“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.