Description
How teacher educators respond as policy actors from inside spaces where multiple policies and policy discourses collide has the potential to provide insights into the ways in which policy does or doesn’t play out in practice in educational contexts. This makes the space where multiple policies and policy discourses collide an interesting place from which to tease out contextual policy complexities, at the same time as thinking innovatively about policy problems and enactments. By engaging and working with the uncertain space of our own contextual ‘policy storm’ we attempt to provide a narrative of enactment that highlights the roles and actions of policy actors who are simultaneously constrained and inspired by policy. To do this we draw upon the policy actor framework outlined by Ball, Maguire, Braun and Hoskins (2011) to unpack the kind of work involved in making meaning of policy within an undergraduate pre-service teacher education program.The paper does three things. First, we explore a contextual space from which it might be possible to simultaneously expose and engage with the multiple complex demands and expectations of the teacher education policy environment. Our context consisted of a confluence of policy (we describe as ‘policy storm’) that sparked our imagination around curriculum and teaching reform in our work and initiated our journey. We outline how this context impacted a group of four teacher educators who were simultaneously attempting to break down traditionally ‘siloed’ approaches to university teaching, re-design undergraduate courses as well as engaging in innovative practices. Second, we provide an empirical and theoretical account of policy interpretation and enactment work through annotated exemplars from the actor’s perspective i.e. a policy actor as opposed to the policy actor. In this sense, we depart from much of the research in the educational policy field by being the participants doing the enactment as opposed to being the researcher looking in. We maintain that this insider approach to performing policy is relatively novel and new as most policy research is done from the outside. Finally, with novelty in mind, we theorise our policy work by testing the policy actor framework of Ball et al., (2011) to find out if it adequately describes our insider policy work and what we do in teacher education, and what that might mean if it does or doesn’t. We do more than describe the numerous policy problems in/of education from an outsider perspective. Instead we draw on policy possibilities from inside classrooms and actors that illustrate and embody enactment, are innovative, and remain optimistic of the productive potential of policy reform in both teacher education and school curriculum spaces.
| Period | 2018 |
|---|---|
| Event title | World Curriculum Studies 2018 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 6th |
| Location | Melbourne, Australia, VictoriaShow on map |