Contextualising teacher education in Australia

The premise of this chapter is that initial teacher education (ITE) is undergoing systemic and cultural changes. The dilemma for ITE is how to meet the various governance and credentialing regulations that suggests a generic standardization of education, whilst at the same time being in direct competition with alternate models of teacher preparation that challenge not only higher education as a bureaucracy but the very core of what education means today. The argument in this chapter is that there is a move away from traditional notions of what is meant by the effectiveness of teacher preparation and teaching to include one which ensures new teachers are prepared for the diversity of conditions in which they will be employed. Traditional preparation has been undertaken in a standardized way that doesn’t always account for the individual needs of the students in their care. These seemingly complex, and potentially flawed imperatives exist at the same time that there is a proliferation of alternate models (for example, Teach for Australia) that are being espoused as ways of more successfully preparing quality teachers who make a difference to student learning. Finally, this chapter will analyse the social media commentary from the Australian documentary Testing Teachers to illustrate what changing times for how education is conceived in terms of what it means to learn and teach for teachers in Australia in these current contexts.