The affective dimensions of teacher education policy reform: narratives of deviance, compliance, and resistance

Since the 1980s, university-based initial teacher education (ITE) in England has faced ongoing threats to its future via a succession of policy moves designed to curtail, discredit and delegitimise the work of teacher educators. In the last 10 years, the UK government has made even greater efforts to disrupt the ITE infrastructure, including the requirement that teacher educators display complicity with the state’s ideology on what constitutes ‘high-quality’ provision. Whilst there exists much critique of policy, there is a complete absence of research which examines the affective dimensions of policy on the professional and personal lives of teacher educators. This research addresses this, by facilitating focus groups with at least 75 teacher educators across England. These groups will provide a shared, safe space in which ITE staff will be invited to talk about the material and lived experience of policy reform. Our work will build new theory in ITE which centres the affective dimensions of policy and how teacher educators get positioned as compliant, deviant and resistant.