5. Dutch Teacher and Teacher Education Policies
Trends and Ambiguities
In: The Teacher’s Role in the Changing Globalizing WorldSearch for other papers by Theo Wubbels in
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One of the main challenges for the Dutch education system is upholding the number and quality of teachers. In this chapter, we will first describe the Dutch educational system, including the results of international comparative studies and the constitutional freedom of education as a background for the teacher’s position. Then we will move to an overview of reforms in Dutch education in the previous decades that have impacted the rhetoric on the position of teachers and describe recent policy plans for improving teaching and teacher education. We conclude with showing the ambiguities in trends and policy plans of taking teaching seriously as a profession, on the one hand, and detailed regulation of teachers’ work and teacher preparation and competence requirements on the other. We conclude that the rhetoric about teachers and teacher educators in the Netherlands is a plea for higher professionalism of both groups, but in practice, policies might also induce deprofessionalization.