Teaching and teacher education possibilities : pathways, partnerships & pedagogy

Teacher educators who embrace both globalization and localization by internationalizing partnerships among providers will position teachers well for the challenges of teaching in the 21st century. Teaching is a profession controlled at local and national levels in all countries throughout the world. Within these top-down policy settings, teacher educators are positioned in the interstitial spaces between the schools in which teachers work and the institutions that credential their learning about teaching. Zhu and Han’s (2006) analysis of the reconstruction of teacher education in contemporary China highlights the diversity of teacher education discourse as it moves to a post-shifan era in which dilemmas remain for professional teacher education in a “social context in which national curriculum standards and textbooks are prescribed, and student test scores are highly emphasized” and a policy context of “national curriculum standards for teacher education and national curriculum standards for elementary and secondary education” (p. 73). Similar discursive dissonances are to be found in Australian teacher education as it struggles to find its place as a profession within the panoply of competing education agenda at all levels of governance and among all key stakeholders.