Certainties and Censure: teacher education in a changing terrain

ABSTRACT Economic and cultural globalisation has resulted in particular political ideologies in policy and practice that have created a certain essentialism – a tightened modernist ‘will to certainty ’ – which is reinscribed in curricular practices in New Zealand teacher education. At a time when the naming and framing of educational practice in terms of the ‘knowledge society’, the ‘learning society ’ and the effects of such discourses on experience needs to be revealed in teacher education – when the relations between political ideologies and their inscription in policy and practice need to be exposed – critical approaches that might threaten global knowledge truth claims exposing the non-neutrality of educational processes have been diminished. A limited selection of ‘worthwhile’ knowledge, which has its genesis in classroom instruction, is involved in censure and a politics of censure opened here for analysis, and thus preconditions practice in the changing educational terrain of the teaching subject. What is questioned here is the related essentialism of the dominant discourses of teacher education (pedagogy, assessment and evaluation, psychology and learning theory), based as these discourses are on the human subject. Drawing distinctions between ‘education ’ and ‘pedagogy’, it is suggested that