Partnership in teacher education: historical perspectives on recent rhetoric

Abstract

'Partnerships' has become a key term in teacher education discourse. Partnerships between universities and schools, have come to function as a strategic and rhetorical lynchpin in proposals for reform, signifying potential for success in contrast to the failures of the past. This paper seeks to inject a note of caution about such claims with regards to both their capacity to sustain strategic moves for reform, and the novelty of the relations they propose between schools and universities. It does so first, through a brief analysis of the claims for partnerships in recent reviews and proposals for teacher education and, second, through an analysis of historical evidence regarding of relations between teacher training institutions, in England and Australia, over the first half of the twentieth century. It argues that the history of partnerships in teacher education throws light on more recent claims and suggests that they exaggerate the novelty of many of the proposals, and that those proposals,like their predecessors, are trapped within a theory-practice binary that cripples their potential for radical transformation and the production of the sorts of radical solutions to endemic problems they hope for.