Towards a complicated conversation: teacher education and the curriculum turn

Historically, research in teacher education has played a practical role deriving its questions directly either from ‘the doing’ of teacher education and/or having sought to directly improve ‘the doing’ of teacher education. As a result, a tendency towards moral, intellectual and institutional parochialism has confined both the promise and purpose of research. It is argued that the field of teacher education might look towards curriculum theory as a possible antidote to parochialism. Curriculum theorising invites consideration of teacher education as a cultural object, nested in layers of meaning that require interpretation and critique. Drawing inspiration from the few scholars whose work is located at the interstices of teacher education and curriculum theory, this article suggests that a curriculum turn is characterised by (1) an attention to language, what it is up to and what it makes of aspiring teachers and their teacher educators; (2) a focus on the fragility of human experience as it is lived in teacher education; and finally (3) a search for new and provocative relations between the social and (teacher) educational worlds. The upshot of a curriculum turn in teacher education research is an emphasis on the significance and complexity of teachers’ work, and the value of teacher education; the recovery of teacher education as an educational project; and an enrichment of the questions that the profession asks of itself.