Introducing Teacher Education under Restructuring

A contribution to the symposium on Teacher Education in Scandinavia at the EERA meeting at Crete, 22-25 September 2004

Gustave Callewaert, University of CopenhagenUppsalaUniversity

Sverker Lindblad, GothenburgUniversity and UppsalaUniversity

Introduction

In this paper we deal with recent changes in teacher education in the light of broader social and cultural tendencies.[1] We discuss different teacher educations in relation to academization, professional positions, and changing relations between the state, schooling, and the teaching professions. In relation to this we present some notions of education restructuring in relation to teachers´ work and professional identities. Finally, we talk about some guidelines when researching and comparing different teacher education systems, their preconditions and outcomes. Here our ambition is not to present results or conclusions, but to frame our studies of teacher education under restructuring in relation to changing recruitment and constructions of professional identities.

Points of departure

Conceptually our research is framed by the concepts of position, disposition, field and positioning. These concepts are derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu (mostly from “La distinction”), where human action is something generated from an accumulated history valid in a field where some kind of value is at stake. The agents (individual or collective) are doing as well as they can do considering what they have in their luggage at the current field (whatever it looks like). That is based on the dispositions one has achieved one will take a position in a network of positions, and the disposition as well as the position is explaining the positioning, that is how one is putting oneself in terms of thoughts, words and movements.

This way to deal with a probable future based on one’s own still present past is not a determinism but the result of still working social and individual differences in conditions and in strategies as well as in ambitions and in negotiations. Individual trajectories are bonds of infinite mass of decisions of which way to go among those ways who were at place and depending on the conditions at stake. At a distance these infinitely differing trajectories turn into a few well constituted. The individual trajectory might differ, new trajectories might be constructed, but such differences and constructions demand new preconditions to appear

An important instrument in the analysis is the concept of habitus as an alternative to Parsonian socialisation theory and to the Lavean learning theory: you achieve your basic orientation not by learning or training into habits or acquisition of norms, but by an incarnation of preconscious everyday life in action. The objective conditions of living ends up as subjective competences as well as objective frames that structure each other.

Another basic idea is that this is a combination of individually differing orientations and the habitus that is typical for the class, the fraction, the generation and gender that one belongs to, where a socially basic habitus is re-occurring in a more specific form as orientations in specific cultural fields such as upbringing and education, religion, aesthetics, taste, or in specific practices such as administration, law, economics, politics, etc. Your social basic habitus and your social position is translated to their corresponding position in a relatively autonomous field with a partially autonomous logic in for instance the religious and the pedagogical field. They are not identical, predetermined by your social origin or current position, but they are homologous, presenting a similar figure or pattern. Employer is to employee as father to child, man to woman, teacher to student, or old to young. All such distinctions are contingent but not arbitrary. And they are based on changing social realities (e.g. relations between young and old which are in change today).

Education restructuring

The social and historical background of this research is ongoing structural and organizational in welfare state education. We focus on recently implemented or planned transitions in the governing and work organization. Such transitions – in terms of decentralization, deregulation, and governing by goals and results –are often categorized as restructuring measures. From the teaching profession point of view education restructuring is connected to issues concerning accountability and the teachers’ position in relation to the school organisation, to students and parents as well as relations between the state and the teaching professionals.

According to Papagiannis et al (1992) restructuring emerged as a means for large private enterprises to deal with increasing international competition. Such changes were also carried out in public institutions in order to modernise or to increase the effectiveness of these institutions and to deal with contradictions in their tasks or functions. Restructuring measures are based on criticisms of the governing and efficiency of these institutions. They imply new ways of governance as well as new ways to manage work. In the education sector the OECD is one of the proponents for restructuring. This idea is presented as follows:

Placing more decision-making authority at lower levels of the educational system has been the key aim in the restructuring and systemic reform in many countries since the early 1980s. (...)The motives for changes in patterns of centralisation are manifold and they vary from country to country. The most common ones are increased efficiency and improved financial control, a reduction of bureaucracy, increased responsiveness to local communities, creative management of human resources, improving the potential for innovation and create conditions that provide more incentives for improving the quality of schooling. (Education at a Glance, 1998, p 292)

Following John W Meyer et al. (1992) restructuring can be regarded as a world movement related to patterns of internationalization and globalization. Furthermore, restructuring is related to changes in the state. Hirst and Thompson (1999) distinguish between government and governance, where government deals with the institutions of the state that control and regulate life in a community, while governance:

… is the control of an activity by some means that a range of desired outcomes are achieved - is however, not just the province of the state. Rather, it is a function that can be performed by a wide variety of public and private, state and non-state, national and international, institutions and practices. (a.a. p 422).

