Abstract

Evidence and comparative teacher education policy: navigating breadth and depth to support legitimation, refraction and indigenization

Paul Conway, University College Cork (UCC),  Ireland
Joanna Michalak, University of Lodz, Poland
Rosaleen Murphy, University College Cork (UCC), Ireland
Kathy Hall, University College Cork (UCC), Ireland 
Anne Rath, University College Cork (UCC), Ireland 

Social and educational policy discourse over the last decade has put a high premium on ‘evidence-based policy’ and is exemplified by the proliferation of narrative research reviews and meta-analyses as well an emerging body of scholarship on both the discursive and methodological aspects of undertaking such review work. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamics of comparative research reviews in teacher education policy discourse drawing on insights from a nine-country cross-national study of learning to teach.

In the European context, in contrast with for example the USA in particular, the use of ‘evidence from other places’ is central to policy formulation especially in smaller countries. In examining the dynamics of comparative research we focus on two examples of evidence and policy formulation (a) when a large and diverse number of countries are the focus of analysis, (ii) when two countries are compared.

The impetus for this study was based on discussion among the authors on the dynamics of evidence and policy formulation which emerged from the authors involvement in undertaking a commissioned nine-country cross-national study to support formulation of teacher education policy in Ireland by the Teaching Council. As such, this paper allows us to take a ‘meta’ perspective on the evidence-policy formulation relationship cogniscent of the insights from the nine-country study. Findings are presented under the following headings:  trans-national convergence vis-a-vis new expectations for teacher education, the relative importance of policy borrowing in different jurisdictions, the affordances and constraints associated with different types of comparative research (multiple country studies and two-country studies), discursive features of comparative policy making. Significantly we make a case for the importance of conceptualising the evidence-policy formulation dynamic in terms of three significant discursive features namely legitimation, refraction and indigenization.