A note on contextualizing teaching, learning and teacher education
As a school is part of its surrounding society, it is natural that developments in society and work life impinge on educational policies, administration and learning cultures in school. The ongoing global restructuring of work life requires important new skills such as flexibility in thinking, continuous learning, participation in multicultural work settings, responsible team work, taking the initiative, and the use of information and communication technologies.

In many post-industrial societies, schools have got more freedom in designing their curricula and using their resources as part of a more general trend of decentralizing administrative power. The purpose is to underscore the need for democratic citizenship education at all levels of schooling. In Finland schools have been expected to design their own site-based curricula since the mid 1990’s, based on the national framework curricula that are specified further in the municipal curriculum guidelines. A pedagogical aim of the innovation is to involve the teachers in decision-making concerning their own work and thereby to increase their engagement in the work place community.

Changes in society and work life pose new challenges for education at all levels of schooling. In an important European report a decade ago, schooling, democracy and teacher education were linked together, emphasizing the role of teachers for raising the general level of education, building a European identity and developing the key competences in school (White Paper 1995). In another report (Cochinaux and de Woot 1995), the future of education in Europe was discussed in terms of the following properties:
- Learning is accepted as a continuing activity throughout life.
- Learners take responsibility for their own progress.
- Assessment confirms progress rather than brands failure.
- Capability, personal and shared values and team work are recognised equally with the pursuit of knowledge.
- Learning is a partnership between students, parents, teachers, employers and the community, all of whom work together to improve performance.
These goals emphasise the need to promote responsible student autonomy, social skills and intercultural communication abilities through an active participation in the classroom community. To become more independent and autonomous language users, students need to develop an awareness of language and communication. They also need to develop their study and heuristic skills to make effective use of the learning opportunities and the available materials on their own as a process of life-long language learning. Facilitating such changes in student learning is a question of developing teacher education towards a new kind of professionalism involving collegial collaboration and partnerships.

A recent Draft on teacher and trainer education by the European Commission (Draft 2005) suggests a number of new policies for teacher education in Europe. The paper notes that teachers and trainers play a crucial role in providing high quality education for personal fulfilment, better social skills and more diverse employment opportunities. The paper emphasizes certain values for the teaching profession such as inclusiveness, nurturing the potential of all pupils and advancing human potential. To implement such values, the development of teacher and trainer competences and qualifications is seen as a key priority in Europe. Teachers need to know how to respond to the challenges of the knowledge society and how to prepare their pupils to be autonomous lifelong learners.

The Draft also emphasizes the social and cultural dimensions of education with reference to EU citizenship education, based on the common cultural base and the rich national/ regional diversity in Europe. To develop schools, the participants should aim at establishing partnerships between higher education and schools and other educational institutions. Similarly, policies for continuity in professional learning need to be integrated in teacher education: initial training should to be followed by continuous professional development, involving interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches, that is, collegial work across the curriculum.

For the teachers, the changes suggest the need to develop teacher education towards an activist teacher professionalism, as Judythe Sachs puts it. She notes that teacher professionalism is in transition towards a transformative notion of professionalism emphasizing the elements of professional expertise, ethics and autonomy as the platform for activist teacher professionalism. The emerging concept needs rethinking and revitalizing teacher professionalism in the light of the new ideas of professional learning and the changes in the educational context. (Sachs 2003, 12-17).

However, developments are frequently contradictory. To my understanding, the principles and practices of the market economy are currently being brought far too crudely from business life to education in many national settings. The now fashionable policy is to have schools and institutions compete against each other for “customers” and resources. Competition is intensified by introducing controlling mechanisms in the interest of what is called “quality assurance”. Such devices include centralised norms and performance standards, various competency lists, inspection and standardised tests. While educational quality obviously is vital for all teachers, these tendencies seem to undermine the teacher’s position as an autonomous professional. They also create a turbulent context for school development aimed at a collegial process of collaboration between the participants and the stakeholders.