How Teacher Educators Do Policy: Enacting Primary Specialisations

In 2015, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) introduced the Accreditation of initial teacher education programs in Australia: Standards and procedures and the Guidelines for the accreditation of initial teacher education programs in Australia. These documents (updated in 2018) stipulated that to gain course accreditation, Initial Teacher Education (ITE) institutions had to incorporate specialisations for primary (K–6) pre-service teachers. This encompassed having knowledge and skills for delivery of the Australian primary curriculum and a specialisation in a priority learning area such as maths, literacy or science. In this study, we adopt a self-study approach using reflexive accounts, policy enactment, and theorisations around policy actors to outline how two teacher educators at a large metropolitan university in Australia navigated the interpretive, material and discursive facets of operationalising a science primary specialisation into practice. In this highly regulated space, the work of these two policy actors showed that despite being constrained by various factors such as the boundaries of accreditation, space for agentic ways of working opened up as policy interpretations moved from one actor to the next. Recommendations for how teacher educators ‘do policy’ are suggested.