Professional Accreditation of Initial Teacher Education Programmes: Teacher Educators’ Strategies Between ‘Accountability’ and Professional Responsibility’?

Source: Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 37 (January, 2014) p. 11-20
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)

This article examines the accounts of teacher educators on their experiences with a professional accreditation process through the multi-focal lens of professional responsibility, accountability, survival and coping strategies.

Method
The participants were four leading teacher educators in Ireland.
Data were collected through interviews and various documents, including policy papers, the actual accreditation reports on each of the four teacher educators' programmes, Teaching Council publications and content of the Pro Forma document that ITE providers are obliged to complete as a major part of the process of professional accreditation.

The findings reveal that teacher educators operate on the premise that they live out their professional responsibility in ways consistent with the complexity and ambiguity inherent in democratic, deliberative decision-making.

Accreditation processes are primarily driven by the logic of New Public Management (NPM).
There are many aspects of the current socio-economic and policy climate that are inhospitable to the creation of multiple performance scripts and attendant creative coping strategies that contribute to the cultivation of professional responsibility.

Multiple performance scripts are created between “responsibility and accountability”.
All educators both in schools and in higher education must cope with the claims of both responsibility and accountability.
Multiple performance scripts are necessary for professional responsibility.
The authors conclude that creative coping through the construction of multiple performance scripts are a vital element of promoting and sustaining professional responsibility among teacher educators.
They argue that teacher educators must be more articulate about the purposes a process of increased explicitness and the logic of accountability actually serve, and what the less tangible moral dimensions of responsibility contribute to the discourses of reform.