Charles Tilly (1998) describes as a general mechanism the process of emulation which describes the diffusion and implementation of new organizational patterns in existing organizations. One feasible hypothesis is that the globalization process more precisely could be described as a process of emulation e.g. within the reproductive sector in the welfare states. Ongoing restructuring can be regarded as such a shift from government to governance, from bureaucratic control to a set of governance relationships, where other agencies than the state are involved in different activities, as a process dependent on the changing role of the state.

Such a shift in governing implies changing ways in management and steering of welfare state institutions such as health and education. This includes greater use of private sector management practices in public services, or promotion of privatization, the systematic use of system evaluation according to explicit and measurable standards of performance and so forth, as well as an increase of consumer influence upon the offer on the market. There are general tendencies of restructuring in the public as well as in the private sector, which in turn are expected to improve the over all efficiency as well as empowering clients and citizens. However, the explanations as well as effects of restructuring are questioned in a number of studies in the education field (e.g. Lindblad & Popkewitz, 2003).

This means that the institutional framework for schooling is changing in two different ways: First that the internal structure of schooling as such is changed, when looking at current discourses. Considering the teachers and their work they will be working in a new management structure. This management structure means that goals and resources are to be related to each other in the tasks of the teachers. Their work is becoming more externally evaluated, e.g. to be a professional means that you are expected to deal with explicit external control of your work as well as to develop relations with the clients of schooling, that is parents and students. Thus, the “new” teachers have to constitute their professional autonomy in changing ways. Furthermore, considering restructuring in relations to the “new” students, which are expected to work more on their own and in their own pace, using their voice as well as exit options in order to have an influence on schooling. Translating this to the conceptual framework that we are using, this means – at least in a tentative way – that the teachers’ position is in transition. They need to positioning themselves in relation to the management (including external experts) as well as to the clients of schooling.

Second, there is an ongoing restructuring of the relations between the state and the school, including the legitimating sources of the teachers. The transition from government to governance means that different agents are participating in the production of schooling. It is not the state that governs by means of directives. The teachers are presented the goals and the resources given. By this they will produce their strategies to accomplish their tasks. They are no longer part of a state project to modernize the society but to produce services that will contribute to the survival of the society and to facilitate the reproduction of families. Thus, the resources for teachers’ positioning are in change.

In sum, the changing institutional framework is deconstructing old positions and possible positioning strategies for teachers as well as producing new networks of positions and opportunities for positionings. This means new demands on dispositions to do the work framed by the new position network inside and outside schooling as an institution.

The teacher education problematic

We are studying teacher education in a restructuring education system. Given the concepts presented above we are working with three kinds of agents engaged in three – broadly defined – trajectories: teacher educators, teacher students, and policy-makers. To some extent these trajectories overlap: teacher educators have not seldom been teacher students themselves and education policymakers have sometimes been teacher educators and teacher students themselves. These three kinds of agents are – in different ways and from different positions – trying to deal with the current conditions and tasks. These actions are based on the habitus they have achieved in their work and life. By habitus is meant a strucuture of structuring dispositions. These habituses in turn are based on their trajectories – on a series of positions taken and positionings made. And the habitus operates in a field and according to the logic of the field.

Now, habitus is a concept that on one side deals with the past in the present and on the other side with the present in relation to the future. Changing institutional frameworks mean challenging the habituses of the agents in these institutions. There are different tendencies here, since the agents are not external to the institutions and since the institutional frameworks as well as the habituses are ingredients in cultural transformations as well as resistance to changes. The focus here is on changes in networks of positions in and between institutions and the implications that this have for the agents and their habituses.

Looking at teacher education a first point is that we might expect that changes in institutional frameworks is connected to changes in recruitment. Changes in the options available for young people will produce changes in trajectories of different kinds. This can be considered in direct relation to the attractiveness of teacher education as such and indirectly to the motives to pick a career as a teacher. Attractiveness in turn is based on the combination of potential teacher students’ habitus and the field of higher education. In order to study the relative attractiveness of teacher education we need to study the recruitment to teacher education over time – not only to teacher education but to other options in the field of tertiary education.

