Conference Agenda

It is well-established that many nations face unprecedented teaching workforce crises (OECD, 2024). While this has been predicted since 2016, it has been exacerbated since the COVID-19 pandemic (Flores and Craig, 2023). Aware that intervention is well overdue, governments are implementing policies designed to attract new teachers to the profession, including paying or removing student debt (US; Australia); offering better-funded employment-based pathways (US; Australia); enabling student teachers to commence teaching prior to completing their initial teacher education qualification, and recruiting from other nations. Governments have also sought to implement policies to retain teachers, encouraging retired or inactive teachers to return to or remain in the profession ( Portugal) and offering incentives for teachers to take up posts in traditionally hard-to-staff contexts. These policies have been borrowed and adopted worldwide and implemented rapidly to respond to crises in the short term. This symposium investigates what these swiftly implemented policies mean for the status and nature of the teaching profession, both now and in the long term.

Symposium presenters from Europe, the United States and Australia will draw on the framework outlined by Goodwin, Madalińska-Michalak & Flores (2023) regarding tensions in teacher education to analyse the impact of these policies on teaching as it is conceptualised and enacted a profession. This framework identifies key tensions as 1) teacher as technician vs. teacher as professional; 2) preparing teachers for the world we have vs. the world we want; 3) place-based vs. context-fluid teacher education; and 4) teacher shortages as a quantity or quality issue (Goodwin et al., 2023). To this end, this symposium will address issues of quality teaching and take up issues inherent in the sub-strands: ‘characteristics of quality teaching’ and ‘reconciling tensions for a new social contract in education.’