes (Cochran-Smith, 2008). This ‘new teacher education’ encourages the states to expand alternative certification programmes, which have increased expectations for traditional teacher education and certification (Darling- Hammond and Lieberman, 2012: 132).

In recent years, Australia announced the Smarter Schools-Improving Quality National

Partnership programme (Department of Education Employment and Workplace Relations,

2010) that aims to attract, prepare, place, develop and retain quality teachers and school leaders in schools (Mayer et al., 2012). This aims to improve the quality of teaching and includes the improvement of both teachers’ skills and knowledge of teaching, as well as challenging their knowledge and competence.

The examples above suggest that policy change affects teacher education both positively and negatively. It is no different in China. As described in Chapter 2, teacher education policy in China has been changing radically since the start of the twenty-first century. Many of these changes were subject to the government’s policy interventions, which have made education a priority in order to raise standards through improving teaching and learning quality (Zhu and Han, 2006). More recently, the Chinese national teacher education policy change has been characterised by the following trends:

(a) Teacher education has changed from a ‘closed system’ to an ‘open system’. Teacher education is not only the task of ‘normal institutions’ as, more and more comprehensive universities have become involved in initial teacher education. (b) Attempts of integrating initial teacher education and in-service teacher education

have been taking place in a number of pioneering regions.

(c) Teacher education institutions are no longer ‘factories’ of ‘producing’ school teachers. Teacher education is more concerned with social change and market demands.

(d) Standard-based and practice-orientated teacher education has been leading national teacher education directions.

(e) The government’s emphases on, and national investment in, teacher education has been increasing year by year.

54

These changes focus on governmental and institutional responsibilities, teacher education curricula, teacher education direction and expectations, as well as economical investment, and have a strong impact on teacher educators’ roles and responsibilities, as well as on their professional development. For example, firstly, the diversity of provision of teacher education in China makes the roles and responsibilities of teacher educators complex. Secondly, the integration of preservice and in-service teacher education provides teacher educators with many challenges in respect to redefining their professional knowledge and competencies to meet policy expectations.

Shanghai’s educational system has been described as one of the most distinctive in China, as well as in the world (OECD, 2010a; OECD, 2013). Shanghai is leading the development of policy change and education improvement for the country. Most recently, as well as the national changes listed above, there have been a number of large moves in relation to teacher education policy change in Shanghai:

(a) University teachers’ professional development projects have taken place, covering all levels, subjects, age groups and sectors. This has had an impact on all types of higher education based on teacher educators’ professional development.

(b) In its provision of base schools (i.e. professional development schools) and a one year induction scheme, Shanghai has been recognised as the ‘national pioneer’. (c) Shanghai’s provision of credit bank and contract-based CPD has been similarly

recognised.

(d) Shanghai’s ‘Shadow headteacher’ and ‘Shadow teacher’ projects have been preparing a huge number of expert leaders and teachers as ‘seeds’ for in-service teacher education.

Comparative studies of the impact of the changes in policy on teacher educators have shown that histories, transitions, and organisational and national cultures, all have an impact on how effective a policy is (Osborn, 2006; Ozga, 2002). At the same time, policy change has a significant impact on the professional identities as well as the roles and responsibilities of teacher educators (Hammersley-Fletcher and Qualter, 2009).

In England, Childs (2013) maintains that the government’s school-based, school-led teacher education policy direction suggests that there will be a shift to more experienced and outstanding teachers becoming the predominant group of teacher educators. This shift

55

will lead to more education of both beginning and experienced teachers through processes of collaboration in and between schools and with other teacher education organisations. This policy shift thus provides more uncertainties around the roles and responsibilities of teacher educators within different settings.

In Turkey, O’Dwyer and Atlı (2015) argue that the role of the wholly school-based in- service teacher educator encompasses a broad set of complex interpersonal and professional skills, which are firmly embedded within the context in which they operate as they need to respond to changing institutional landscapes. This means that changes in the organisational context, where policy is made, interpreted, and implemented, have an impact on their role. Although the distinctive role and identity of teacher educators has gradually been receiving more attention in research, in practice as well as in educational policy in this decade, some research reveals that not all teacher educators consider their roles and identities primarily to be those of teacher educators. School-based teacher educators and teachers who recently have become teacher educators view their role as that of a school teacher (McKeon and Harrison, 2010; Murray and Male, 2005). According to Chetty and Lubben (2010) and Lunenberg et al. (2011), teacher educators in universities think they should comply with the academic and scholarly requirements of all academic staff in their institution as well as adhering to their academic discipline.

In both the USA and Australia, a large number of teacher educators directly come from universities with a Ph.D., rather than from primary or secondary schools (Zeichner, 2010). The tendencies for these teacher educators to view their roles and responsibilities differently seem to be reinforced by national policies, advocating on the one hand the inclusion of, or even a shift to, school-based teacher education (e.g. school-based teacher training in England and Wales), and on the other hand, a more academic research-based teacher education (Cochran-Smith, 2005; Murray et al., 2011).

The existing literature discussed above informs us that when policy changes, teacher educators’ identities, roles and responsibilities (which will be discussed in Section 3.3) will change accordingly within such contexts and that these changes manifest themselves in different ways according to the different national and organisational histories, traditions and stories (which are related to the organisational culture that will be discussed in Section 3.4). These views inform this study into the professional development of teacher educators in Shanghai by offering an opportunity to reflect on how the participants respond to the

56

policy changes in different ways in different institutional settings, and the professional development needed to support them in these changes.