We are doing our research in a specific situation – or process – labelled restructuring, where institutions such as the school and the university are changing and by means of that teacher education as well. Policy-makers – which are not present in the current field of study – are trying to meet transitions into late modernity by means of changing education policies based on their habitus.[2] Teacher educators are presented with tasks in relation to the production of teachers as agents with specific tasks in changing schools. And teacher students are present as agents in the field of higher education – inside or outside academia – with their positions and dispositions that is part in the making of the “new teacher” habitus.

We are dealing with three different institutional frameworks: the school, tertiary education institutions and the policy-making arenas. These frameworks are now in transition, most clearly perhaps when we look at the policy-making arenas which are moving into the two other frameworks in restructuring. In other terms, changing relations between institutions are expected to have implications inside these institutions.

Since restructuring as far as we can see implies changing relations between the state and the teachers this in turn will presumably have an impact on the legitimating sources available for teachers. They can – in public as well as in private schools – refer to stated goals from based on decisions by the state. But they cannot refer to central directives and goals. This means that the habitus of a “civil servant” will structure teachers’ actions in a misleading way, especially when dealing with the clients – parents and students – according to the restructuring discourse. And since restructuring means changing relations inside the school between teachers and teaching teams as well as between school leaders and teachers we might expect as well that old habituses among teachers – based on a cellular organisation of schooling (c.f. Lortie, 1975) – will guide teachers into trouble. Thus it is of interest to capture changes in habitus in terms of changes in recruitment as well as potential changes and resistances in teacher education institution institutions.

We are focussing on teacher education which is located in the academy, that is in tertiary education – being inside (Sweden) or outside (Denmark) the university. In Sweden the reformed teacher education programme is integrated to a large extent in two ways: (a) teacher students with different trajectories and with different future positions in their work are assumed to do the same curricula to a large extent, and (b) different university departments are taking part in the making of the new teachers by means of mainly the courses in the different scientific disciplines/school subjects, etc.

In table 1 we present an overview over Danish and Swedish teacher education of today. The main point to take into account, typical also for the Swedish sample in this study, is that students earlier enrolled in totally different programs preparing for totally different and to some extent antagonistic professional roles, like preschool teachers, basic school teachers and senior secondary school teachers, are united into one single curriculum at one single university based institution, in collaboration with other subject matter departments.

Denmark is quite different with a different institutional framework. Here we find a split in the making of Danish teachers at different levels. The system does not even call all of them for teachers. Preschool teachers and educators are trained at special colleges, basic school teachers at a different type of colleges, senior secondary school teachers at university faculties in a 5 year curriculum plus a pedagogical unit, technical and vocational school teachers at other different colleges. The well known socio-cultural and professional differences between these positions and the corresponding educations are in Denmark articulated even stronger by being located at totally separated institutions, most of them outside the university. The Danish sample of this study comprehends only students at Colleges for basic school teachers outside the universities. Another factor of differentiation accounted for in the sampling procedure are the important differences between the 5 institutions, 3 Swedish and 2 Danish. The sample is not a random sample of the national teacher student populations, but a stratified sample constituted by two institutions that constitute extremes of the teacher education seminars in Denmark, and three Swedish institutions (an old university, a new university plus a university college) where an institution in the middle has also been included..

Table 1: Aspects of teacher education in Denmark and Sweden today.

Aspects / Sweden / Denmark
Input / An integrated national programme for all kinds of teacher students with local variations / Differentiated teacher education programmes inside and outside the university
Process / A sequential differentiation of teachers at different levels and in different positions.
Curricula based on
-Common core studies
-Different directions
-Specializations
-Dissertation work
In university departments plus school work periods / Differentiation from the start
Separate institutional frameworks for different kinds of teachers.
University departments for senior secondary teachers
Training Colleges for basic school teachers
Output / Bachelor of educ. (3,5 ys): e.g. pre-school teachers and school teachers.
Master of education (4,5 ys): e.g. upper secondary school teachers
Both eligible for postgraduate studies / Professional-bachelor of education

The content in table 1 is written in administrative terms with the ambition to present a simple over-view of Danish and Swedish teacher education programmes. The differences are sometimes not as distinct as it seems to be in the table. For instance, the meaning of an education programme to be included into university is clearly dependent on its position in the university field (c.f. Broady, 1995; Lindblad, 1998) in our studies we will penetrate that issue more precisely for the teacher educations in the 1990-ies.

In the Swedish sample we can compare different kinds of teacher students[3] with different positions in the education system, while we in Denmark have a specific kind of teacher education targeting the “lower levels” in the Danish education system. Thus, the targets differed, which will have implications for the possibilities make comparisons between Denmark and Sweden in our study.