Changing Patterns of Power: Social Regulation and Teacher Education Reform (SUNY series, Teacher Preparation and Development)

The reform of teacher education has been a focal point of state action in industrial countries since the early 1980s. Given this convergence of educational and governmental activity, the studies presented here are a significant departure from conventional discourse on reform, because they explore the ways that social regulation and political power operate through the processes of educational reform.

This book considers the reform of teacher education to be an integral part of the larger system of social regulation that takes place in the arena of schooling. Reforms in teacher education involve complex sets of interactions among and within social institutions. These interactions help shape power relations and patterns of social regulation that operate through state, university, and school interactions. Nevertheless, the patterns that give direction and value to teacher education are not easily discerned in public discussions of educational change. Instead, many of the most important regulatory aspects of teacher education reform are partly obscured by a public discourse that focuses attention on formal responses to socioeconomic events, and that tends to divert critical attention away from the power that is exercised—and the interests that are served—during reform.

This volume presents studies of reform in Australia, Finland, Iceland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Although these countries differ in their political and social histories, rates and levels of industrialization, and patterns of educational practice, there is a striking commonality in both the strategies that are employed to reform teacher education, and in the nature of social regulation that is a concomitant of reform.

Thomas S. Popkewitz is Professor of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has written many books including Paradigm and Ideology in Educational Research and A Political Sociology of Educational Reform; and edited Critical Studies in Teacher Education.