The simple view of teaching: authorised pedagogies, curriculum and the neoliberal learner in preservice teacher education

In the context of a global teacher recruitment crisis, the English department for Education has responded by implementing a new, highly prescriptive curriculum for initial teacher education called the Initial Teacher Training Core Content Framework. Using a combination of content analysis and an original approach entitled “doppelganger as method,” we examine where a doubling has occurred, asking how this doubling functions. Our analysis of the Core Content Framework focuses on the construction of both learners and learning, teachers and teaching. We find that the complex, relationship-based, messy act of educating pre-service teachers is reduced to a simple view of teaching in which fidelity to the authorised curriculum content and pedagogy define quality. This doubling of teacher education into its doppelganger, teacher training is essentially dehumanising as it denies the personhood of the people involved and the complex, relational aspect of the process.