“Can’t you just tell us when to teach them how to use an apostrophe?” The worthwhile struggle to cultivate agential preservice teachers in a compliance culture

ABSTRACT

Teachers are simultaneously regarded as the most important influence on student learning and, paradoxically, as untrustworthy agents who can’t be relied upon to deliver quality learning outcomes. Globally, this contested view of teaching is reflected in policies that limit teacher agency by prescribing how teaching will be conducted; for example, insisting on so-called evidence-based instructional models. Such policies also affect initial teacher education, which is increasingly policed for compliance with national teaching standards. However, teaching standards that reduce the teacher’s role to ensuring fidelity to acceptable pedagogies have been widely criticised, with calls for teacher agency and professional judgement to be more highly valued. We endorse this critique and draw on Bakhtin’s dialogic theory to illuminate data generated using collaborative autoethnography that reveals the worthwhile struggle for “good” initial teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Bakhtin
• ideological becoming
• teacher agency
• initial teacher education

Introduction

Reid (2019) encapsulated the current challenges of teaching and indeed of teacher education arguing that:

The one-to-many relationship of the teacher and her students prioritises the importance of mediated relationships—and this relationality renders teachers’ work at once intensely personal, invariably complex, and inevitably unpredictable. (p. 722)

Like others (e.g., Brownlee et al., 2023; Fitzgerald, 2023), we endorse the act of teaching as intensely personal, relational, complex, and unpredictable; in other words, deeply human. In this paper we present a collaborative autoethnography of this human struggle to be a teacher educator who resists the instrumentalist and prescriptive view of teaching inherent in recent policies. The autoethnographic approach enables the moment-by-moment dialogues with self and others to be analysed and brings to the fore the relational and intensely personal nature of teaching events. To be begin, we delve into the paradoxical and increasingly prescriptive policy framing of teaching and teacher education that has restricted the scope of professional decision-making and created a culture of compliance and instrumentalism. To critique and talk-back to these authoritative policy discourses we deploy Bakhtin’s notions of answerability and responsivity to reveal how struggles about worthwhile teacher education involve dialogues infused with intense feelings and tension about how to act.

Policy context for teacher education

Teachers continue to be regarded as the most important influence on student learning (Hattie, 2009, 2023) and, paradoxically, as untrustworthy agents whose expertise and judgement can’t be relied upon. This contested view of teachers is evident in policies that reflect the contemporary “age of compliance” in which the value of teacher professional judgement is diminished amid dominant discourses of teacher quality. Such discourses have contributed to a perceived education crisis that, for example, requires teachers to follow “evidence-based” practice rather than drawing on their expertise and local professional know-how to respond to particular students’ needs in different learning contexts (Rogers, 2019).

These prescriptivist tendencies have also had a significant impact on teacher education which has, since the mid 1990s, been conceived as an ongoing policy problem. This conception has seen a preoccupation with identifying the controllable aspects of teacher education policy (Cochrane-Smith, 2023). For example, in Australia, all initial teacher education (ITE) programmes are mapped to the Graduate Standards of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2011). To be accredited, all ITE providers must demonstrate to the relevant state or territory regulatory body that their programmes provide opportunities for each of the Graduate Standards to be taught, practised, and assessed to ensure “every program is preparing classroom ready teachers” (AITSL, 2015, p. 1). Most recently, the Quality Initial Teacher Education Review (QITER) Report (Department of Education, Skills and Employment [DESE], 2022) made a range of recommendations designed to further control teacher preparation, such as ensuring graduate teachers “are taught sufficient evidence-based practices” (p. ix). The report proposes that compliance with the recommendations would be policed by a new body, the Initial Teacher Education Quality Assurance Board, that would “reward those who used evidence-based teaching approaches and punish those who did not” (Harris & Grace, 2023) by incentivising through funding and punishing by stripping non-compliant providers of accreditation.

