Call for Papers

The Organising Committee of the TEPE Network Conference 2011 invites you to submit a paper on the theme:

Research-Based Teacher Education Reform:
Making Teacher Education Work

During the past decade numerous European countries have implemented large-scale teacher education reforms and others are on the brink of doing so. While teacher education reform in the 1990s was characterised principally by academization and extension, the current framework and context is more diffuse. Whereas some European countries are still in the process of investing in teacher education, others are engaged in downsizing or fragmenting it, favouring new types of institutionalisation (e.g. following the pattern of Teach for America) or using the Bologna process to introduce new kinds of differentiation and structures. The key questions are, of course, how many of these changes are informed by research and how many of these changes are simply in response to the dominant popular discourse? Furthermore, the question also arises as to whether or not teacher education research is sufficiently well developed to respond to the challenges set by teacher education policy.

Accordingly, it seems timely to ask some tough questions about the state of the art of our discipline, viz:

1. What do we actually know from a comparative perspective about the quality and impact of different types of teacher education systems and teacher education policy in different contexts?

2. Does the current wave of teacher education reforms indicate a significant shift or is it reflective merely of the need to be ticking boxes at the national level in order to adhere to a wider European agenda?

3. How has research-based knowledge been used, or misused, in teacher education reform?

4. What kind of research should be prioritised to meet the needs of teacher education policymaking, as well as the needs of the teacher education community?