Qualitative Research in Education in Canada

Likewise with many other major themes in teachers’ work. The question of teacher stress and burn-out would, I believe, be best studied through life history perspectives. Similarly the issue of effective teaching and the question of the take-up innovations and new managerial initiatives. Above all, in the study of teachers’ working conditions this approach has a great deal to offer.

Studies of teachers’ lives might allow us to see the individual in relation to the history of his or her time allowing us to view the intersection of the life history with the history of society thus illuminating the choices, contingencies and options open to the individual. ‘Life histories’ of schools, subjects and the teaching profession would provide vital contextual background. The initial focus on the teachers’ lives therefore would reconceptualize our studies of schooling and curriculum in quite basic ways.

Essentially collaborative study of teachers’ lives at the levels mentioned constitutes a new way of viewing teacher development; a way which should re-direct the power relations underpinning teachers lives in significant and generative ways.

This chapter has tried to undertake some crystal ball gazing with regard to the future of teacher education in Canada. This is because the evidence of rapid change in Canadian teacher education is very substantial and this is important to try and assess the new genres and initiatives which might rejuvenate and revive Canadian teacher education as it comes under threat. It is important, however, to reiterate that most Canadian Faculties of Education currently have a balance between foundational theoretical discourses and more practical schools-based genres. The balance, however, is tilting very fast towards the latter and it is therefore important to assess ways in which the theoretical, critical and qualitative enterprise in Canadian teacher education will be reinscribed within an inevitably more schools based terrain.

Conclusion

This paper illustrates that Canada provides an unique and idiosyncratic location for teacher education. The uniqueness and idiosyncrasy relate to the absence of any national policy making body with regard to education. I have pointed to some of the valuable spin-offs from this absence of national prescription and surveillance with regard to qualitative studies. Most notably in the field of education, this vacuum has led to the development of some deeply interesting, innovative and generative genres for the qualitative study of teachers and the development of teacher education. The country has been a seedbed for the development of narratology, storying and phenomenological work.

In the last part of the paper, I have however, raised some questions about these genres. Not surprisingly, given the fact that these genres have been spawned in a somewhat depoliticized arena because of the absence of a national policy, the genres themselves echo a depoliticized world. As a result, phenomenology, narratology and storying all fail to address the issue of political context and the way that phenomena, narrations and story are all located and embedded within the social and political context.

The last section has pointed towards work, much of it also located in Canada, that seeks to redress this absence of politics and social context. The life history method, through the triangulation of life stories, historical context and contemporary commentary seeks to address the question of historical background and context. In this project, the teacher and teacher education, emerge as phenomena to be scrutinized. In the social space of teacher education by this view, subjectivities are made and constructed and the project of the teacher educator and educational researcher is to understand the social construction of the subjectivities. The project then is not to capture the subjectivities that are created and merely record them as is the project of phenomenology, narratology and storying but rather to take the subjectivities as the beginning part of the exploration and of the project of teacher education, in this sense, teacher education, employing life history work would take as its project the delineation of the social and political context which define and confine the world of teaching and schooling. This I take to be the most empowering prospect before us as we begin to define qualitative studies within teacher education for the twenty-first century.