Neoliberal Elements in Canadian Teacher Education: Challenges and Possibilities

This article examines the evolving landscape of environmental and sustainability education in teacher education (ESE-TE) in Canada through a scoping review of 198 peer-reviewed studies published between 2005 and 2020. Situated within broader international efforts to reorient education toward sustainability, the review maps the theoretical, methodological, and linguistic contours of ESE-TE scholarship across the country. Findings reveal a field characterized predominantly by qualitative research, strong representation from Ontario-based scholars, and limited contributions in French and from northern regions. The increasing integration of Indigenous education and land-based learning signals a promising yet complex engagement with decolonizing approaches to sustainability. However, significant gaps persist in the inclusion of diverse epistemologies, methodological breadth, and Indigenous-led scholarship. By tracing these developments, this study contributes to ongoing conversations about how Canadian faculties of education might mobilize research and collaboration to address the climate crisis and advance the transformative aims of sustainability education. Keywords: environmental and sustainability education, teacher education, scoping review, Indigenous education, climate crisis

During the last few years, higher education has been the subject of constant transformation, innovations and reforms. In response to the new demands of the society, universities increase academic mobility, attract international students, introduce information technologies and new approaches to learning: personalized learning, problem-based learning, flipped classroom, distance learning, blended learning and so on. The role of a teacher in introducing new educational technologies and preparing the future generation is of great importance, so the main priority all over the world is to improve the quality of teacher education.The purpose of this paper is to analyze the current state of initial teacher training in Canada, a country where a larger proportion of students performed at the highest levels of proficiency according to the most recent PISA study, which indicates the quality of teacher training. The paper discusses the main features of Canadian teacher education programs: the teacher education models, the program structure and duration, the program content as well as different methods for assessing student learning outcomes with particular attention paid to modern approaches to assessing the student professional competencies at Quebec teacher faculties. Based on a literature review, the results of comparative studies of Canadian researches as well as universities regulations and official websites information, we analyze the main trends in the teacher education in Canada.

ABSTRACTThis article contributes a Canadian perspective to a growing body of international research investigating teacher education, specifically as a category of academic work exemplified in employment advertisements. By investigating how Canadian employment advertisements in teacher education are constructed as mediating artefacts in the relationship between potential candidates and their goal of gaining an academic position, we attempt to identify contradictions inherent to systems of human activity, and surface institutional priorities regarding faculty hiring policies and the staffing practices within Canadian teacher education programs. Our study surfaces both similarities and differences with concurrent WoTE (Work of Teacher Education) investigations in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand regarding the teacher education as a form of academic labour, echoing their characterisation of the increasingly “precarious space” occupied by teacher education in post-secondary institutions.

Indigenous teacher education has proven to be a powerful influence in the resurgence of Indigenous cultures and languages globally. In Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, while there are numerous distinctions between the countries in size, linguistic and cultural diversity, and the histories of Indigenous peoples and colonization, an Indigenous commitment to schooling has shaped long-term and recent aspirations in both contexts. Within Canada, the proliferation of Indigenous teacher education programs is a direct result of a 1972 landmark national policy document Indian Control of Indian Education. This document written by Indigenous leaders in response to the Canadian government was the culmination of a decades-long, relentless commitment to creating the best possible schooling systems for Indigenous students within the provinces and territories. In 2015, despite some significant gains, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada completed its work articulating Calls to Action that reinforce the original recommendations, particularly the focus on Indigenous control of education. In the Aotearoa New Zealand context, the establishment of Māori language schooling pathways and Māori medium teacher education programs has been made possible by activism focused on the recognition of Indigenous-Māori rights to language and culture guaranteed by the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Forms of constitutional recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi mean that New Zealand endorses a social policy of biculturalism. From the 1970s and 1980s, responses to exclusionary and racist colonial policies and practices have led to the creation of teacher education programs in both Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand transforming universities and schools and establishing spaces of Indigenous authority, activism and expertise. While the pace of change varies radically from place to place and from institution to institution, and the specific contexts of the two countries differ in important ways, the innumerable Indigenous graduates of the programs make ongoing contributions to Indigenizing, decolonizing, and educating Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike. The growth and strengthening of an Indigenous education sector have led to significant policy and curriculum reforms across the education systems and to ongoing engagement in critique, advocacy, research, and practice. Throughout their development, Indigenous leadership and control of the programs remain the immediate and long-range goals.

In considering the problems of teacher education in Prince Edward Island one must deal not only with the perennial questions about types of programs to be offered but also with the prior question of whether such a small province should attempt to provide for this service locally or participate with neighboring provinces in training teachers for a wider area. The author concludes that this small province can justify its own teacher education program only if the hitherto neglected in-service education function is given priority.

