An ethics of innovation for teacher education: an interview with Anne Phelan

One of the abiding challenges for teacher education is to create and sustain a sense of educational possibility. This means putting conditions in place that can help preserve the capacity of each new teacher to renew the educational conversation, that is, to question, to articulate what matters, and to imagine yet unthought educational purposes and practices. This means that teacher education programmes and policies not only welcome but nourish the difference that each newcomer brings to the profession. Put simply, the challenge is how to keep the question of a future open. This is a perennial educational challenge of course but one currently haunted by neo-liberal learning utopias, on the one hand, and pandemic dystopias, on the other. Utopian thought provides enticing visions of a better future. In its neo-liberal variety, the future is defined within the terms of global economics. Oriented towards uncontested and predetermined destinations, neo-liberalism offers a sort of user manual for living and teaching (Clarke & Phelan, 2017). It provides direction without inviting an articulation of meaningful purpose (Brown, 2017). This means that the need for ethical judgment or political consideration is erased because, we are told, there are no alternatives to consider. Dion Rüsselbæk Hansen and I have written about how the neo-liberal utopian ideal of a better economic future is entangled with education (Phelan & Rüsselbæk Hansen, 2021). Education becomes little more than “a ‘resource’ to be used as part of the standing reserve in the game of national economic competition” (Peters & Humes, 2003, p. 432). Teachers become the instrumental means to commercial ends and good teaching, directed towards predetermined effects – improvement of student test scores on international comparative tests (Hattie, 2013; McMahon, Forde, & Dickson, 2015) – is seen as merely “a clinical practice positioned within an audit culture” (Peters & Humes, 2003, p. 68). In this scenario, teacher education prepares teachers as: