Governments internationally have positioned teacher education as a panacea for major challenges encountered by students and teachers in education systems. In Australia, as in northern hemisphere countries, this has led to sustained reviews of initial teacher education and calls for the improvement of teacher quality (Louden 2008), to be demonstrated by pre-service teachers’ ‘classroom readiness’ (AGDET 2023). This talk draws on current research focussed on teachers’ knowledge and practices in the context of generative AI technologies. Thinking with Abblitt’s concepts of the post-digital (2019) and in dialogue with Young’s arguments regarding powerful knowledge (2013, 2015), I contend that teacher education (understood across the career) must be reclaimed as a site of critical professional knowledge production in order for current policy renderings of ‘classroom readiness’ to be productively reconceptualised.
Larissa’s research spans the fields of teacher education and professional learning, and literacy and English education. Her scholarship is concerned with the ways in which teacher knowledge is built and developed, particularly in the context of justice, anti-colonial, and sustainability imperatives. Larissa is known for her strong partnerships with governments and not-for-profit organisations which are mobilised to support large-scale projects to improve educational outcomes for diverse learners. Since 2019, Larissa has co-directed the Literary Education Lab literaryeducationlab.org, which hosts a range of interdisciplinary projects focusing on the role literature plays in shaping national and global narratives, and on building new disciplinary and pedagogical understandings of major social and environmental challenges.