However, teacher standards as a policy lever driving reform have been widely critiqued as inadequate. For example, Kincheloe (2001) argues that standards convey a deceptively narrow and technicist view of teaching that overemphasises “practical matters related to classroom survival, transmission of knowledge and classroom management” (in Down & Sullivan, 2019, p. 48). In relation to the Australian teacher standards specifically, Bahr and Mellor (2016) suggest that the prevailing view of what constitutes a quality teacher is “simplistic and instrumentalist” (p. 58) and that the attributes of “good” teachers as identified by school students are either entirely absent from or only implicit in the APST. For example, the capacity to motivate, build confidence, show care, compassion and humour, and build relationships with students characterised by trust and care is undoubted, yet absent from the AITSL standards (see also Renshaw, 2017). And the notion of “classroom readiness,” which took hold in Australia through the report, Action now: Classroom ready teachers (Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group [TEMAG], 2014) and remains powerfully present in the AITSL (2015) standards, has also been challenged as erroneously assuming that these standards will actually cultivate the qualities necessary in a graduate teacher (Down & Sullivan, 2019). In addition to positive relationships, such qualities include the capacity to engage with complexity and to “not only possess knowledge but also know where it came from” (Kincheloe, 2001, p. 39).

Further, the policies underpinning the teacher standards are also widely regarded as problematic. Cochrane-Smith (2023) identifies three key issues. First, teacher education is not simply a policy issue but has political dimensions through entwinement with ideologies and systems of power and privilege. In Australia, the QITER Report (DESE, 2022) referred to above is a prime example of teacher education being framed as a policy problem, with “increased accountability, performance standards and compliance … situated as an antidote to public concerns about the quality of teaching and learning” (Fitzgerald, 2023, p. 5). Second, that the goals of education in democratic nations are (or should) not be simply to prepare a nation’s workforce for economic participation, but also to encourage students to become thoughtful citizens. And finally, the view that teachers can be “trained” with measurable knowledge and skills ignores that teaching is “an intellectual, cultural, and contextual activity that requires skilful decisions about how to convey subject matter knowledge, apply pedagogical skills, develop human relationships, and both generate and utilize local knowledge” (Cochrane-Smith, 2023, p. 125). Relatedly, the term “evidence-based” is contested as a mythical and seductive term that fails to take account of the complex and varied nature of teaching (Fitzgerald, 2022) and may even have harmful side effects (Zhao, 2017). This complexity means there is not always clear evidence to support an approach, yet policy makers often ignore or selectively choose evidence to support their existing views (Cochrane-Smith, 2023).

As we noted above, Reid (2019) argued that teachers’ work is “intensely personal, invariably complex, and inevitably unpredictable (p.722). These qualities of teachers’ work resonate with Bakhtin’s dialogic theory, which regards any human interaction as unfolding, dramatic, unfinalised and multivoiced. Below, we draw on Bakhtin’s dialogic theory to illuminate autoethnographic data, revealing the conflicting internal and external forces at play in contemporary initial teacher education, and the impact of these forces on one teacher educator. Through the Bakhtinian precepts of answerability and responsivity, we argue that teaching ought to be a deeply human profession – personal, complex, and unpredictable (Reid, 2019). This ideological stance pushes back at the neoliberal preoccupation with performativity and accountability measures that ignores the complexity, variability, and human-ness of teaching and reduces teacher education to training an instrumental set of measurable standards.

Instead, we argue that the “goodness” of teacher education lies in encouraging preservice teachers to become practitioners who form caring relationships with students and can enact well-developed pedagogical understandings and convictions about what is educationally beneficial for their students. In the current reductionist, “training model” of teacher education favoured by policy makers and politicians, encouraging preservice teachers towards being able to exercise caring professional judgement is not without struggle for teacher educators – but we suggest it is a worthwhile struggle. By analysing and exploring one teacher educator’s autoethnographic data, we demonstrate how Bakhtinian precepts can make visible the impact of the current policy context on teacher educators and teacher education, and support sense-making and meaning-making in this highly contested space.

Theorising language and identity: Bakhtin

Bakhtin’s dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986) refers to the intertwined relationship between a speaker’s utterances and the utterances of others. Language exists on the border of self and other because, for Bakhtin, using language is always a social act addressed to another person. Importantly, dialogism is not limited to language but applies equally to our “being.” Bakhtin saw human consciousness as a fusion of languages and social worlds – using language involves drawing on the social languages and genres of the communities to which we belong, and through which we “become.” Our human “being” is thus not about achieving a particular identity – Bakhtin rejected the Romantic yearning for wholeness (Clark & Holquist, 1984). Instead, existence is a process of dialoguing with the other (Sidorkin, 1999; Wegerif, 2008). The self is theorised, therefore, as a dialogic and continually emerging process that necessarily involves interplay with the other.