In Canada, education is a provincial responsibility. Given a geographically expansive country, a diversity of cultures, and 13 provinces and territories, the role of history and philosophy of science (HPS) in science education varies considerably across the nation. In the last decade, some attempts have been made to provide some national consistency in science curricula across provincial boundaries (Pan-Canadian Frameworks for Science). While a focus for this work is on scientific literacy that incorporates in some ways teaching about the nature of science, implementation at the provincial level, often guided by textbooks, has not been widespread.

This volume developed as a result of the first Working Conference on Teacher Education in Canada, held in Winnipeg in 2007. Along with general essays on teacher education, topic areas of discussion that appear as sections in the volume include (a) teacher governance, policy, and the role of the university; (b) aboriginal teacher education and aboriginal perspectives in teacher education; (c) understanding of practices in teacher education related to diversity, identity and inclusion, and demographic change (d) the nature, role and place of field experiences in teacher education and relationships with schools; (e) the education and professional development of teacher educators, and; (f) teacher education program reform and development.

This paper examines the impact of neoliberalist macro-policy and culture on the conditions and practice of teacher education in Canada. The origins and central features of neoliberalism are unpacked to show how the centrality of the nation state of liberalism has been replaced under neoliberalism by the distorted myth of a minimalist state that in reality reshapes social institutions along market lines and uses state regulation machinery to ensure that the market model is dominant to the point of diminishing the idea of the “public good.” This has made the world very unstable, leading to civil strife, political violence and an ongoing diasporization associated with trans-national migration. Within this unstable world, higher education and teacher education in Canada take place. I then turn to examining the impact of neoliberalist policy on higher education as a foreground to examining the impact of neoliberalist policy conditions on Canadian teacher education. Three themes are extrapolated to demonstrate this impact—the conflicted challenge between institutional legitimacy and professional identity that working in a higher education context presents to Canadian teacher educators; some unresolved issues of accessibility and accountability in Canadian teacher education programs; and the ways in which a commitment to social justice with its emphasis on inclusion, diversity, and multiculturalism that Canadian teacher educators name as important are frustrated and sometimes impeded. My thesis is that neoliberalism is using audit conditions of accountability to re-frame teachers’ work as an occupational relationship. My claim is that if economic rationalist accountability ends up trumping professional judgment, then teaching will potentially lose its professional status. And, if that happens, there will likely be no place for university teacher education. Cet article porte sur l’impact de la macro-politique et la culture néolibérales sur les conditions et la pratique de la formation des enseignants au Canada. Les origines et les caractéristiques essentielles du néolibéralisme sont exposées afin de démontrer dans quelle mesure la centralité de l’état nation du libéralisme a été remplacée sous le néolibéralisme par le mythe déformé d’un état minimaliste qui, en réalité, remanie les institutions sociales selon les principes de la liberté du marché et utilise l’appareil de la réglementation étatique pour assurer que le modèle du marché domine jusqu’au point de diminuer l’idée du « bien public ». Le résultat en est un monde très instable caractérisé par des troubles civils, de la violence politique et des déplacements constants liés à la migration transnationale. C’est dans ce contexte instable que se déroulent les études supérieures et la formation des enseignants au Canada. L’examen de l’impact de la politique néolibérale sur les études supérieures sert de toile de fond pour l’étude de l’impact des politiques néolibérales sur la formation des enseignants au Canada. Trois thèmes démontrent bien cet impact : le défi que pose, pour les formateurs d’enseignants au Canada œuvrant dans les milieux des études supérieures, le conflit entre la légitimité institutionnelle et l’identité professionnelle; des problèmes non résolus dans les programmes de formation des enseignants et portant sur l’accessibilité et la responsabilité; et les entraves qui se dressent parfois devant un engagement envers la justice sociale visant l’inclusion, la diversité et le multiculturalisme, éléments que les formateurs d’enseignants indiquent comme étant importants. Ma thèse propose que le néolibéralisme emploie des conditions de vérification pour reformuler le travail des enseignants comme une relation professionnelle. J’affirme que si les notions économiques et rationalistes de la responsabilité finissent par l’emporter sur le jugement professionnel, l’enseignement pourrait perdre son statut professionnel. Si cela devait se produire, il est probable que la formation universitaire des enseignants n’aurait plus sa place au Canada. Mots clés : néolibéralisme, travail des enseignants, formation des enseignants, intellectuel public

In this article I explore the part played by liberal democratic ideology in the regulation of female work, in particular, the work of women teacher educators and contract researchers in British and Canadian teacher education departments. My goal is to examine the relationship between symbolic notions of female domesticity and service as they have been expressed in liberal understandings of the nation state across time, together with accounts of contemporary working life as described by differently positioned women workers in teacher education. Central to the argument I make is the assertion that women's work and its symbolic representation in teacher education constitute powerful symbolic elements in the ongoing regulation of women as non-citizens. In following the work of feminist political theorists and cultural sociologists, I also examine the cultural, material, and social power of historicized visions of the female as “domestic servant”, as daughter of the nation state, and as “deviant non-citizen” as they are reflected in the contemporary working lives of women teacher educators.

