Reforming Teacher Education in French-speaking Belgium: a crises policy or a policy in crisis?

peer reviewedA major reform of teacher training has been built and planned since the last three decades in French-speaking Belgium, based on extensive qualitative research conducted with multiple actors of the field, denouncing the quality of teacher education and the consequences for school teaching and learning, deemed in deep crises (Dufrasne et al., 2013). However, after having been decreed in 2019, the policy implementation was adjourned in 2020 with a three-year delay. Amidst political (non) decision-making and budgetary tensions, concerned actors in organizations, such as in Universities, Higher Education Training Colleges and Schools, voice ambiguity (scientific articles, white papers, press) about the policy implementation of teacher training reform (Demeuse et al., 2020) in what is a vast (post-Bologna) field of restructuring the French-speaking Belgian educational systems (landscape decree, 2013). The collective problematization resulting in a policy plan (Dufrasne et al., 2013) determines a successful collective action in reforming teacher training: “Firstly, faced with the rapid and profound changes in society, the increasing complexity of modes of 'regulation', the multiple crises (of state structures, public finances, etc.), the 'decline of institutions' (as a whole), and finally the growing influence of the market (especially in education), the tendency has been, for quite a few years now, to think about 'institutions' (Dubet, 2002) and to approach their problems, in a defensive mode, within the framework of a mainly organizational vision. Secondly, for their (educational) institutions (with a lowercase letter) to overcome this, institutional actors need to think of themselves more as Institutions (with a capital letter), without underestimating or approaching organizational contingencies in an amateurish way.” (Dufrasne et al., 2013:81). How are organizations involved in the reform process tackling this overarching call of Institutional (capital letter) change? Czarniawska (2017) proposes that a key driver of organizational change can be imitation that rests on translation. Having reached common problematization after years of negotiations and research in the field, the policy cycle (Parsons, 1995) seems to stagnate on the level of interessement (Callon, 1986), a necessary step in ascertaining common and shared interests in action. In his description of processes of translation, Michel Callon (1986) delineates four steps (problematization, interessement, enrolment and mobilization) that enable a cycle of collective action, which we propose can be applied to analyzing policy processes. This paper explores firstly whether problematization discourse for teacher training reform has maintained an Institutional (with a capital letter) ideological note, and therefore is repeatedly revised to re-problematize and re-define common “problems” (Callon, 1986). Various working and evaluation groups were created by the French-speaking government since 2019 in order to re-evaluate the problematization part of the policy process (avant-projet de décret, 2019).” We are interested to what extent these working groups are representing real interest groups. The idea of the role, scope and efficiency of interest groups in a policy process of associative democracy is explored (Sarugger, 2002). Secondly, a hypothesis is put forward that by not being able to produce concrete interest devices (here modes of organizing the reform, through restructuring, negotiating and collaborating), different interest groups are “refusing the transaction by defining its identity, its goals, projects, orientations, motivations, or interests in another manner.” (Callon, 1986: 204). How are actors organizing concretely what is not only an ideological but a profound organizational reform? This paper examines through critical policy discourse analysis (Hyatt, 2013) initial reform problematization that was formulated, and describes what kind of challenges and tensions issue for different actors in A) (re-) creating groups of interest (Sarugger, 2010) and in B) proposing concrete interest devices (Callon, 1984) for implementing teacher training reform