Transnational policy discourses on ‘teacher quality’ : an educational connoisseurship and criticism approach

In this article, we analyse key policy documents on teacher quality produced by the OECD andthe EU during the period 2005 to 2017 using an educational connoisseurship and criticismapproach. The purpose of this article is to explore how Eisner’s concepts of educational connoisseurshipand educational criticism can be understood and used to analyse educational policy,especially how teacher quality is discursively constructed in transnational authoritative texts oneducation policy. Eisner’s three aspects of criticism, description, interpretation and evaluation canbe utilised in a differentiated critical approach to the analysis of transnational policy documentson education. While the critical descriptive discourse can be viewed as ‘identifying a simplerelationship’ between social development and educational needs, the interpretative critical discoursecan be regarded as ‘recognising the complexity’ of teachers’ tasks in changing societies andthe critical evaluative discourse as ‘recognising and problematising contradictory interests’ thataffect teachers’ work. We argue that the philosophical concepts of connoisseurship and criticismcontribute to policy research by demonstrating that a multifaceted concept of teacher quality isneeded to capture the complex nature of education