Qualitative Research in Education in Canada

The Devil’s Bargain which Canadian Faculties of Education face makes them peculiarly vulnerable to demands for change at the present moment. In many ways, we can see the demands for change echoing from the more general demands of capital for practical knowledge among workers. Teacher education is being pushed to practicalize and utilitarianize its mission by focussing on the personal and practical knowledge which teachers have of their craft. As a result, the more theoretical and critical discourses within Canadian Faculties of Education, which have traditionally focussed on the foundational disciplines, are coming under considerable pressure. Certainly in university Faculties of Education in Ontario, there is a perceptible shift away from the foundational disciplines in new recruitment policies and many of the old history of education, philosophy of education and sociology of education programs appear to be in disarray. Most recently, for instance, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, when choosing which programs to close in a period of retrenchment, focussed particularly on the history of education department (which interestingly has some very distinguished scholars among it’s members). At the same time as these more theoretical departments are being eroded, teacher development centres are being promoted in a significant number of faculties from the University of Alberta through to the Ontario Institute, the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University.

In Canada the devil’s bargain which Faculties of Education entered when taking their place in universities intersects with other historical contingencies which have been briefly touched on. The current moves to make teacher education more practical and field-based make this intersection of contingencies both perilous, both also potentially promising. This then is the Janus face of Canadian teacher education.

On the one hand theoretical disciplines and discourses are under threat as faculties and teacher education become more field based and teacher development centred. In other nations this erosion of theoretical disciplines has led to a shift into Education Policy Studies (for instance in Britain, one famous sociology of education department until recently headed by Basil Bernstein has moved into the Education Policy and Management Department).

But this is, where Canada’s unique ‘nation at rest’ status with regard to educational policy makes teacher education reforms imminently perilous but potentially promising. Because of the absence of national education policy, the field of education policy analysis is profoundly undeveloped. In a more general sense, Canadian teacher education has a grossly underdeveloped sense of politics. The politics of teacher education is negotiated, made and in a broad sense understood outside Faculties of Education. This absence of political or indeed critical theory across Canadian teacher education makes the attack on the theoretical disciplines of teacher education deeply worrisome. For the option of moving to educational policy studies, in any national sense, plainly does not exist.

But as is often the case the situation in paradoxical: The absence of policy analysis and study, and of deep concern with the politics of education, has allowed Canadian scholars to develop a range of fascinating modes of qualitative study which are well-developed and promising. Since these methodologies are a distinctive companion of the unique ‘nation at rest’ mode of educational policy-making and analysis, I would like to spend some time discussing these genres of work as they relate to recent teacher education reform initiatives.