Anti-intellectualism and Teacher Education in the 21st Century Is there any way out? Antonio Novoa (University of Lisbon)
1. The essay by James Ladwig rightly points the problem of anti-intellectualism, both in education and teacher education. As the author explains, it is a long-standing issue that invades historical and contemporary discourses. I will not deepen the arguments raised by James Ladwig, but I will add my own perspective to this debate, and I will ask if there is any way out. 2. Recently, in preparing a keynote address on “Teacher professional development for the quality and equity of lifelong learning” upon invitation from the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the European Union, I collected a wide range of documentation: international reports, scientific articles, political speeches, documents about teacher education, books and PhD theses, etc. When reading this material over a few days one can see the recurrent use of the same concepts and language, of the same ways of speaking and thinking about the problems of the teaching profession. We are looking at a type of discursive consensus, rather redundant and verbose, which expands into references about teachers’ professional development, the coordination of initial training, induction and in-service training from a lifelong learning perspective, the focus on the first years of professional practice and the placement of young teachers in schools, the idea of the reflective teacher and research-based teacher education, the new competencies for teachers in the 21st century, the importance of collaborative cultures, teamwork, monitoring, supervision and assessment of teachers… and so on. All of this is part of a discourse that has become dominant and one that we all have contributed to. We are not just talking about words, but also about the practices and policies that they transport and suggest. 3. Two major groups have contributed to the dissemination and vulgarization of this discourse, here understood in the sense of discourse-practice that Cleo Cherryholmes gave it: “the intertextuality of discourses and practices that constitutes and structures our social and educational worlds”. In the first place, there is the group commonly known as the teacher education community, which includes researchers in subject areas, in education and didactics, networks and institutions. In the last fifteen years, this community has produced a number of impressive texts, which include the concept of the reflective teacher, changing how teachers and teacher education are viewed. The second group is made up of international experts that act as consultants or are part of major international organizations (OECD, UNESCO, the European Union, etc.). Despite their heterogeneous nature, they have created and disseminated, on a global scale, discursive practices that are strongly grounded on comparative arguments. Their legitimacy is essentially based on the knowledge of international networks and comparative data and less on the theoretical expertise of a scientific or professional area.