Dialogue is not neutral, however. All utterances have an ethical dimension of responsivity; we anticipate the other’s response to our words. This “other” is not merely a formless theoretical construct, but a particular, concrete other with whom we “can maintain a relationship of answerability … and can accept full responsibility for [our] actions and words” (Gardiner, 1996, p. 32). Further, we cannot delegate this responsibility: “Bakhtin assumes that each of us is ‘without an alibi in existence.’ We must ourselves be responsible, or answerable, for ourselves” (Clark & Holquist, 1984, p. 64). Because humans are unique and complex, we all respond to our environments in distinct ways and this “is how we take responsibility for our selves” (p. 67). For Bakhtin, this responsibility is a form of authorship; the self creates meaning through encountering the Other (Clark & Holquist, 1984). Drawing on these precepts, we offer a view of initial teacher education as a dialogical struggle between preservice teachers, teacher educators, practising teachers, students, and the broader cultural-historical context.

From a Bakhtinian perspective, this struggle can be understood as both necessary and worthwhile to the “ideological becoming” – developing a sense of one’s self (Bakhtin/Medvedev, 1978) – that emerges in response to encountering diverse voices within various social contexts. These diverse voices fall into two categories, which can be difficult to reconcile: authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. Authoritative discourse can be understood as official; it must be obeyed, for it is “the word of the fathers … a prior discourse … for example, the authority of religious dogma, or of acknowledged scientific truth or of a currently fashionable book” (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 342–343). Internally persuasive discourse is that which is ultimately persuasive for each person – it is “the discourse of personal beliefs, ideas that influence responses to the world and others” (Maguire, 2007, p. 173). Struggles arise when an individual’s perspective does not align with the official perspective, thereby creating a sense of uncertainty that unfolds in everyday dramas of self-making in interaction with others. Our autoethnographic research captures something of this struggle with uncertainty and the everyday dramas of professional self-making in the context of teacher education. Our subject is Kate (first author) as she reflects on her ideological becoming as a teacher educator caught between authoritative discourses of prescriptivism, performativity and compliance, and internally persuasive discourses that value teacher agency, responsivity, and perspicacity.

Methodology – collaborative autoethnography

Autoethnography is a relative newcomer to educational research methods, barely into its second decade, but occupying a respected place in the qualitative methodological fold. Indeed, we suggest that autoethnography has a distinctive role in educational research since it is interested not in “what is but rather on what ought to be the case” (Bochner & Ellis, 2016, p. 45, emphasis in original). Clifford and Marcus (1986) marked a shift in thinking about the authoring of research, or “crisis of representation.” Their seminal work questioned the existence of a reality that could be accessed through adherence to objective research methods and exposed the illusory neutrality of empiricism that “masks domination, conserves the interest of the status quo, and reinforces oppressive social practices” (Bochner & Ellis, 2016, p. 49).

Autoethnography rests on the moral agency of the author who reflexively enables the reader to enter a distinctive subjective world of experiences of what is and what ought to be. Doing autoethnography involves simultaneous engagement with multiple dialogic selves and relationships with culture. The term encapsulates three intertwined and equally essential dimensions of autoethnography: auto (the self or personal experience); ethno (culture and cultural experience); and graphy (the written product, comprising description and analysis) (Ellis & Bochner, 2000).

Autoethnography is thus not just a narration of personal history or experience but, as Chang et al. (2016) suggest, a window into a unique world through which autoethnographers, “interpret how their selves are connected to their sociocultural contexts and how the contexts give meanings to their experiences and perspectives” (p. 18, emphasis in original). Further, autoethnography carries the hope of change and often appeals to those who seek to challenge the existing order and contribute to a better world. In using autoethnography in this paper, we thus offer a moral and ethical exploration of teacher agency in an era preoccupied with standards, accountability, and performativity. Autoethnography enables us to consider how the personal perspectives, decisions and selfhood of the teacher educator were shaped both by the preoccupations of the era and the relationships that she formed with preservice teachers within that historical moment.

We recognise that autoethnography has been criticised as lacking theoretical and conceptual grounding (Denzin, 2014). Delamont (2009) also argued that scholarly research should focus on others rather than on the researcher – a stance with which some contemporary thinkers still align (Anderson et al., 2019). Our uptake of autoethnography is designed to reveal the moment-by-moment struggles as a teacher educator contests with dominant policy discourses circulating within the professional community and given voice in students’ questions and complaints. By pairing autoethnography with Bakhtin’s dialogic theory, we move beyond a narrow focus on the researcher per se to explore “the relationship between experience and theory” (Silverman & Rowe, 2020, p. 91). The personal stories included here are not simply stories; they are coupled with analysis of the cultural context and the possible implications of the lived experience captured in the stories (Lapadat, 2017). As such, in writing about and analysing the lived experiences in this paper, we offer ways of understanding what it may mean to be a teacher educator in the contemporary neo-liberal climate and illuminating both what is and what “ought to be” (Stanley, 2019) in teacher education.

