“Strange pilgrims” disillusionment and nostalgia in teacher education reform

The first task on our pilgrimage is to make a distinction between questions of governance which administrators ask and pedagogical questions which are the teacher's. To date policy initiatives have been directed by the governance questions such as: Under what regime will students learn more? Predictably, this has led to the answer “better teachers” which has led us to describe what teachers do so that we can make them accountable. Accountability of public servants is not the sin; rather it is the description of teaching that has been problematic because it has been construed as an unproblematic and relatively straightforward affair. Certainly, teachers plan, instruct, and assess but each of those visible behaviours is embedded in a kind of moral evaluative deliberation that is not easily discernible. Teachers ask pedagogical questions such as “What ought I do to help students learn?” “What experiences are most worthwhile?” “What might be the long-term social consequences of a particular mode of instruction?” The questions are not procedurally resolvable; these are the normative questions of teaching ignored in the governance mode.