Abstract:
This paper considers how crisis-level teaching shortages have impacted initial teacher education. With a focus on teacher supply, initial teacher education is both under scrutiny and the overwhelming focus of many Australian government initiatives. The Teacher Education Expert Panel notes that recent conditions such as the pandemic have created a ‘tipping point’ bringing forward long-projected endemic teaching shortages. Attracting new teachers is, however, a challenge when teachers report being overworked, demoralized, devalued and underpaid. As a response to these unprecedented teaching shortages, with more emphasis on recruitment and supply of teachers than retention, an inordinate amount of pressure is placed on Initial Teacher Education which is both blamed for underpreparing teachers while tasked with recruiting and preparing more teachers quickly to fill the urgent workforce gap. Following conservative movements in the US and the UK, Initial Teacher Education in Australia is increasingly criticised for underpreparing graduate teachers by being ‘too political’, focusing too much on social issues, such as poverty, gender inequality, anti-racism, or decolonisation and mandated to increase their attention on core learning, including learning sciences, evidence-based pedagogies and classroom or behaviour management. With unprecedented teaching shortages, the field is going through a change when we can observe how Initial Teacher Education is deployed to reproduce certain kinds of teachers in a market-driven climate in which critical social justice in education takes a back seat to the more immediate and desperate need to fill teacher vacancies any way possible, that is to risk favouring quantity over quality.