There are many different kinds of autoethnography, including: evocative (Bochner & Ellis, 2016); analytic (Anderson, 2006); interpretative (Denzin, 2014); performative (Spry, 2016); collaborative (Chang et al., 2016); critical (Boylorn & Orbe, 2021); queer (Jones & Harris, 2018); feminist (e.g., Mackinlay, 2019) and black feminist (e.g., Boylorn, 2016) – and no doubt, still more approaches will emerge. Our approach is best understood as a collaborative autoethnography (CAE). CAE and autoethnography (AE) share four key qualities. According to Chang et al. (2016), both forms are: self-focused (the researcher is both instrument and data source); researcher-visible (the researcher’s thoughts, experiences and interpretations are articulated to the reader and are central to the research process and products); context-conscious (the researcher shifts focus fluidly between personal experience and social phenomena); and critically dialogic (the fluid shifting between personal and cultural perspectives cultivates rich inner dialogue). In CAE, these qualities can be augmented and enriched as researchers dialogue with one another to unfold multiple perspectives, opening up nuanced layers of interpretation and understanding. Given our dialogic theory of self and authorship, we suggest CAE is an appropriate approach to this autoethnography.

There is no single “right” way to approach CAE, which tends to be iterative rather than linear (Chang et al., 2016). In our case, the focus on teacher agency initially emerged from several years of collegial conversations. Our conversations reflected a shared interest in Bakhtinian perspectives on the ways that school students and preservice teachers develop selves – private, shared, schooled and professional – as they engage in formal “academic” learning at school or university. We often found ourselves grappling with the related questions: what is our vision of the “good teacher” and how can our practices support this vision? Bakhtin’s notion of answerability was woven into our intra and inter-personal dialogues as we addressed each other as well as imagined others, and worried about the current neoliberal circumstances of our work in education and the influence on our preservice teachers and on us as teacher educators. Our conversations often included Bakhtinian precepts such as dialogue, ideological becoming, struggle and resistance. At the centre of these conversations, therefore, was the notion of teacher agency and how it could be enabled in an era where agentic voices from below and the margins were largely ignored.

Several more formal dialogues regarding the goals of and approach to this paper followed; Kate (the first author of this paper) kept detailed notes during these dialogues, during which Peter (the second author of this paper) sought examples or clarification from Kate about her experiences. Kate recounted incidents with preservice teachers that had remained vivid in her memory over time. Several incidents offered “a-ha” moments for Peter, who began to delve into why these moments were so memorable. Autoethnography often finds genesis in “epiphanies” – remembered moments that the researcher subjectively believes to have had a significant impact on his/her life or trajectory. These remembered moments are then retrospectively and selectively explored in the written product (Ellis et al., 2011).

To identify and crystallise these “epiphanies,” we discussed which of Kate’s remembered interactions and moments with preservice teachers had remained with her and to which she returned over time as part of her sensemaking and ideological becoming as a teacher educator. After identifying those vivid memorable moments that would comprise the research data, we collaborated to develop a broad outline for the present paper and a practical approach; that is, who would draft which sections. Several weeks later, the rare opportunity of a well-timed two-day writing retreat allowed us to work together to polish and refine our drafting by reading and responding to one another’s work both in writing and conversation. This fluid shifting between working together and working alone is common in collaborative autoethnography, as is the iterative rather than linear nature of AE as both process and product (Chang et al., 2016) – there is not a neat division between research, analysis and writing up. Analysis of Kate’s epiphanic moments unfolded continuously during informal conversation with one another and collaborative and independent writing, as well as during more formal collaborative analysis of the autoethnographic data when we identified key themes and learnings.

