Performativity cultures and their effects on teacher educators’ work

In this article I want to look at three specific areas of teacher education work, analysing how and why the practices and discourses of performativity have impacted disproportionately hard. These three areas are: the ‘double whammy’ of audit (Murray 2007) which teacher educators face; the particular nature of teacher education pedagogy and partnership practices; and the issue of what research-informed teaching and scholarship/research in the field means. In this article my particular focus is on teacher educators in England, working in a teacher education regime which now has few disciplinary foundations and often prioritises training rather than education for student teachers. This regime is sometimes seen as the ‘English exception’ and regarded with puzzlement or alarm in other countries. There are then some ‘English-specific’ factors here, notably the strong regulation by government and ongoing debates about the knowledge base of teacher education as played out in the proposed moves to wholly school-based models of teacher education. But, over and above these factors, the increase in performativity cultures is a global phenomenon which has impacted in some way on all who work in teacher education, wherever their university is located and whatever the national context.