The Role of Higher Education in Teacher Education: A Reorientation Towards Ontology

Recent changes to policy and provision in England and Wales have brought into question university's place as home of teacher education. This chapter presents a positive case for a way of conceiving of 'higher education' of teachers that does not accept the division of labour and that draws on resources that already have a foothold in a broader debate around the nature of higher education and the disputed identity of the university. It briefs about 'ontological turn' in higher education that has been developed in the work of Ron Barnett and others. The chapter argues that what a higher education offers is space for such transformation. This requires, in curriculum terms, a decluttering of programmes of study in favour of a clearing in which dialogue can occur. Both practice and theory can be conceived either in terms of an ontological event or as the epistemological achievements of relatively unchanging subjects.