In terms of ethical considerations, writing about personal experiences includes representing other people. As such, we draw on autoethnographic strategies such as using pseudonyms, fictionalised identifiers and omitting identifiable biographical characteristics, combined with writing up the memories as vignettes with fictionalised elements (Lapadat, 2017) so that those who feature in the written product are not identifiable. One of the students, who was able to be located, specifically consented to the inclusion of the vignette. The other students and events featured in this paper are amalgams of several students and conversations as opposed to specific individuals and moments. Gender neutral names and pronouns are used both as a strategy to protect identities as well as to convey the amalgamated nature of the students who are represented. In terms of procedural ethics, this research was deemed exempt from ethics review by Research Ethics and Integrity in accordance with university policy.

In short, our method involves a collaborative autoethnographic approach to exploring moments that have been vivid and memorable for Kate, including interactions with preservice teachers that had a lingering effect (Bochner, 1984) and provoked attention to and analysis of this lived experience (Ellis, et al., 2011). This paper captures the product of our dialogic interactions within ourselves, with one another, and with real and imagined others in response to these remembered moments. We draw on these to understand and describe the cultural experience of contemporary teaching and learning in initial teacher education and illustrate the worthwhile struggle associated with resisting authoritative discourses of compliance and performativity to cultivate agential graduate teachers.

Data – the challenge of encouraging students towards professional agency

In this section, we offer an autoethnographic account of “epiphanic” moments that occurred at different times over several years with different preservice teachers, who we have amalgamated into Jordan and Rory, captured as vignettes. Our dialogic interactions and reflections around these data, generated through a collaborative autoethnographic approach, are interwoven with the vignettes and discussion.

Searching for certainty: Jordan

Jordan was in my (Kate’s) tutorial group. I was very new to university teaching at the time, and uncertain about my professional future – would I return to the classroom or pursue an academic career? I had loved teaching and felt I was doing something that mattered. But I was no longer “at the chalkface” making a difference so I invested my moral purpose into helping my preservice teachers become capable, compassionate future teachers.

I was deeply invested in a discussion about Luis Moll’s work on “funds of knowledge” (e.g., Moll et al., 1992) when suddenly, Jordan thrust their hand into the air with an unmistakable air of exasperation and asked, “Can’t you just tell us when to teach them how to use an apostrophe?”

There could only have been a few moments of silence, but it seemed much longer. In my mind’s eye, I can still see my students’ heads turn, as though watching a slow-motion tennis match, from Jordan to me. They waited expectantly – could I even the score to fifteen all? I knew I needed to respond carefully, calmly and respectfully to make this a “teachable moment” not just for Jordan, but for all my students.

“Well, not all students are the same, Jordan,” I offer. “There isn’t a tidy, step-by-step process that tells us the precise time and strategy for teaching a particular concept or skill.”

Jordan folds their arms, leans back in the chair, and rolls their eyes – the holy trinity of passive resistance.

“This is just theory. It’s no use in a real classroom. My prac teacher told me I need to develop some of those basic things that everyone does. You know, the “bread and butter” of English teaching, like how to teach theme and character.” Jordan sits forward now and holds up their hands, gesturing inclusively at their classmates. “How are we supposed to stand at the front of a classroom full of kids with just theory?”

Twenty-three faces swivel back to me again. Even in the moment, I marvel at the perfect synchronisation. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen this phenomenon; I remember witnessing similar interactions with my own English curriculum lecturer in the late 1990s and it is her words that I draw on to respond.

“Jordan, we need deep understanding not just of pedagogical strategy, but of theory so we can make purposeful pedagogical choices that are responsive to students’ needs in a particular context. There isn’t a single right way or time to teach students about punctuation, or theme and character or anything else. Effective teachers have a diverse toolkit of strategies which they deliberately combine in different ways at different times to support different students.”

There is a perceptible shift in the room, as though everyone has just exhaled. This has obviously satisfied most of my students, or perhaps they just feel relieved – my response has restored the natural order of the classroom. With a non-committal shrug from Jordan, conversation resumes. But I know that while I might have won the point, I haven’t won the match.

Jordan’s revoicing voice of the supervising teacher’s words arrests Peter, who prompts me: What does Jordan accomplish by appropriating their supervisor’s words?

I think of Bakhtin. Jordan’s words are not spoken as an “agent in isolation” (Bakhtin, 1986); the supervisor’s voice is summoned as practice-based and therefore more authentic and authoritative than mine. The supervising teacher’s “authoritative word … demands we acknowledge it … it binds us … we encounter it with its authority already infused in it” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342). This captures an important nuance in the tensions between theory and practice in teacher education: perhaps it is less about accepting or rejecting the body of theoretical work, and more about accepting or rejecting the “authority of those that have defined this knowledge base” (McGarr et al., 2017, p. 49). Here, Jordan’s words invoke the authority and power of an authentic practitioner to challenge my stance that they need to be able to deliberately combine different pedagogical strategies to meet diverse learners’ needs. And perhaps the desire for some “bread and butter” certainty reflects the broader educational preoccupation with “the basics,” prescription and “evidence-based” instructional strategies – the “is” rather than the “ought to be” (Stanley, 2019).

