Transitional Teacher Education in Globalised and Neoliberal Contexts - Professor Diane Mayer, University of Sydney

In the Stow Lecture Professor Diane Mayer addressed the question of how we ensure high quality teachers in an age of pupil testing and teacher accountability.  Increasingly, governments around the world are looking to teachers to address their economic agendas and, as a result, create policy that borrows from other, often different, contexts.  In a drive towards what are seen as efficient practices in teacher education, there is a danger that governments create a false theory-practice divide where there is a disconnect between learning teaching and doing teaching and where schools, authorities, universities and national organisations are not aligned.  In the Scottish context, following Donaldson’s review of teacher education, Prof. Mayer explored the need for such an alignment in Initial Teacher Education and teacher education more generally by drawing on her unique, large scale, longitudinal study in Australia: Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education.

The Annual Stow Lecture is hosted by the School of Education at the University of Strathclyde which traces its origins back to David Stow’s Glasgow Normal School in 1837, the first purpose-built teacher education institution in the UK, and among the first in Europe.   Stow recognised the need for effective teacher education.  Glasgow Normal School later became Jordanhill College of Education which merged with the University of Strathclyde in 1993.