two - Teacher education and the enterprise narrative

Summary

In this chapter, we introduce our approach to studying the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) crises in teacher education in more detail, especially as it relates to the importance of attending to the histories of institutions and practices in understanding the present situations. We then provide some brief, historical background to the emergence of pre-service teacher education in the US, England and Norway, highlighting the cultural– political– economic dimensions of those histories and acknowledging that the preparation of schoolteachers has never been motivated purely by educational ideals alone. This is followed by our discussion of the enterprise narrative, and how private sector entrepreneurialism has become an almost inevitable response to perceived public sector ‘failure’, and how the involvement of private, non-state actors can create shadow state structures. Finally, we explore what these ideas mean when they are materialised through examining the case of the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL) in Chicago and the role of ‘experts’ in the political reform of teacher education in England.

A cultural-historical approach to political economy: the importance of social situations of development

As Verger et al (2016a) note, ‘political economy studies are interested intrinsically in understanding how influence and power operate in multiple settings’ (p 6), analysing how political forces and economic resources work together both to constrain and enable human agency in societies. In the previous chapter, we also emphasised the social and cultural dimensions of political economy, not by tacking them on as separate dimensions to the political and the economic, but to focus on how the interaction of the political and economic shapes the way we make meaning in societies. So, as Jessop points out, a cultural political economy approach inevitably involves attention to meaning-making (Jessop, 2004), and therefore has to look at the specific social practices of organisations and individuals, including their rhetoric. As Sayer put it: ‘Cultural political economy emphasises the lifeworld aspects of economic processes – identities, discourses, work cultures and the social and cultural embedding of economic activity, reversing the pattern of emphasis of conventional political economy with its concern for systems’ (Sayer, 2002, p 688).