I also recognise that Jordan hit a nerve. Academics are often accused of occupying ivory towers and being divorced from reality, but perhaps none more than those in education.

But, Peter presses me, this trope is often hurled at teacher educators, and your skin is thicker now. Why does this moment linger?

It lingers because I worry. I worry whether I am doing a good enough job of cultivating effective and compassionate teachers. I worry that Jordan’s response is less indicative of their own shortcomings and more revealing of my own. I worry about Jordan’s students and about whether Jordan can respond with agility to the diverse needs of their learners. Sometimes, I think of my own children and who will teach them; whether I am shaping the kind of teachers I want teaching my children. These are moral anxieties that also reveal the entwinement of personal and professional in academic life (Anderson et al., 2019), which has not shifted with time, experience, or even thicker skin.

Mostly, I worry about the future of the teaching profession. I feel ethically obliged to encourage my preservice teachers towards a desire to keep refining their practice rather than simply handing them a recipe for teaching comprehension or analysis – but it is often a struggle. When I point them to a range of possible teaching approaches from which they can make purposeful selections, there seems to be an air of suspicion, as though I am taking perverse pleasure in withholding from them a simple formula that will achieve the desired outcomes. I can’t blame them for thinking such a formula exists – the policy milieux and public discourse proclaim it through, for example, calls for “evidence-based practice.” But I am deflated by remembered moments like those captured in this vignette. My efforts to encourage my preservice English teachers towards using their professional judgement and discretion (Biesta, 2015) to draw on and deliberately combine a repertoire of literacy teaching strategies feel frustratingly ineffective.

I think of my sustained focus on the need for teacher responsivity, not just to hard, measurable data but to the intensely personal, invariably complex, inevitably unpredictable and deeply human act of teaching (Reid, 2019). I question how well I am supporting my preservice English teachers to exercise professional judgement in selecting from pedagogical approaches – towards an appreciation of the varied and relational nature of teaching and learning. I think, again, of my own children – would the hours spent preparing workshops and materials have been better invested in them? My children always seem to come second to the faceless and nameless yet, in my mind, very real future children who will be taught by my preservice teachers, and to whom I feel a deep and present moral obligation.

You have no alibi in existence, Bakhtin reminds me.

Importantly, however, the memorable moments of teacher education are not characterised solely of worry and conflict but also of remembered moments of joy, which we illustrate in the following vignette.

Thinking like a teacher: Rory

Rory, a final year preservice English teacher, came to see me for some guidance with an assessment task. As we talked, the conversation evolved from a practical focus on the task requirements to a more philosophical exploration of their experience in the first few weeks of the course. As our conversation ranges over lots of different ideas about teachers and teaching, Rory pauses and leans forward – it is almost conspiratorial, as though not wanting to be overheard.

“I think I think a bit differently to some of the other students in the course,” Rory says, tentatively.

I am intrigued. “How do you mean?”

“Well … ” Rory hesitates, seemingly casting about for the words. “Some of them are still thinking about just what they have to do to pass, you know? Like, ‘Nah, I don’t have to worry about going to that workshop’.”

“Why does that bother you?” I ask. I am delighted – Rory is entering territory that is close to my heart.

“I guess for me, it’s different now; the way I see uni is different now. We’re so close to being on our own in a classroom and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is really important. I need to be here and learn as much as I can if I’m going to be any good at it’.”

Rory sits back, as though struck by a sudden thought: “It’s like I’m … thinking like a teacher.” For a moment, Rory looks past me and out the window before returning to the conversation, eyes alight.

“I think it’s because of the kids. They really deserve good teachers; they need good teachers – you know?”

I nod and smile. Oh, do I know!

Discussion: the answerability of initial teacher education

Bakhtin’s notion of “answerability” is that there is no alibi in being; we are always ethically accountable (in different ways) for our words and actions in the world. This answerability is powerfully evident in the vignettes and carries particular implications for teacher educators.

