thrupp@waikato.ac.nz
I have been thinking about initial teacher education a lot lately and so I read Perry Rush’s last President’s column in this magazine with great interest. Perry argued that New Zealand’s teacher education providers – many of which are universities – are not serving the teaching profession well, and that the quality of programmes needs to be urgently addressed. He lamented the loss of a rich curriculum of the kind that used to be taught in the stand-alone Teacher’s Colleges of the past and called for more understanding of practices associated with different curricula, and of pedagogy. Like Perry, I went through the old system of ‘teacher training’ (as it was called back then) and I have considerable sympathy with his arguments. But I still think initial teacher education is best placed in universities, in fact increasingly so. I believe the goal should be to make it work in that context. Partly I have this view because I have become increasingly embedded in Finnish education over the last few years. Before the pandemic I flew up there too many times for the good of the planet and I am still working on some Finnish research projects and editing a large book on Finnish education alongside three Finnish professors. (I work in my day, they work in theirs and we swap drafts night and morning). Finnish initial teacher education is also seeing a critique of tensions between practice, theory and research. But it demonstrates that university-based teacher education with more of a focus on a rich curriculum is possible and that the wider conditions around teacher education in universities are what fosters or precludes this. To begin with, the school-age population in Finland is not exploding, as New Zealand’s has done as a result of immigration settings. Finnish policymakers and teacher educators are therefore much less preoccupied with the sheer quantity of teaching graduates required, whereas our Ministry of Education has been super-keen to recruit for many years now. Secondly, and I expect you have all heard this, teaching is a highly sought-after job in Finland. Indeed my Finnish colleagues have told me, and I have seen it in the day-to-day life and special events of the education faculties I am familiar with, that it is a largely upper-middle class occupation, a bit like law or medicine is here. There are some particularly Finnish reasons for this, for instance attitudes to education and the advantages of being able to look after children over the fantastically long Finnish summer holiday. It is also an occupation which requires a Master’s degree (I haven’t worked out the chicken and egg of this yet). In Aotearoa, teaching has not been so sought after for many years now. There are likely numerous reasons for this, including the demonisation of teachers by previous governments and social distress in schools caused by growing inequalities. But teacher
education has also been cheapened by various developments in tertiary education over the years. New Zealand students of teaching typically have to pay fees and take out loans to cover their studies and so they are attracted to shorter programmes. Teacher education providers, being in competition with each other, have obliged by compressing their programmes despite reservations. For instance, the then Auckland College of Education reduced their four-year primary teaching degree to three years in the 1990s, and the other university providers followed suit. It was this that saw the dropping off of many of the curriculum papers that would have provided the richness that Perry seeks. In Finland, students are better supported financially. It is more like the Teacher’s College situation I knew in this country in the 1980s. There are even heavily subsidised cooked lunches. The Finnish graduate students I know are not in such a hurry through their education studies: they are enjoying the journey as well as the destination. Market competition also impacts selection processes. It’s a big deal to get into a Finnish teacher education programme and it was for me too in New Zealand in the 1980s because there weren’t many providers and the overall student numbers had been cut under the Muldoon Government. But in the current climate, a student being accepted doesn’t even mean they will turn up. They may have been accepted by one of many other providers, or have just decided they don’t want to become a teacher after all. So teacher education providers are under pressure to offer many more places for students than they expect will take them up, in the hope of getting enough. The current selection processes in Aotearoa do have advantages. We get a wider range of students in terms of ethnicity, class, gender/sexuality, age and interests and this allows schools to employ teachers to suit their context. But it should not be surprising if some teacher education students are not so capable in an academic sense at the point of being selected into programmes. Yes, there is University Entrance as well as the numeracy and literacy tests required by the Teaching Council, but it’s not a very high bar. A few other problems exist in New Zealand. NCEA has a lot to answer for in terms of student attitudes to their studies – let’s bank those credits/assignments! The academic rating exercise (PBRF) encourages universities to prioritise research over experience of teaching in schools, when making academic appointments in education faculties. It means many former colleagues with great career success would no longer be appointable these days. The staffing of education faculties has also been repeatedly cut back as universities juggle to make ends meet. Teacher educators are generally working more intensively than ever against a
