Teaching and Teacher Education for a Post-pandemic Canada: Context, Crisis, Critique and Complication

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, Canadian teacher education has been characterized by a trend towards professionalization of teaching. A concern, however, is that in the absence of a federal education system, the trend has not served to integrate teacher education programs within and across provinces. A Canadian compromise has been achieved by the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE) committed to creating and fostering a pan-Canadian space for dialogue on issues important to the provision of public (teacher) education. Against this backdrop, we examine a recent position paper titled, “Teaching and Teacher Education for a Post-pandemic Canada” issued by ACDE (2020) and calling for investment in and reimagining of teaching and teacher education. Our Foucauldian analysis of the document reveals that rather than unsettle prevailing educational discourses and disturb existing power relations in the name of transformation, the position paper offers Canadians ‘more of the same but worse’. We identify and examine four key power relations (global–local; school–society; research–practice; and centre–margin) that structure the document, arguing that they reflect the imminent capture of teaching and teacher education in Canada by instrumentalism—the pervasive view that the main purpose of teacher education is to serve the needs of the economy—and consensualism—the unifying of multiple points of view into a single perspective. We conclude by speculating about how acknowledgement of a multiplicity of conflicting relations and positions—via a process of ‘disidentification’—might be more conducive to Canadian efforts to re-imagine teaching and teacher education for our times.