Changes and continuities in teacher education: international perspectives on a gendered field

In this paper we assert that the ‘public discourse’ of teacher education is reductionist, operating to simplify a complex field, and to exclude alternative discourses and practices that challenge its hegemony. In particular, many policies for teacher education fail to acknowledge it as a gendered field of practice. In order to create theoretical frameworks for analysing the gendered changes and continuities that pattern the field of teacher education, we argue that four key factors need careful and reflexive consideration. These are: firstly, the recognition and articulation of the relationships between the field of school teaching and the field of teacher education; secondly, taking into account both the immediate timeframe of the research and relevant historical factors (that is, adopting a diachronic rather than a synchronic emphasis); thirdly, conceptualizing the field in terms of three ‘levels’ or spaces—the micro (the level of individual aspirations, interactions and micro political struggles), the meso (including the departmental and institutional contexts within which teacher education takes place) and the macro (broadly, the national context within which teacher education occurs, including state policies); fourthly, acknowledging the complexity of the field both by investigating specificity and the ‘local’ and by analysing and identifying the commonalities occurring in very different national contexts.