Pedagogy, pedagogic relations, and professionalisation in teacher education

This chapter positions pedagogy both as a curricular knowledge and as a process of transmission in order to challenge the climate of performativity in teacher education. It is argued that the concepts of teaching and pedagogy are connected but involve significantly different knowledge structures and knowledge structuring processes. When these two distinct forms are condensed or misrecognised, then reductive forms of professionalisation result. Bernstein's concepts of vertical and horizontal discourses are used to expose why the status of the profession is challenged if pedagogy is absent or inert in specifications of professional knowledge. There is a focus on the particular case of teacher education in England to illustrate this claim. The analysis is further enriched through reference to Bernstein's concepts of tacit, implicit, and explicit pedagogic relations, and Polanyi's articulation of tacit knowledge. It is argued that, if teacher educators are more aware of the relational structure of pedagogy as a disciplinary knowledge, then professionally reductive and unhelpful conflations between conceptual, normative, and empirical elements of teacher education can be avoided.