Teacher education in the Netherlands: Teacher Educators' Struggles over Monopoly and Autonomy 1990-2010

The profession of teacher educators in the Netherlands is relatively well developed and has its own association, a journal, annual meetings, a standard which is developed by the profession and a system for registration of teacher educators (http://www.lerarenopleider.nl/velon/about-velon/). As elsewhere in Europe (European Commission 2013), teacher educators are recognized as a distinct professional group within the larger educational profession. Yet, more than ever in history, the Dutch government interferes with teacher education, apparently without involving teacher educators explicitly in decisions that affect their profession (Swennen 2012).

In this chapter we discuss the struggles around three important innovations that have affected Dutch primary teacher education in the past decades: the move of teacher education into the field of Higher Education, the rise of school-based teacher education and the implementation of compulsory subject content in the curriculum of teacher education. We focus on how these struggles affect the monopoly and autonomy of teacher educators as a professional group. To analyse the data, we make use of a theoretical framework that analyses professions and professionalization in terms of autonomy and monopoly (Abbott 1988). We define monopoly as the degree to which teacher educators have the (sole) right to educate and examine teachers and autonomy as the control that teacher educators have over various aspects of their work, especially the degree of influence that they exercise on the structure and contents of the curriculum
of teacher education. In our analysis we draw on two types of data: written primary and secondary sources concerning the three innovations and extensive interviews with three teacher educators from different generations....