background of fast-changing university processes. Teacher education programmes also face new requirements from the Teaching Council. I haven’t worked out yet to what extent these are a hinderance or a help, they are most likely a bit of both. I do know the new requirements put some of my university colleagues under huge pressure during 2020 when we all had quite enough to deal with in any case. As an organisation that is reinventing itself from its earlier EDUCANZ version, the Teaching Council is probably struggling for oxygen amongst the education agencies in Wellington and it clearly has insufficient funding for its aspirations – hence its legal battles with the PPTA over the cost of practising certificates. The Teaching Council’s leadership strategy ‘seeks to develop leadership capability and capacity for every teacher, including those in role-based leadership roles but not limited to that’. Perhaps ‘teacher leadership’ will become the Teaching Council’s equivalent of what David Phillips called the ‘Big Idea’ of a unitary qualifications framework as used by the NZQA in its early days. It was a way of promoting its interests in the competition for government influence. Important strengths of our initial teacher education programmes are the practicum arrangements and other opportunities that see students being in schools on a regular basis, and those which see principals and teachers of normal schools and others taking up associate roles within programmes as well. I know my teacher education colleagues across the country would like me to thank you for this crucial involvement, and I thank you as well.
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Let me return to why I have been thinking about Initial Teacher Education and why I think universities should be at the heart of it despite the problems I have mentioned. The usual justification given for university-based teacher education is that it allows teacher education to be informed by educational research and scholarship (note I didn’t say ‘research-based’ – teaching and learning is far too complex for that). But the recent events in the world have also made me think about the wider purposes of the University. As you will know we have a growing problem, highlighted by Trump’s supporters and by events around the pandemic, of people getting terribly caught up in misinformation and conspiracy. There is pressure to take sides on many issues without thinking much about them. Spin and celebrity often win the day. Aotearoa is not immune from these problems. Some of the children we work with in our schools come from families that have less than tolerant attitudes at times. We have recently seen the Advance New Zealand party co-led by Jamie-Lee Ross and Billy Te Kahika and many people have supported John Key or Jacinda Ardern without a clear understanding of their party policies and overlooking the problem that their governments’ actions often do not match up to rhetoric or slogans. In the circumstances, we need a new emphasis on children and young people being able to really think for themselves so that they can respond best to the often frightening developments we are seeing around the globe and not be at the mercy of social media platforms. Political extremism and populism, social inequalities and discriminations of various kinds, consumerism and the climate crisis: all of these need a really considered response. We need teachers capable of creating a safe place for discussion that can challenge misconceptions and help students to protect themselves. Unfortunately, there is also a real risk that some New Zealand teachers will be among those who move into alternative realities. Don’t you think that amongst Trump’s MAGA supporters there would probably be some teachers? And last year it was reported that a New Zealand polytech tutor was allegedly bringing conspiracy theories into class. Universities are well placed to foster critical thinking, for instance teaching about the historical rise and fall of political ideologies, emphasising the importance of assessing the quality of evidence and demonstrating the way statistics can be used to manipulate the truth. I’m not saying there is enough of such matters in current teacher education programmes but I do think universities are a great place for them to get discussed. Perhaps the real challenge is to slow down initial teacher education in Aotearoa’s universities enough to provide time for students to take a wide range of both curriculum and other papers, possibly from beyond education faculties, including those on politics, sociology, social psychology, history and philosophy. In other words, those that will really develop the ability of teacher education students to think critically and to encourage such attributes in the students they teach as well. To do this, we need to resist the urge to always get beginning teachers in our classrooms ASAP. We need to support longer initial teacher education programmes and we need the kind of funding for students that will allow them to be happy about this as well. Under such conditions teaching could again become more of a respected vocation, as well as being a profession better geared to today’s challenges.