From policy objects to self-regulating subjects: reimagining the role of teacher educators

This paper begins where many analyses of teacher education policy typically end: in calls to more strongly include teacher educators’ voices within existing policy frameworks. While such calls are both legitimate and necessary, they risk reinforcing the very dependency they seek to overcome, as professional status and recognition remain contingent on a more favourable disposition from policymakers. What remains underexplored, then, is not how teacher educators can be better included in existing governance arrangements, but what it would mean to fundamentally reconfigure those arrangements. Drawing on a thought experiment, we explore teacher education as a liberal profession – akin to fields such as medicine or law – characterised by autonomy, collective responsibility, a shared knowledge base and ethical self-regulation. The thought experiment illuminates what it would mean for professional agency to become constituted rather than permitted, and identifies key tensions and responsibilities inherent in such a reconfiguration of the profession.