The remembered moments in Jordan’s vignette reflect Kate’s sense of being responsible for her graduates. Kate’s own ethical orientation to teaching involves encouraging students towards becoming masterful teachers who can weave together “various approaches and views in response to the unique needs of individual students in local contexts” (Wyatt-Smith & Gunn, 2007, p. 15). This capacity for pedagogical “weaving” requires teachers to be agential; that is, capable of perceptive moment-by-moment responsivity to students’ needs in particular socio-historical contexts. Further, Kate’s sense of ethical responsibility involves encouraging preservice teachers to become aware of their own answerability. To Kate, Jordan seems resistant to developing responsive professional judgement, preferring to “just be told” some bread-and-butter teaching strategies. This worries Kate because it does not take adequate account of the countless variables that exist within classrooms – the “intensely personal, invariably complex, and inevitably unpredictable” dynamics to which Reid (2019, p. 722) refers. This worry relates to Jordan’s pedagogical orientations, to Jordan’s own capacity as a teacher educator, to Jordan’s future students, and even to Kate’s own children.

In contrast, Rory seems to have a sense of “thinking differently” to peers and expresses a sense of answerability to their future students. To be the “good teacher” they deserve, Rory must learn as much as possible instead of doing only what is necessary to achieve qualification. While Jordan’s response is deflating for Kate, Rory’s is a source of joy. These responses illuminate how Bakhtinian dialogism is also about our “being.” As Kate encounters the other through her preservice teachers her “self” creates meaning (Clark & Holquist, 1984). In this instance, that meaning involves Kate’s sense of responsibility in relation to others – preservice teachers and their future students. In a Bakhtinian sense, Kate’s sense of responsibility can be understood as a form of authorship – “who” or perhaps “how” she is as a teacher educator and even as a mother. Kate’s answerability is not limited to preparing her current preservice teachers to meet Australia’s national graduate standards. Rather, her answerability stretches into the future to embrace the graduate teachers’ own students as well as across the boundaries of personal and professional as Kate imagines her own children being taught by graduate teachers whose pedagogies she has helped to shape. Here, the unfolding, dialogic sensemaking of collaborative autoethnography foregrounds that our personal and professional lives impact on one another and that separating these domains “is no longer useful in academic life; we need to be aware of our own values and beliefs and where they might be challenged by alternative ones, if we are to function effectively in our complex, multi-layered environments” (Anderson et al., 2020, p. 395).

Bakhtin’s concept of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses can also help make sense of Kate’s experience of having her values and beliefs challenged by Jordan. Kate’s voice can be understood, in Bakhtinian terms, as internally persuasive. But as a teacher educator, Kate’s values and beliefs are often in tension with the contemporary predilection for measurability, accountability, and prescription – the authoritative word of education policy makers and politicians. Encouraging preservice teachers towards the capacity for professional agency and judgement so they can make purposeful decisions about which theories and pedagogies to draw on for particular students in particular moments can be seen as an act of resistance to the contemporary, authoritative preference for teachers to simply ensure fidelity to so-called “evidence-based approaches.”

Preservice teachers, however, may conceive Kate’s voice as authoritative – Jordan appears to struggle with and reject this authoritative voice, preferring the “authentic” voice of the practitioner in the remembered moments we describe. This is something of a paradox: when does an authoritative voice become internally persuasive? Indeed, is this even possible given that authoritative voices are monologic while internally persuasive voices are dialogic? Certainly, the question of how preservice teachers grapple with and make sense of competing authoritative discourses offers interesting ways of exploring how a sense of personal and professional self unfolds – both for teacher educators and preservice teachers. Consider Rory’s reflection that while they are now now “thinking like a teacher,” some of their peers are “still thinking about just what they have to do to pass,” perhaps only attending workshops if directly relevant to achieving an acceptable grade. We suggest that Rory’s view of a “good teacher” involves more than simply demonstrating competency against the Graduate Standards – something an “intelligent robot” could do (Renshaw, 2017). To Rory, being a good teacher involves a sense of responsibility for students that goes beyond the “necessary but insufficient” (Bahr & Mellor, 2016, p. 31) standards. We see here something of Rory’s ideological becoming in these values and beliefs which involve responsibility and response-ability (Haraway, 2016) – a recognition not only of obligations but also of an agential capacity to “learn as much as I can.” This ideological becoming has unfolded in response to encountering diverse voices, including teacher educators, peers, and practitioners.