Most Canadian teacher education programs are offered in urban centers, resulting in limited access for rural and remote Canadians unwilling or unable to relocate to participate in pre-service teacher education. To better understand the extent of this issue and provide Canadian teacher education programs with current data, this study examines how many Canadians live within a reasonable commuting distance from at least one program—a distance we define as a 1-hour drive, one-way. Using ArcGIS and current Statistics Canada data, we analyze the populations that have geographic access to Canadian programs, the populations that are excluded, and offer recommendations for stakeholders across institutions so that we might continue to improve how we offer teacher education to students in rural and remote communities across the country.

Global education is that focus of education which is concerned with coming to a better understanding of worldwide (i.e. multinational] perspectives, problems, issues, interdependencies and human values. It was initially found in North American educational systems after World War II and it became a major focus of attention in the 1970s. Some global education content can be found in the 1982 public school curricula of the ten Canadian provinces. There was no information in the educational literature concerning global education in Canadian teacher education programs and so this study was developed. In the late spring of this year a twelve-item questionnaire was mailed to the heads of the social studies departments (or equivalent] of those Canadian higher education institutions which offer teacher education at at least the bachelors degree level. Fifty-two such institutions were identified. Forty English-language and twelve French- language questionnaires were mailed out with appropriate cover letters explaining the study. Several weeks after the initial mailing a follow-up letter and an additional questionnaire were mailed to those institutions which had not yet responded. Replies were received from thirty-six of the fifty-two institutions. Eighteen of these identified global education courses at their institutions. More than fifty specific global education courses were identified, overall, and of these there were slightly more at the undergraduate than graduate level. Most courses were identified as being for pre-service rather than in-service teacher education. Only two non-credit courses (workshops) were identified. There was some indication that a few institutions plan to add one or two modules or courses on global education over the next few years. Information was also obtained concerning exchange programs, resource centers of information, and sources of funding for the promotion of global education in teacher education programs. The general conclusion of this study was that there appears to be a marginal to modest level of global education present in the teacher education programs across the country tin most of the provinces). A secondary and less solid conclusion of this study was that over the next three to five years it appears as though a global education emphasis in Canadian teacher education programs will either be maintained at present levels or will be increased slightly.

This study examines the potential impact of training informed by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) on future French as a second language (FSL) teachers’ language proficiency and developing pedagogical practice. Specifically, it examines the implementation of the Diplôme d’Études de Langue Française [DELF] Correcteur training in a Canadian preservice FSL teacher education program from 2018 to 2021. Findings from surveys (N = 42) and semi-structured interviews (n = 3) reveal key possibilities and limitations for this training to optimize language teacher preparation, eventual transition to the field, and overall retention in the Canadian FSL teaching context.

This paper explores the role of relationships for eight Indigenous (Ojibwe) women enrolled in a Canadian teacher education program, specifically, the ways in which relationships pertained to Indigenous culture-creation and continuity through education. Findings from this small study suggest that there is some consistency in the relational orientations and in the roles of Ojibwe women past and present. The paper outlines ways in which study participants are demonstrating cultural continuity in fulfilling roles as learners and as teachers of Indigenous students. It concludes with questions and implications for the design and practice of Indigenous education.

In the Spring of 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic impacted all aspects of life throughout the world, including education. Teachers who had never taught online before, all of a sudden had one week to get ready to engage with their students in a virtual setting. On top of these changes, our small post-degree Canadian teacher education program had teacher candidates on practicum in K-12 schools. That meant our faculty mentors, responsible for recommending teacher candidates for certification, had to figure out how to mentor, support, and evaluate teacher candidates who were teaching remotely. This research aimed to address the following two questions: a) What were these faculty mentors’ experiences when having to move mentoring of teacher candidates on a remote practicum? and b) What recommendations do these faculty mentors have for teacher education programs trying to support faculty mentors having to mentor teacher candidates who are teaching remotely? Results illustrate challenges with workload, anxiety, screen time, teacher mentors limiting teacher candidate opportunities, and figuring out how to evaluate certification readiness.

Disability as Difference in Canadian Teacher Education Programs: Policies and Lived Experiences