Reconstructing Teacher Education

Teacher education and training in the UK is under attack from the New Right and government policy-makers have been sufficiently influenced by its ideas to threaten the very existence of higher education-based teacher training. The attack has been very much directed toward theory-based training which is accused of promoting progressive theories that are politically biased in favour of left-wing egalitarian ideology. The over all effect, it is argued, is a failure to raise standards. The New Right, aided and abetted by the tabloid press, wants to see the removal of teacher training from higher education, and for it to be unambiguously located in the schools, where it can be linked to the "theory-free" development of practical skills. Elliott and his contributors do not offer a defence of current practice, but do provide a rationale for the continuing role for higher education while at the same time moving toward a more experimentally-based professional preparation. They articulate in some detail that the practice of teaching is neither a matter of applying ideas derived from theory rather than experience, nor simply a matter of applying instrumental technical skills, learned on-the-job, to produce standardized and measurable end-products. Teaching is best viewed as a practical science in which the relationship between theory and practice is interactive. Practical skills are not simply technical in character, but structured by values and understandings of how to act consistently with them.