As described above, for Kate, encountering her students’ seeming resistance to her encouragement towards professional agency involves encountering the other which, from a Bakhtinian perspective, involves self authorship – Kate’s sense of herself as a teacher educator is constituted in this dialogical struggle with the other. And it is at times a vulnerable experience, evoking anxiety and fear of failure. For us, the dialogical process of exploring these remembered moments has offered ways to consider the difference between answerability for our own being and doing in the world and what is (or ought to be) answerability that belongs with others. That is, ultimately, our students must be answerable for their own professional becoming, as we must be answerable for our own. We have also reflected that, while the contested ideas are a source of worry to Kate, perhaps it is in these encounters that the work of teaching is done: meeting Jordan in the struggle provides an opportunity to bring competing discourses into dialogue. For Bakhtin, struggle is healthy and necessary for our becoming – perhaps we need to reassert the importance of these uncomfortable moments by making space for them in our classrooms.

Kate’s ideological self involves a sense of ethical accountability to her students and their future students to challenge the authoritative discourses of policy makers and sometimes even practitioners. We suggest that for Kate, remembered moments are sources of both worry and joy that continue to shape her perspectives, behaviours, and decisions as a teacher educator and that moments of both joy and worry make the struggle to encourage preservice teachers towards responsibility and response-ability a worthwhile one.

Conclusion

Teacher education, like classroom teaching itself, is a highly contested practice and the distrust of teachers reflected in the trend to prescription and instrumental professional standards is also reflected in the increasing regulation and standardisation of teacher education programs across the globe. This pervasive policy context has inevitably affected initial teacher education, with accreditation requirements and centralised quality assurance constructed as measures to ensure “every program is preparing classroom ready teachers” (AITSL, 2015, p. 1). But what does it mean to be “classroom ready”? This phrase is an example of the contemporary “language of learning” which is “insufficient to capture what education is about” (Biesta, 2015, p. 77) and which constructs teachers as “obedient servants of the state” rather than public intellectuals (Biesta et al., 2020, p. 455). Education is (or ought to be) about more than mastery of facts, skills, and reason; it is equally about “learning how to be a human being capable of love and imagination (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 14). We suggest that, beyond the knowledge and skills prescribed by the AISTL (minimum) standards, an appreciation of teaching and learning as a deeply human, dialogical, and more-than-cognitive act is needed.

However, these deeply human aspects of teaching are difficult to reconcile with contemporary neoliberal requirements for “objectivity,” certainty, prescription and accountability. Teacher educators may feel, like Kate, caught between these two seemingly irreconcilable perspectives as preservice teachers come to expect that the formulaic language of the standards is what they should expect from their teacher education programmes. Yet, we empathise with Jordan’s desire for certainty as a novice. Perhaps one challenge for teacher educators is to find the balance between challenging and supporting preservice teachers as we encourage them towards professional agency in an increasingly reductionist policy context.

Our collaborative autoethnographic data also indicates that moral distress and a sense of failure and powerlessness can result from holding an ethical orientation that is misaligned with the policy context. Drawing on dialogic interactions around one teacher educator’s significant remembered moments, this paper has shown the struggle between reductionist approaches and a teacher educators’ own sense of answerability to others. This answerability foregrounds teaching as not simply a matter of teacher “input” and student “output,” but as a “complex interactive process of communication, interpretation and joint meaning making where teacher judgement and decision-making are crucial” (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 4). Teaching is, at its core, a deeply human and thus fundamentally ethical profession. As such, being “classroom ready” requires more than graduate-level content knowledge and pedagogical skills. Like others (e.g., Fitzgerald, 2023; Mayer et al., 2021), we suggest that teacher educators must challenge powerful discourses that mischaracterise the complexity and human-ness of teaching, cultivating mistrust and blame, and constraining moral and intellectual freedom.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this intellectual work has been conducted and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This project [2023/HE000094] has been reviewed by the Research Ethics and Integrity and is deemed to be exempt from ethics review under the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research and relevant University of Queensland policy [PPL 4.20.07].

Notes on contributors

Katherine Frances McLay

Dr Katherine Frances McLay is a sociocultural scholar whose research interests span literacy, dialogic pedagogy, professional and learner identity development, and technology enhanced learning.

Peter David Renshaw

Peter David Renshaw Emeritus Professor scholarship is framed by a sociocultural theory of education that foregrounds the social and cultural construction of knowledge and identity.