The current English education reform and privileged methodologies for pre-service teacher education

This chapter considers the current English education reform that privileges specific and prescribed methodologies for pre-service teacher education. Globalised trends of performative accountability have seen a shift of policy focus in teacher education to performativity and positivist methodologies of ‘evidence-based practice’, alongside the neoconservative ideology of a more traditional knowledge-led curriculum. The resultant, extant education policy context has led to a narrowing of curricula with highly prescribed, scrutinised and ‘authorised’ pedagogic practices. As teacher educators’ work becomes subject to homogenised, generic and knowledge-led practices, there is a shift to reductive forms of teaching ‘in what we might call pedagogies of the same, rather than pedagogies of difference’. This ‘what works’, one-size-fits-all approach reduces education and all the associated challenges of learning, into something that can simply be ‘fixed’ by a linear, causal process of production that privileges knowledge based on the connections between input and outcomes. Conversely, pedagogic reasoning, as a way of developing professional knowledge, comes from the understanding of these complexities in specific contexts, the ‘swampy lowlands of practice’ that cannot be fulfilled by a generic provision that bleaches out context. As advocates of phronesis (or practical wisdom), we acknowledge the importance of tacit, personal reflection based on experience and context as central to teacher professional development.